Tomorrow is the sixtieth anniversary of the bombing of Dresden. The other week I “mentioned”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003128.html W.G. Sebald’s “The Natural History of Destruction”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375504842/junius-20 , a work that addresses the horror of the Allied bombing raids and the inadequacy of the German postwar response to that horror. Today, of course, the bombing is being cynically used by German neo-Nazi groups who want to relativise or diminish Nazi crimes. The methodical slaughter perpetrated by the Nazis on Jews and others shouldn’t lead us to close our eyes to what happened in Dresden and in other German cities. What was done there was wrong, even though I, for one, would hesitate in blaming those who did it. Der Spiegel’s English site has “an interview with historian Frederick Taylor”:http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,341239,00.html , a “piece on Victor Klemperer”:http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,341147,00.html , and “an extract from Klemperer’s diary”:http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,341230,00.html .