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Sir: Your article, "Dresden Rebuilt," [Feb. 23] condemns what you call the pointless air raid on that city. Any young cadet with the war plans of early 1945 in his hands could point out that this city was the hub of all communications between the German armies in the Balkans and the rest of the Reich, and also with the Eastern front, where the Russian armies had just broken into eastern Silesia and were rushing forward toward Berlin. As the maps will show you, there, was no rail link of any importance between Czechoslovakia, at that time named Böhmen-Mähren, and the other side of the Riesengebirge; and the rail between Cracow in Poland and Bratislava in Czechoslovakia had been cut by the Russian advance. The Germans desperately tried to get equipment up from the Southeastern front, which was already collapsing, to throw against the Russians. I know. It was in the last days of September, 1944 that I was transported as a slave laborer, supposedly to go to work in Riesa's (a small town a bit farther north) Hermann Goring steelworks. We went in three trams, 60 to a wagon, 50 wagons to a train —east to Auschwitz to be gassed. Of my fellow prisoners, only a few may live today.
We went through that lovely Florence on the Elbe. The train passed the last great railway-engine repair works m Germany still working full blast to repair the engines the brave boys of the Royal Air Force had riddled with bullets. They were working desperately there, as the transport system of Hitler's Reich was on the verge of collapse.
The "few light industries" you mention made specialized equipment for the German army, especially aircraft instruments and other precision parts for planes.
Militarily speaking, the bombardment was very necessary. It cut the enemy's transport system, hit vital instrument and small-arms factories, and destroyed the railway repair yard.
They began the war, they killed millions, and they got what they wanted to bring others. In Dresden, too.
EDGAR S. WEINBERG-WYVERN
Laren, The Netherlands
Self-Contradictory?
Sir: As an Indian woman, I must strongly protest the statement that harijan women are "paraded nude through the streets and then raped" for the offense of forgetting their station [Feb. 16].
The report is self-contradictory, for presumably men guilty of such conduct would pride themselves on their "high" caste; such men would hardly risk their standing by raping a harijan woman publicly. I have spent three decades in Indian villages, and never once heard of such an incident. Women are raped in India, as they are in other countries (after all, I do read Washington newspapers), but the social level they come from has nothing to do with it.
We in India do have our problems, political, social and economic. But if we have one thing to be thankful for in the past two decades, it is the progress that has been made in removing the traditional disabilities of the harijans.
(MRS.) PROBHA GHOSHAL
Washington, D.C.
Clean Sweep
Sir: The article, "Soviet Portrait of America" [Feb. 23], states that the Russians Strelnikov and Shatunovsky are disseminating misinformation wnen tney describe Negro women sweeping up in front of the White House.