Germans once victory had been won . . . Some of the bombing was just pointless. In the last days of the war, we struck at the old gingerbread towns south of Wuerzburg, where there was no military target at all . . . Of these acts of gratuitous sadism, the worst was the bombing of Dresden. In the early weeks of 1945, the coldest winter in a century, Dresden was swollen with refugees fleeing the advance of the Soviet army.
Nobody is innocent.
Neither the living, nor the yet unborn. . . Each new refugee train, each new river of wagons, trucks and cars brought fearful accounts of horrendous Soviet atrocities - murder, torture and brutal mass rapes. Hundreds of thousands of refugees flooded into the city of Dresden. The inhabitants moved closer together and took them all in, but even so, there was no room for all. Most of the refugees lived in the city's main park and in what was known as Die Altstadt - the Old Town.