“We were supposed to be the good guys.” That’s how this British veteran remembered surviving Dresden. After the war, one explanation for Dresden increasingly shifted responsibility eastward: the Soviets had supposedly requested the bombing to help the Red Army. Except the Yalta minutes record General Antonov asking the Allies to paralyze the railway junctions of Berlin and Leipzig, not Dresden. The story became useful enough that in 1952 the CIA searched its records for evidence of a Soviet request, hoping to counter Soviet “propaganda” about Dresden. The result? Absolutely nothing! In 1965, an even more extraordinary allegation came, but this time from the other side. In Inferno Dresden, former Dresden mayor Walter Weidauer stated that Dresden had originally been intended as the target of the first atomic bomb - and that the conventional raid came after the bomb proved unlikely to be ready before Germany’s defeat. Which brings us back to the man who was actually there: “We were supposed to be the good guys. We finished up being worse than they were.”