Legacy Matters

The American in the Gulag

John Noble, an American who lived through the Dresden air bombings  said the Red Army that moved into the city in May 1945 was far worse.

"The Soviets in Dresden were worse than the air raids," Noble recalled. Murders and looting were widespread - as were rapes, which were sometimes carried out in public on mattresses thrown down in the streets.

As the Soviets took over his family's camera factory, he was arrested, thrown into prison, kept on a starvation diet for months,  transferred to Buchenwald and later to the Soviet gulag.

The Telegraph obituary has more of his story.