Slaughterhouse-Five | Historical Context

The Firebombing of Dresden
The most important historical event which informs Slaughterhouse-Five took place almost a quarter of a century before the novel was published. On February 13 and 14, 1945, allied aircraft dropped incendiary bombs on the German city of Dresden—a so-called ‘‘open city’’ with no significant military targets. The bombing raid created a firestorm that destroyed the city and killed an estimated 135,000 people, almost all of them civilians. This was nearly twice the number of people killed by the first atomic bomb dropped on...

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