What the bombing of Dresden in World War II can teach us about the destruction in Gaza

Last fall, I went to a conference in the Netherlands about citizen attacks on public education around the world. Each speaker was asked to identify the most serious threats to schools in their own country.

In the United States, I said, Republican-dominated school boards were banning books that discussed race and sexuality. A German professor smiled, in a you-think-you’ve-got-it-bad kind of way. People have been banning books for as long as they’ve been reading, he told me. But in Germany, he said, right-wing groups want schools to teach that Germans were victims as well as perpetrators of genocide.

These activists acknowledge that the Third Reich murdered Jews, Romani, and gays. But they insist that the Allies committed their own genocide by firebombing cities like Dresden, where protesters gather every February to commemorate the “Bombenholocaust” (as they call it) that killed at least 25,000 people and obliterated much of the city in 1945.

You get the idea: Germany killed people in gas chambers, but the other team incinerated Germans in their homes and workplaces. That’s why members of the far-right Alternative for Germany party are pushing schools to observe “Dresden Remembrance Day” on Feb. 13, as my German colleague explained. That’s just a few weeks after Germany’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, which commemorates the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp on Jan. 27, 1945.

I’ve been thinking about this history ever since South Africa accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. In a filing last month before the International Court of Justice, South Africa charged that Israeli “acts and omissions” in Gaza are “intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial, and ethnical group.”

The language is important because the United Nations defined genocide in 1948 as “acts committed with the intent to destroy” a people. That’s what Germany did, via its “Final Solution” to eliminate Jews. Is the Jewish state doing the same thing to Palestinians?

No. A thousand times no. Saying that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is like saying the Allies committed it in Dresden. It confuses actions with motives. And it makes a mockery of the real genocides Jews and so many others — including Armenians and Cambodians — have suffered.

In all three of those cases, perpetrators made open and explicit efforts to destroy a people. Adolf Hitler approvingly cited the Turks’ attempt to annihilate Armenians during the First World War. Khmer Rouge officials in Cambodia presided over the murder of 1.7 million people, especially the country’s Vietnamese and Muslim minorities.

There’s no evidence — none — that Israel similarly envisions the destruction of the Palestinian people. Yes, several Israeli officials have made hateful statements calling Palestinians “human animals.” Israeli leaders have also claimed that all Palestinians are responsible for Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which critics have cited as proof of Israel’s genocidal intent.

The Allies made similar claims about the Germans, noting that a majority of them remained loyal to Hitler until the end of World War II. As in Gaza, however, the major justification for firebombing German cities was strategic. Just as Israel aims to destroy Hamas’ tunnels and infrastructure, the Allies targeted factories in Dresden that manufactured aircraft parts, munitions, and other vital elements of the German war machine.

Allied officials also argued that bombing German cities would undermine “the morale of the German people” so “their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened,” as a secret U.S.-British military memorandum resolved in 1943. But there was little evidence — then or now — that the attacks had the desired effect. On the contrary, they appear to have solidified Germans’ support for Hitler and increased their wish to exact revenge, especially upon Great Britain.

Likewise, I fear the recent attacks on Gaza will simply spawn more support for Hamas or for whatever organization arises in its place. And it’s entirely reasonable to criticize Israel’s killing of nearly 23,000 Palestinians — mostly women and children — as disproportionate to its own suffering in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.

Indeed, some Allies condemned the firebombing of German cities on similar grounds. Noting that the majority of victims were, yes, women and children, a U.S. intelligence officer denounced the attacks as “baby-killing schemes.” So did German American author Kurt Vonnegut, whose best-selling novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, described the carnage he had witnessed in Dresden. Even British premier Winston Churchill — otherwise an enthusiastic advocate for firebombing — came to doubt the morality of the Dresden attack.

But that doesn’t mean it was a genocide, which aims to eliminate a people altogether. That wasn’t the Allies’ goal in Dresden, and it’s not the Israeli goal in Gaza. It doesn’t matter that the Gaza genocide charge comes mostly from the political left, while the Dresden one comes from the right. They’re both wrong.