Cloud over Dresden's 60-year reflection

DRESDEN - Sixty years after the Dresden bombings, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder pledged to stop far-right groups exploiting the anniversary and portraying Germany as a war victim while ignoring Nazi atrocities.

A planned march by thousands of far-right activists in the eastern German city threatened to upstage today's official commemoration of United States and British bomber raids that devastated what had been known as the Florence of northern Europe.

"We will use all means to counter all attempts to reinterpret history," Schroeder told Welt am Sonntag newspaper. "This is our obligation to all the victims of the war and Nazi terror especially, and also the victims of Dresden."

Dresden, famed for its baroque architecture and untouched by bombing just three months before the end of World War II, was nearly destroyed by two waves of British bombers and then US planes in 1945.

The official death toll is put at around 35,000, but many survivors believe the number was higher as bodies were reduced to ashes in the ensuing firestorm.

Pilots reported feeling the heat of the blaze from their planes and the glowing red sky above the city was visible up to 70km away.

Where once German civilian suffering was ignored, the country is now seeking to acknowledge those Germans who died while also condemning the crimes of the Nazis.

The anniversary has reopened a debate over how to mourn Germany's war dead while containing the resurgent far right.

Members of the National Democratic Party (NPD) that sits in the Dresden-based Saxony state Parliament provoked outrage last month by walking out of a commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp and calling the air raids a "bombing holocaust".

"We did not refuse to pay respect to the victims but saw no reason to one-sidedly think about the dead of Auschwitz," NPD leader Udo Voigt told Die Welt newspaper.

The NPD was helping organise the march, which the city fears could attract 7000 far-right activists from across Germany, making it the biggest such demonstration since the war.

Dresden residents plan to turn out in their thousands wearing white roses in a counter-protest. Politicians are concerned about clashes between far right and anti-fascist groups.

Schroeder hinted the Government might make a fresh attempt to ban the NPD, which it has likened to the Nazis, after an earlier application was thrown out by the country's top court in 2003.

He told Welt he would try to stop the party demonstrating near Berlin's new Holocaust memorial on May 8, the anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe.

Dresden residents who survived the raid said they felt obliged to prevent the commemoration being misused and misrepresented.

"I am outraged at what is going on here," said 76-year-old Christa Nagel, who remembers searching in vain for her mother in the rubble of their Dresden home after the bombing.

"These young far-right supporters, who say they have no jobs, no prospects, they have no idea of history."

- REUTERS