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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

Dresden was never rebuilt (by the soviets) and it’s so much better for it. The city was mostly left as a pile of rubble for decades. It began being rebuilt in the 90s after the fall of the USSR to the historical standards and without all the bloc architecture

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While the Dresden bombing raid was devastating in terms of human lives lost, it doesn't rank equally high with respect to percentage of buildings destroyed.

Far less people died in other places but far more building damage got done (e.g. Würzburg, Pforzheim, and/or large cities hit by dozens of major raids like Hamburg, Cologne or Berlin).

None of this, though, justifies razing Warsaw. Atrocities don't "balance".

In comparison with Warsaw, Dresden was barely touched. Even some of the worst hit areas had walls left standing after all.

> Dresden was barely touched

Err, Dresden was infamously firebombed to hell in the final days of the war (for no good reason).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden

It was bombed for, given the data they had, good reasons (it turned out the intelligence data was not correct, but not the decision process).

It was also relatively untouched compared to what Third Reich planned to Warsaw even before war, yet alone the revenge spree in 1945.

There are reasons why it's practically illegal to remove most bullet holes you find on some walls on western side of Warsaw - they are the rare walls that survived.

Dresden lost about 6 square km utterly. Warsaw lost 100+ square km utterly.

There was a reason for Dresden not rebuilt by the Soviets in the same way as Warsaw. It was a reminder for the Germans that starting a world war has consequences.

In my layman perspective there's another argument to be made from Soviet perspective.

Dresden was destroyed by the western countries (US et al). While Warsaw was destroyed by Germans.

So "we" fix what the bad Germans broke. But we keep the mess left by the spoiled West as a reminder.

There is another reason. Russians saw rebuilding Warsaw as a way to rebuild Polish national identity after the ravages of WWII and the severe redrawing of the borders. It was a way to make Poles warm up to the Russian rule over the country. In Germany, Russians had no such sophisticated thoughts, they literally raped and pillaged their part of the country and if Germans wanted to protest they'd be reminded that it was Germany who started WWII. Quite honestly, after what Germans did to Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe, there is zero sympathy for what happened to them during WWII or afterwards.

> for what happened to them during

Nazi perpetrators and victims of the rape and pillage "revenge" are generally not the same people. So yes there's sympathy.

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