
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, February 15, 1991                   TAG: 9102150381
SECTION: NATL/INTL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARC FISHER THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: DRESDEN, GERMANY                                LENGTH: Medium

DRESDEN MARKS AIR RAID ANNIVERSARY, TACKLES WAR ISSUE

Even now, 46 years later, they remember those childhood days in bunkers deep below the city. They could not see or hear anything, but they remember knowing that bombs were falling, fires raging through their houses, through the Baroque treasures of the city they called Florence on the Elbe.

This is the anniversary of the Allied firebombing of Dresden, an act of rage and revenge that killed 35,000 people on Feb. 13 and 14, 1945, ruining forever one of the most spectacular places on the planet.

Wednesday night, led by Germany's president, Richard von Weizsaecker, tens of thousands of Dresdeners held candles and walked through the bitter cold from the Catholic cathedral to the pile of rubble that was - until that February night three months before the end of World War II in Europe - the Evangelical Church of Our Lady.

Their march this year could have been another in the troubling series of anti-American, anti-war demonstrations that have made many Germans question the direction of their own country. But the speeches inside the cathedral and the voices outside were less strident, more struggling.

In this city, the Persian Gulf War seems neither black nor white, but the same frustrating gray that keeps alive the trauma and tragedy of what happened in Dresden half a century ago.

Germany's leaders have been sharply criticized both at home and abroad for their relative silence in the early days of the Gulf War, a silence that seemed to show sympathy for, if not agreement with, the pacifist mood on the streets.

But von Weizsaecker brought a clear message to the Dresden memorial service, confronting those mostly young Germans who have studied the crimes of their fathers and grandfathers and concluded that no war can be just.

"Who can endure the sacrifices of war?" the president asked. "War brings unspeakable human suffering, irretrievable losses for culture and civilization, and destructive risks to nature. Who can accept responsibility for this?

"But by the same token, who can accept responsibility for allowing injustice and violence to go unanswered? Who can watch with easy conscience without doing anything when peace is broken and human rights trampled upon? Would inaction in the end not exact far more victims than responsible action?"

Thousands of Dresdeners packed into the cathedral listened silently as von Weizsaecker went on to compare Iraq's Saddam with Adolf Hitler, calling both dictators enemies of mankind. The only answer, even in Dresden, is a "hard, inescapable and necessary" decision, a choice that can even mean using terrifying force.

by CNB