One morning in mid-January, residents of Dresden, Germany, awoke to find that a sandstone plaque commemorating the victims of the city’s bombing in World War II was gone. For decades, it had stood in the city’s Altmarkt square to commemorate the thousands of German civilians who had died in the attack. “The horrors of the war, which had been carried from Germany all over the world, also came back to our city,” its inscription read.

One morning in mid-January, residents of Dresden, Germany, awoke to find that a sandstone plaque commemorating the victims of the city’s bombing in World War II was gone. For decades, it had stood in the city’s Altmarkt square to commemorate the thousands of German civilians who had died in the attack. “The horrors of the war, which had been carried from Germany all over the world, also came back to our city,” its inscription read.

The plaque’s removal made headlines in the city and beyond. The extreme-right German magazine Compact was incensed: Multiple articles on the publication’s website described the removal as an insult to the victims and initially suggested that left-wing activists were behind it because they didn’t respect the German lives lost. Ultimately, it turned out the city itself had removed the plaque as part of its ongoing plans to overhaul the memorial elements in the square—it had just “acted extremely poorly from a communications point of view,” Dresden Mayor Dirk Hilbert said in a statement.

The incident, which came weeks before the 79th anniversary of the bombing, illustrated how heated emotions can be this time of year in Dresden. On the evening of Feb. 13, 1945, Allied forces bombed the city, turning its historic center to rubble in a fiery night of explosions. Modern estimates put the total death toll at around 25,000. The city itself—a cultural hub along the Elbe River and the heart of the former Saxon kingdom—was destroyed.

Each February since the early 2000s, neo-Nazi groups have organized a “march of mourning” for the victims, with hundreds of participants making their way through the city. They argue that the bombing was a war crime and the clearest example that Germans were not only perpetrators during the war. This year, that march is slated to take place on Sunday. In response, Dresden residents who oppose the far right will gather for a........

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