German President Joachim Gauck has warned against a cult of victimhood over the World War II destruction of the city of Dresden 70 years ago.
"We know who started the murderous war," the head of state said in a remembrance church service on Friday.
"And that's why we will never forget the victims of German aggression, even as we remember the German victims today."
The eastern city of Dresden - dubbed the "Florence on the Elbe" river for its Baroque architecture - has become a symbol of the wholesale destruction of World War II, as has its British post-war partner city of Coventry.
In a campaign that started on February 13, 1945, British and US planes bombed Dresden with conventional and incendiary explosives, causing a firestorm that killed up to 25,000 people and wiped out the historic city centre.
Gauck spoke in Dresden's emblematic 18th-century Church of Our Lady, which was reduced to a rubble heap that long served as a war memorial. It was rebuilt after Germany's 1990 reunification and reconsecrated a decade ago.
Some critics in Germany and abroad have argued the raids on mostly civilian targets were unjustified as Hitler's Germany was already effectively defeated - but Gauck cautioned against revisionism, especially voiced by extremist groups.
The president, a former pastor and civil rights activist in communist East Germany, said the falsification of history had begun during the Nazi regime, continued in East Germany, "and is even now continued by the most incorrigible".
"A country that perpetrated the monstrosity of genocide could not expect to emerge with impunity and undamaged from the war that it had started," he said.
Thousands of people, including Gauck, city officials and religious leaders, meanwhile formed a human circle around the old city as church bells rang.
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