When the sirens sounded an air-raid warning at 1.50pm on 17 April 1945, residents from the local area hurried to the Falken brewery’s safe storage cellars at Chemnitzer Straße 58. A large crowd of people was still thronging at the entrance when high-explosive bombs fell. Approximately seventy people, several of them children, died in the open space in front of the air-raid shelter.
This further heavy air raid targeted the railway installations in the city of Dresden. From a military perspective it was an example of successful “precision bombing”: major long-term damage was done to Dresden’s railway infrastructure and the important Dresden railway junction was put out of operation until the end of the war. But heavy damage was also caused in residential areas, mostly along the railway lines, and several hundred people died.

Marked in 2001