On an average day in 1944, 28 military trains passed through its marshalling yards.Nor was Dresden selected on the whim of the maligned Air Marshal "Bomber" Harris, head of Bomber Command, at a time when the war was won. Nazi propaganda described Dresden as a city of no military value, crammed with refugees from the East. The "Florence on the Elbe" was allegedly obliterated in a senseless act of barbarism. Later accretions to the myth included the obscene suggestion that Dresden was targeted by the Western Allies as an object lesson for the Russians.Taylor exposes each one of these legends Dresden was hardly "an innocent city". It was a Nazified city in which opponents of the regime and Czech nationalists had been incarcerated and executed en masse.

The Jewish population, which included the remarkable diarist Viktor Klemperer, had been reduced by deportations from 6,000 to a few hundred.Thousands of impressed foreign workers and slave labourers toiled in the city's armaments industries. It is impeccably documented while avoiding the sterile jargon of so much military history.In setting out to create "a more complex moral and ambivalent framework", Taylor gives us the voice of civilians and bomber crews, teenage flak gunners and Jews facing deportation. For such Jews, so often omitted from the moral equation, the incendiaries and HE bombs were less a deadly rain than manna from heaven.Even before the war was over, a legend grew up around the bombing of Dresden - largely thanks to Goebbels and his Propaganda Ministry. His cool reappraisal benefits from sources that have become available since German reunification and the recent work of conscientious German researchers. By using it, Sebald juxtaposed memory of the bombing with memory of the "Final Solution" and turned history on its head.Although his lectures concentrated on the alleged failure of post-war writers to describe the destruction and carnage caused by bombing, Sebald deployed terms such as "annihilation" and "extermination" to evoke Allied policy - terms that are customarily Nazi euphemisms for genocide. The lectures triggered a huge correspondence from Germans who lived through the raids, some of which - he acknowledged - showed the persistence of an unapologetic Nazi outlook.Now Frederick Taylor, a specialist on the Nazi era, has entered the maelstrom of conflicting interpretations. He maintained: "In spite of strenuous efforts to come to terms with the past, as people like to put it, it seems to me that we Germans today are a nation strikingly blind to history and lacking in tradition." The formula "coming to terms with the past", or Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, is more usually employed to describe Germany's reckoning with the Nazi persecution and mass murder of the Jews.

This time, he accused the Allies of committing a war crime by continuing the intensive bombing of German cities between January and May 1945.Last year, the late WG Sebald's controversial lectures On the Natural History of Destruction appeared in English, arguing that Germans had repressed memories of the air raids. Friedrich followed it with an illustrated history, using images previously considered too horrific to bear publication. Friedrich argued that the suffering of German civilians had always been unjustly overshadowed by the fate of the Jews It sold 200,000 copies within months. At worst, it was a tool for polemicists blurring victims and perpetrators. This disturbing trend has gained force in Germany over the past few years.In 2002, J?Friedrich published Der Brand, an account of how ordinary Germans experienced the air war. At best, Dresden distorted the moral balance sheet of the Second World War.