In the years after the Allied bombing of German cities, women did the hard and dirty labour of clearing away the fallen rubble. This monument to those women stands on the Rathausplatz: it was created by Walter Reinhold in 1952.

The city of Dresden was bombed catastrophically on 13th/14th February 1945, destroying the city centre and killing at least 35 000 of the people who lived there and an unknown number of refugees – Vera Brittain, who visited Dresden in the 1940s, estimates about a hundred thousand may have been killed.