U.S. and British warplanes indiscriminately bombed Dresden with munitions including 4,000-pound „blockbusters“ and incendiary explosives over two days in February 1945. The heat generated by the inferno melted human flesh, turning many victims into piles of goop. Men, women, children; the sick and the elderly; refugees and Allied prisoners of war—even the animals in the city zoo—were incinerated together.

Acclaimed author Kurt Vonnegut—an American POW imprisoned in Dresden at the time, whose seminal novel Slaughterhouse-Five was inspired by the firebombing—later described the attack as „carnage unfathomable.“ After viewing images of the bombing, then-British Prime Minister Winston Churchill asked: „Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?“

As the old adage posits, „history is written by the victors,“ and no Allied officials were ever held accountable for atrocities committed against their Axis enemies. However, after the war, the Nuremberg trials, Fourth Geneva Convention, and Genocide Convention sought to ensure that horrors like Nazi and Japanese war crimes and what the British described as the „terror bombing“ of Germany never happened again.