On the night of 13 to 14 February 1945, RAF Bomber Command attacked Dresden in two waves, starting a firestorm that destroyed the city center; American bombers struck again the next day. The Dresden Historians' Commission concluded in 2010 that up to 25,000 people were killed. On the same date in 1706, Sweden won at Fraustadt.
The bombing of Dresden
On the night of 13 to 14 February 1945 RAF Bomber Command attacked Dresden in two waves. The fires merged into a firestorm that destroyed the inner city and the districts around it, and thousands of people died in the flames and in their shelters. Around midday on 14 February bombers of the US Army Air Forces attacked the city again.1
How many died was disputed for decades. Within weeks Nazi propaganda was spreading a death toll of 200,000, many times the figure the Dresden police had recorded, and numbers of that size were repeated long after the war.2
The Dresden Historians' Commission examined the burial records, registry files and the archaeology of the ruins. Its final report, presented in 2010, concluded that up to 25,000 people were killed in the raids of 13 to 15 February 1945, in line with what the city authorities had reported in 1945 and 1946.3
The Channel Dash, 1942: three German warships through the Strait of Dover
11 to 13 February 1942 · 84 years ago
The German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen slipped out of Brest and raced up the English Channel to German ports. British air, sea and shore attacks failed to stop them, a public humiliation for Britain, though both battleships hit mines.
Read the full story of The Channel Dash, 1942: three German warships through the Strait of Dover ›Battle of Fraustadt
13 February 1706 · 320 years ago
Fraustadt, 1706
On 13 February 1706, the date given in the German national biography, a Swedish army under General Carl Gustaf Rehnskiöld routed a Saxon and Russian army under Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg at Fraustadt, today Wschowa in western Poland. Schulenburg served Augustus II, Elector of Saxony, whom his Polish opponents, backed by Charles XII of Sweden, had declared deposed as king of Poland in 1704.4
Some 6,000 to 7,000 of the allied soldiers were Russians. The allied army broke almost at once and fled. Swedish military historians later compared the battle with Hannibal's double envelopment at Cannae; Oskar Sjöström, in his book on the battle, rejects the comparison, while Sverker Oredsson holds that the result was a double envelopment all the same.5
The Russian prisoners
Many Russians threw down their weapons and begged for mercy but were cut down, and Russian prisoners were put to death after the battle, while prisoners from the Saxon army were taken into Swedish service.6
Historians still judge the killings differently. Sjöström argues that the Russians had turned their coats inside out to pass as Saxons and could therefore be executed by the custom of the time. Oredsson rejects that view, noting that Swedish soldiers were deeply shocked by the killings, as were Voltaire and later historians.7
After Fraustadt
Charles XII then marched into Saxony, and in September 1706 Augustus made peace at Altranstädt and gave up the Polish crown, leaving Stanisław Leszczyński as king of Poland. Rehnskiöld, one of Charles XII's leading generals, had fought beside the king at Narva in 1700; three years after Fraustadt he was taken prisoner by the Russians at Poltava.8
