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“Toward the end of the war, the Allies bombed dozens of German cities. Dresden suffered the greatest losses. Between February 13 and 15, 1945, the city was pounded and all but destroyed. About 35,000 people died in the air raids. One result was to change the direction of the German discourse of guilt. Many Germans exchanged their feelings of guilt for the Nazis’ crimes into a feeling of suffering and victimization. “The narrative of suffering is deeply rooted in the Nazi conception, and even people who were not Nazis shared part of this narrative,” Margalit says. “The bombings were described as a great wrong inflicted on the Germans by the Allies, who were waging all-out war, a war utterly unlike that of the Germans.”

Is it not possible that the Allies really did bomb a civilian population without restraint?”

I lived in Bavaria for four years and visited Dresden when it was still in the DDR. The Commie travel guides played up the allied bombing of Dresden, when made me very angry since the Soviets treated the Germans as bad as the Germans had treated Soviet citizens, and that was very badly. Germans were moving West to escape the Red Army, preferring the Western allies.

I have questioned the need for the bombing of Dresden, which was not an industrial city, and was full of refugees.
However, Hitler had indiscriminately bombed London, including the more recent V-1 and V-2 rockets. Did bombing Dresden hasten the end of the war against Germany like the A-Bomb did against Japan. I am not sure about that, but if it saved allied lives, it was probably justifiable.

Certainly, the Dresden bombing should not be spoken in the same breath with the Holocaust, or even the starving of the Dutch People after they rose up during Market-Garden, or the Katyn Forrest massacre by Stalin.

“The bombings were described as a great wrong inflicted on the Germans by the Allies, who were waging all-out war, a war utterly unlike that of the Germans.”

LOL!

Yes, the Nazis were extremely restrained in their warfare.

The Poles are grateful for their mildness and the people of Stalingrad look back to those lovely days of the half-hearted Nazi siege of their city.

who were waging all-out war, a war utterly unlike that of the Germans.”

Absolute horsesh*t.

The firebombing of Dresden took place in February of 1945.

"I ask you: Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?"

-National Socialist propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, in his famous Sportpalast speech, on 18 February, 1943

The 1930s and 40s Germans (the leaders at least, and the people to the degree that they supported those leaders) got precisely what they wanted. They asked for total war, they purposed total war, they supported total war, they planned total war, they implemented total war, and they got total war. They just didn't plan to themselves end up on the hard end of the stick. Sorry, Fritz, but that's the risk you run when you decide to just go out and beat the Scheisse out of and murder millions of other people.

And I'm not saying there weren't plenty of innocent, decent German citizens. But on the whole, the German people of that generation made the mistake of following a brutal, murderous thug - and they paid the almost inevitable price for making that decision.