Dresden braced for neo-Nazi bombing anniversary clashes

Police leave in the baroque city that was devastated by the air raids in February 1945 has been cancelled as fears rise of serious clashes between the far-right National Democratic Party and anti-Nazi protesters.

Between 35,000 and 130,000 civilians died in the bombing, which remains the most controversial of the war.

Stephan Fritz, the priest at the restored Frauenkirche, a church destroyed in the bombing, said: "With some Dresdeners the phrase ‘bombing Holocaust’ falls upon fruitful soil. There are many, many people who are by no means right-wing with whom this message continues to strike a chord."

The media is portraying Germany’s civilians as having been caught between the vengeful and overwhelming Allies and the pig-headed stubbornness of the Nazi leadership, who insisted that the war could still be won and that their nation should fight on. Sources close to some of the main Nazi leaders have admitted in new German TV documentaries that accounts of Soviet atrocities were exaggerated in order to terrify Germans into fighting to the last.

Coverage of the controversial bombings of German cities, which have been condemned by some of the nation’s writers as war crimes, is this year castigating the Nazi leadership for allowing the destruction through their "mad obsession with resistance".

The rationale for the attack has been questioned in both Britain and Germany because the end of war was looming and Dresden was not a major centre of Nazi war production.

Ralph Giordano, who endured the bombing of Hamburg, told Germany’s ZDF TV station: "Hitler and his people were well aware that nothing could stand up against the overwhelming British air superiority. And despite that they allowed city after city to be destroyed. This was a regime which was ready to allow its entire population, their own people, to be completely destroyed."