phil gal welcome to the program germany's marking the 75th anniversary of the allied bombing of dresden one of world war 2 this most controversial moments german president. paid tribute to the 10s of thousands who lost their lives during the british and american 5 bombing of the city this carpet bombing is still discussed as a possible war crime and far right activists claim that the number of deaths has been under reported president also remembered those who suffered from germany's actions . india hard to. think back to the history of the bombing lies in our country we remember 2 things we remember the suffering of the people in german citizens in german cities but also the suffering of the germans inflicted on others do not forget and we began to it was germans who began the surrender or anyone and ought to be and it was millions of germans who waged it not since all but many on the strength of their convictions as you would believe it was the nazis and their willing executioners and you wouldn't set the mass murder of jews in europe in motion and it was the nazi regime that kept on murdering even when it knew going to war was lost and if we do not forget germany's. well let's get more on today's events from to correspond only from how much style it was dressed in welcome to you. say with me in the studio a welcome to start with you really only that and dress and talk us through some of the main points of today's ceremony. so today's ceremony kicks off with the german president in my signing the golden book of the city of. the town hall here in dresden earlier today he was joined by kent also by the state . premier and the mayor of the city and my other met with students student representatives people who are civil society actors. then go on to the main event and we've just seen a piece of his speech just now there where i held a speech in the palace of culture. place and. walked a very fine line between commemorating the victims of the 25000 people who were killed but also while also stressing germany's responsibility a lot of people in the room collapsed when he called people to act against the. far right extremism that we're seeing in germany and elsewhere in the world right now then later today in the next hour or so tens of thousands of people are expected to gather for human chain. in my will join that human chain to stand together for tolerance. live and thank you for. a lot to today's ceremony but. the rise of the far right is something that would that we've seen in germany across the years and the president making a point of talking about them in relation to these events 70 years ago but also about today absolutely there was a discussion again about how many people were killed during the bombing of dresden . and one representative of the of the far right here in this country in germany i was again talking about few things that more than 100700 various we do know by. intense research of groups of different groups of historians that we talk about 25000 so that was a signal of course for him obviously for him to say we do not want and democrats in this open society should stand up against any comparison here of atrocities. for example of this bombing comparing it to auschwitz for example what happened there and i think it was very clear here and i myself was just recently during the commemoration of 75 years of the liberation of auschwitz where against time i was also very clear saying that we have to stand up and this is about reconsideration and this is about peace and this is about the future also only in here on the continent in europe leoni took this took a step to talk to us about the mewed because there were speeches and there was music as well. exactly i've just come back from the event and yes there were there was music film on it because for kicks off the event and. then there was a speech by fun by my who was introduced by the mayor of. and frankly just time i gave a speech after arms 30 minutes and a lot of people as a sad stood up and clapped while he was giving that speech he also welcomes guests from patna cities there were a lot of people sitting in the room with microphone with headphones and similar 10 years translations so people have come from. patna cities coventry in england he mentions it's in poland and steinmeier stressed how what jason experienced here 75 years ago obviously a lot of other cities across europe but also across the world is half experience and still experiencing the terrors off war. here with me for now we will talk more in the course of the program over a period of 3 days allied warplanes dropped 5 bombs that killed thousands of people many of them women and children fleeing the soviet arms advance in the east the bombs also laid waste to the cities of famous baroque churches and palaces. since bringing rebuild but survivors of the attack i've been telling d.w. what it was like when the bombs began to fall. when aaron's tears comes to the new mark's public square and sees the restored church of our lady or fallen cure here he is reminded of the dresden bombings 75 years ago. here. and everything was destroyed and this was where most of the people were killed in the fire storm then on the next day the duration following kisha collapsed yes the square was reduced to rubble. on the evening of february 13th 1945 over the span of just 15 minutes the allied forces dropped bombs containing 900 tons of explosives on dresden during the next 2 days 3 more attack waves followed after that the baroque old town lay in ruins. at the time and tears was 9 years old when the bombs were dropped on dresden he and his parents he had in a bomb shelter in the cellar of their house seen here in the former your hungry organ alley. and. after the 1st attack we left the apartment while everything was burning and i can still see it before my eyes the flames creeping over the rooftops of neighboring houses and. that's what it looked like afterwards that was my parents' apartment was on the top of the that's what the ruins looked like you can see the facade was still in good shape but inside the building everything was burned out and that's what the whole wonderful street looked like. ants tears and his parents were lucky they were able to flee the city as many as 25000 people died during the air raids many of them suffocated during the firestorms. and concur in my eyes this was a war crime many things happened on all sides but this was an act of destruction directed at the civilian population. and steere started working as a camera man in the 1950 s. his nickname was the army of dresden he documented the reconstruction of the destroyed city and has been collecting photos and videos of dresden dating back to the 19th century for his film archives. documentary film can be brutally honest if you do not edit or change the footage and i never did this then for me it is the most impressive historical witness. today the rebuilt cityscape of dresden betrays few signs of the destruction that took place here 75 years ago. the most wonderful thing of all is that the dresden from care here has been restored that is really the biggest miracle and after the destruction i experienced in my childhood and youth i never hoped or expected this to happen i hope it will stay this way forever. the dresden for one cure here is where aaron's tears was baptized before the war today he sees it as a symbol of peace. time is still with us interest and here with me frank hoffman frank we heard. they're saying that the attack on dresden was a war crime 70 years on historians still can't seem to agree look there's a legally a very complex question because at the time. something like a carpet bombing that was seen there that we see that there was not mention in the in the so-called hague convention of 1007. knowledge days. it surely would be qualified as a war crime according to the european human rights convention that was signed after world war 2. and there's the field there's argumentation is playing in. interest and we've talked about the president's concerns about the far right a using this event for their own. presence there today what were they doing. yes exactly. just outside of the. palace of culture the a 50 the thyroid actually sets up an information booth trying to inform citizens about the so-called truth of the bombing or what they see was the truth of the bombing and we talked to some people there and they said they want to commemorate the victims of that raised in bombing and not commemorate and half this day to commemorate this the victims of this bombing and not of all bombings of all wars. or even just victims of the 2nd world war and there was a counter protest happening just next to the booths not many people actually were frequenting the. but the far right. is expected to have their own commemoration ceremony later tonight at $930.00 tonight and also just outside of the palace of culture and days and you not see protest. where you not just fire right groups and right wing extremists have called on their members have actually called on people to come from all over europe to join them in commemorating what they call sort of yeah this this bombing this bombing of tourists. in front presents in his speech he also mentioned the polish town of. explains why that was significant this was very important because over years or decades even the beginning of world war 2 was seen as it's been happened at the so-called west german navy was. the best of the free city of. and for decades neither doing communist times in communist poland or even off to the fall of. communism this little town which was an innocence mall town in south eastern poland at the time was mentions and this was indeed again according to how we would see today a war crime it was perpetrated by. a monthly from which to often one of the main figures of the the german army there was no defense at all in this little town and the fact that the federal president. mentioned this went there and put on the lights and shed a light on this tragedy there and now he mentioned it again i would say is a big it was the beginning of a chain of different speeches he's holding at the moment and we will probably hear more in the course of this year. very important because the federal presence in this country is a moral authority say in the political field and i think in these times where there is a strong wording of the far right against and in that this trial to use. atrocities like and raised for their purposes it's very i think he took up the line and say ok i'm here i take this more responsibility and i want to take the lead in in this front hoffman thank you for that live on homicide in dresden thank you as well we'll have more from there or indeed both of you in the course of today's events as we look at events commemorating the 70th anniversary of the allied bombing of dresden and we'll take a look at some more of the day's news and there's been an alarming surge in the number of infections and deaths from the coronavirus named by scientists is covert 19 health officials are becoming increasingly worried the number of infections worldwide to shot up 260000 that's after some 50000 new cases were reported in just one day japan has reported it. 1st death from the virus and more than 250 deaths recorded on wednesday alone in the chinese province of ballet the epicenter of the outbreak. correspondent m it is built into has more from beijing indeed a new reporting method the local authorities have decided to include patients who show clear symptoms of viral pneumonia but. not tested positively for the virus into this statistics the reason is that many patients could not be tested so far because there is a lack of laboratories and testing kids and we're also hearing cases where people have tested negative lead. despite clear symptoms at that point to the coronavirus infection i have spoken to some of them one woman told me that her mother was suffering from says it was suffering severe lee could not be admitted into a hospital because she tested negatively twice despite her symptoms and only the 3rd test was positive so hopefully this new method of. counting will also lead to more patients having a chance at a proper treatment because they can be admitted to hospitals now it might also mean that the queues for the hospital beds will be longer and people and people will still have to wait. it was material into the porcelain so to dr simon clark who's a sensitive microbiologist from the university of reading in england welcome to day doubly dr clark we just heard back chinese authorities broadening back classification of corona virus infections to include pneumonia sentence is that a useful sort of precaution or does it muddy the waters. well i think basically the more we know about this infection the more we know about people's symptoms it's only reasonable to expect us to include more and more things that will classify somebody as having coronavirus infections so the more we study the more we know the better we can diagnose these things. we've seen some deaths some deaths outside china but the vast majority of deaths and infections have been largely confined to the province. should we expect another break somewhere else in the world or do we see this sort of a dwindling and until it becomes manageable. well it's difficult to know whether it'll brindle more often if indeed it does when that will happen but it's only reasonable to expect the chinese will be hit hardest 1st because of course that's seemingly where the virus originated as it spreads outside of china you may may see more deaths in other countries and of course the harder countries hits in terms of the number of people get if infected the more deaths you will see there so in the meantime all we can do is the reasonable things why show hands and if you've been in the area or in contact with someone in the area. do they keep an eye out for the symptoms. i think so yes wash your hands capture the sneezing in tissues and make sure it's been if you have been exposed to somebody you know has the infection then in the u.k. at least people are being encouraged to self quarantine and hide themselves away for a fortnight until you infection if they've got the infection would have passed and it's important to remember that if they do get the infection the likelihood is that it will be pretty mild. the numbers and the response i think a quite telling we know with that pneumonia for instance kills more people every day that has happened during the whole of this particular corona infection so clearly there corona is not as deadly why is it so dangerous why is it were a world health problem. pneumonia is a catch all phrase for a chest infection any chest infection can be characterized as pneumonia that's all it is it's inflammation in the alarms due to an infection so that's what the doctors are looking for so yeah. aside from coronavirus we'll call will kill a lot more people because it represents a lot more infections things like flu and things can cause pneumonia presumably this will not be the last killer virus it doesn't call it that that the world is going to have to deal with so where do these unknown diseases spring from. it seems that they usually spring from animals they mutate they move from animals into the human population and that can happen with flu it's what happened with hiv it's what happens with all sorts of other viruses as well they cross species barriers when they mutate and of course human immune systems probably have never seen anything like them before and that's why they can spread quite quickly good talking to you thank you for joining us dr simon clarke from the university of ready you're welcome. i mean you health ministers have held an emergency meeting in brussels to discuss europe's response to the corona virus outbreak the doubly comes upon a balance of eager to caught up with german health health minister bond after the meeting to find out what was discussed. mr spawn which additional measures does europe does germany need to prevent the corona opec to devolve into a real pandemic 1st of all what we do need isn't coordinated approach in europe and internationally and that is why we are very much engaged in coordinating within the european union like today within the council or within the g 7 that we have calls of the health minister for for example and what is important is actually that we prepare and that we try to retard to actually as much as possible that the virus read just as our regions than china and it's affecting it as much as it is china so far just a regional epidemic outbreak in china but we need to be sure that it does not become a real epidemic growled wyatt and if so a pandemic worldwide if so we need to be prepared to regarding research around therapies and vaccination we need to prepare to be appropriate in what we know about the wires every week we have to prepare helps us to know more about how an infectious that is actually how severe it can get for the patients and all of these actions actually are focusing on this getting gaining time to know more do you seek to restrict travel from and to china as for example the united states did what we already have done in germany for example that we asked pilots that they need to tell the tower in advance if there are patients present restless symptoms are bought on board or not and that passengers actually have to fill out of form that says where they are reachable contact dates for the next 30 days we might need additional measures to know which passengers actually have been in contact with people from the region for for example and that is actually one. we have discussed here during the council meeting but we do not need to by the way if i might add is from my point at least. measuring this for example taking the temperature of passengers because we just know because of the incubation time and the symptom free time we have after infection it actually doesn't help do you trust the numbers of infections you get from the communist regime in china while what we can see is actually that there. must be many more. cases than b. actually do see in the in the public figures why because they just changed actually and the case definition for for the statistic that only a case goes into the statistic if there really were symptoms and we know that there are many many symptom free cases so i would assume that there are many more cases than we see in the statistic which is important because if you take the cases in relation to for example people that died. that makes a difference then for the relation china on the other hand is able to apply very draconian measures lockdown of whole cities with europe be able to do that if need be i would say i'm impressed by what china does and different regards actually. but what we see is if there is a missile outbreak in germany and measles are much more infectious they're not b. c. with the corona virus so far we actually i bill to deal with a without putting whole cities on the current time when the worst be over. that's a good question if i knew the that's actually our problem is that we don't know enough about the wires that is why there is these. that there are so many measures actually that need to be taken to prepare as long as we don't know really what. what it does for example and how harmful it is and so far in europe and that with a new pin union detection and containment works we are able to to stop the infectious chains. but we have to admit. today it could get worse before it becomes better because as long as it is not under control in china these regional epidemic situation can develop worldwide pandemic situation. let's thank you all the best. correspondent i've been to regret that with a german health minister. and as we look at other news in this hour we see that a