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Between February 13 and 15 1,300 Allied heavy bombers dropped more than 3,900 tons of bombs on Dresden, the baroque capital of the German state of Saxony. The resulting firestorm completely destroyed 13 square miles of the city centre and killed about 25,000 people.
Until the firebombing, the Church of Our Lady was one of the most prominent buildings in Dresden. It was built as a Lutheran cathedral between 1726 and 1743 by Dresden's city architect George Bähr. The church's most distinctive feature was its "Stone Bell" - a 315 ft-high dome, soaring skyward with no internal supports. It was inspired by Michelangelo's dome for St. Peter's Basilica in Rome and is certainly comparable. Europe's most famous organ maker Gottfried Silbermann built a three-manual, 43-stop instrument for the church. It was dedicated on November 25, 1736 and Johann Sebastian Bach gave a recital on the instrument on December 1 in the same year.
The church and its dome proved to be extremely stable. During the Seven Years' War in 1760, it had been hit by more than 100 cannonballs which simply bounced off the walls. Even during the hell of the WW II bombing, the church survived long enough to have 300 people who had sought shelter in the church crypt, evacuated to safety. Shortly after that, it succumbed to the heat generated by thousands of incendiary bombs that had been dropped on the city. When the temperature in the church reached 1,800 F, the pillars started glowing bright red. Then, they literally exploded and the structure collapsed. For the next 60 years, the blackened stones would lie in a pile in the center of the city as a monument to the absurdity of war.
For many years, rebuilding the church was too much of a technological challenge. Only in the 1990s, computers were advanced enough to generate a simulation of the collapse of the church 50 years earlier. With the help of that simulation, the original location of many bricks found in the rubble was determined and when the church was rebuilt, a large number of original bricks was put back exactly in its old location. Reconstruction started in 1993 and took 12 years. In 2005, the church was reopened - again dominating Dresden's skyline in all its glory.
The "Then" picture was taken from the German wikipedia site of the church; the "Now" pictures were taken during our visit in Dresden in 2007.
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