The Sunday Post: The Rape of Dresden
Dresden. 70 years ago 13 square miles of the city lay in smouldering ruins. Something like 25,000 people lay dead. Many died from lack of oxygen as the fire storm swept through the city; others were simply burned alive.
I heard a couple of interviews with a survivor this week – Victor Gregg. He was a tough old bloke, a British paratrooper who has seen quite a lot of action before being captured at Arnhem. As a prisoner of war he was sent to Dresden on some sort of punishment work detail. The bombing killed many around him (some burned alive by the phosphorous in the incendiaries) but a blast bomb opened a hole in a wall and allowed him to escape. He did his best to describe the indescribable. He said he had coped with six years of war from the Middle East, Italy and Arnhem itself. But nothing had prepared him for seeing how the howling winds caused by the fire would literally sweep women and children, burning alive in flames, high into the air before dropping them to their deaths. At one point he described how a group of people trying to run from the flames across a road “got stuck”, trapped in the melting tar. The fiery winds consumed them. They collapsed then burst into flames and then, he said, they simply exploded. He helped with clearing up after the raids were over, co-opted into a work group. He described cellars full of bones and fat where those sheltering had effectively been cremated; others where the dead had been suffocated by the lack of oxygen as the fires consumed all around. He made it plain that the horror has caused him mental problems ever since. An article and interview can be found via The Independent here:
There is, of course, a huge debate about whether the raid was justified, or even necessary. I understand Dresden was an important manufacturing centre and was being used as a marshalling station for troops heading to the Eastern front to fend off the advancing Russians. There is a succinct and very well written summary of the raids and the debates to be found on the ever helpful Wikipedia here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II
From that entry, this distressing quote by another survivor:
‘To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire. Suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream and gesticulate with their hands, and then—to my utter horror and amazement—I see how one after the other they simply seem to let themselves drop to the ground. (Today I know that these unfortunate people were the victims of lack of oxygen). They fainted and then burnt to cinders. Insane fear grips me and from then on I repeat one simple sentence to myself continuously: “I don’t want to burn to death”. I do not know how many people I fell over. I know only one thing: that I must not burn.’ — Margaret Freyer
Was it a “war crime”? People bandy such terms around a lot without too much in the way of intellectual discipline. It is not a question I propose to answer as such. I am not an expert on strategy; nor had I lived through more than five years of total war, in which my own cities, like London and Coventry, had suffered grievously from heavy raids. Nor did I have responsibility for bringing the war to the earliest possible conclusion, thus saving the lives of my own citizens. However, my sense is that it had more than a whiff of viciousness about it, and went beyond what was just, even in the course of a justified total war. I certainly don’t blame the pilots – they had their orders and their duty to do, and faced terrible peril. Ultimately, Churchill authorised it. But I suspect that he soon developed grave misgivings about it.
On 28 March, in a memo sent by telegram to General Ismay for the British Chiefs of Staff and the Chief of the Air Staff, he wrote:
“It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land… The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. I am of the opinion that military objectives must henceforward be more strictly studied in our own interests than that of the enemy. The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive”
In his subsequent six volume memoir “The Second World War” the bombing received a terse two lines to the following effect: Dresden was bombed, and the war continued. It was a dreadful event, and reminder of the horror of war. Today, as you probably know, Dresden is twinned with Coventry, which of course suffered grievously too. That is a great symbol of reconciliation. There is hope.
PS: Wolf Hall
I have been watching ‘Wolf Hall’. There is some very fine acting; magnificently detailed costumes; great settings; someone seems to be playing the dulcimer or possibly a lute. I don’t know. That nice woman from “Call the Midwife” turned up this week, and she must be a very good actress because she was particularly nasty, hard eyed and hatchet faced in a world which seems to have been full of nasty, hard eyed and hatchet faced women.
I only have one problem. I don’t know what the hell is going on!!
Gildas the Monk
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February 15, 2015 at 10:18 am -
“Dresden is twinned with Coventry, which of course suffered grievously too.”
Grievously? How many died in Coventry in total- around a thousand? The lowest guessimate for Dresden is some 25 times that figure. I have discussed the Dresden Bombings a few times here in the comments section , can’t recall off the top of my head whether it was Airman, Engineer or Windsock but someone made the telling point that Dresden was ‘ a Crime of War, not a War Crime’ and that argument holds a lot of truth I think…and seems to be a point where even the “you’d be speaking German now’ Little Englanders and the ‘revisionists’ (as I think I was called) can agree.
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February 15, 2015 at 10:38 am -
I am interested to be informed on this debate – and have been already. I see Archbishop of Canterbury made a statement apologizing for Dresden – cue outrage in the Daily Mail. I would not be so quick to condemn him for that. However, I am open to all views. The Raccoonistas are a wise bunch, they know “stuff” and have life experience. What think you all?
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February 15, 2015 at 11:40 am -
@Gildas, back when the death toll for Dresden was commonly held to have been in the hundreds, not merely, tens of thousands I delved into what facts there were then commonly available (in dead tree format, preinternet) to the general public in Germany ie i used my exclusive pass for the Ecclesiastic Theological Library to get me into the Public Town Library Reference Section (I mention that so people will get an idea of where I was ‘coming from’).
I came to the conclusion that either Butcher Harris/Churchill was a homocidal Maniac or there was someone or something in Dresden that had to be destroyed at all costs. A ‘Something’ or ‘Someones’ so crucial to the Nazi war effort that justified killing that many ‘innocents’ so horrifically….and something that still remains classified and will for at least another 70 odd years. Gut feeling , the Nazi’s were a lot closer to an Atomic or WMD Wunderwaffe than we realise.
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February 15, 2015 at 11:44 am -
“the Nazi’s” AAARRRGH! You can take the boy off the Market Stall…
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February 15, 2015 at 11:50 am -
I am not persuaded that there was some hidden agenda. I think it was done because it could be done.
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February 15, 2015 at 11:53 am -
” it was done because it could be done.”-Gildas
… which might be an even more scary thought than Hitler having had a biological WMD.
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February 15, 2015 at 12:00 pm -
Possibly so. I think that although there were military reasons (blocking the supply of troops to the eastern front) it was done as an act of retaliation and vengeance for the years of war. Which is problematic.
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February 15, 2015 at 4:52 pm -
No, the AoC didn’t “apologise for Dresden”. Here’s what he actually said: http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/5498/archbishops-speech-on-70th-anniversary-of-dresden-bombing
I’m at a loss to see how even the Mail hacks managed to find anything like an apology in there.-
February 15, 2015 at 11:55 pm -
‘…the AoC didn’t “apologise for Dresden”.’
But he did talk the usual platitude filled bollocks…
We are in no position to sit in judgement of the people who ordered and carried out this raid. It sickens me that it was felt necessary to go to war with Germany twice in a very short period, with all the death and mayhem that this involved but who knows the limitation of the visions of Hitler? I have been reading a book by Martin Gilbert on the the Somme. My grandfather survived it and I have an interest.
It contains the following quote: ‘… I hope we shall get to England’ one German soldier wrote to his landlord on October 20 (1914) as he set off for the front, but Adolf Hitler was to be disappointed, both then and in 1940.’
Hitler was crazy enough to deploy WMD if he could have created them and perhaps the speculation that something unspeakable was being prepared in Dresden may have some credibility. On the other hand, I think that the raid was deliberately carried out to carry the message to the German people that they should surrender, or suffer the same fate – which was evidently the policy employed by the Americans at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Terrible things are done in war and we, with the gift of hindsight have the luxury of examining decisions whilst enjoying the benefits that are the by product of those difficut choices, and without listening out, night after night for the unsynchronised drone of approaching German bombers, intent upon raining down death and destruction on the people and places that we love.
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February 15, 2015 at 11:20 am -
BD – Whilst I think the words, “a Crime of War, not a War Crime” are wise ones in connection with Dresden, I can’t claim them as mine.
On the wider point, how does one go about drawing the line between an acceptable war act and an unacceptable one in the context of a total war like WW2? It would appear that there was legitimate military reason to attack, though whether the weapons deployed and the precise targets were chosen carefully enough is a matter of legitimate debate, I think. The whole business of attack from the air developed very rapidly during the course of the war from lobbing a lot of ordnance in the general direction and hoping some of it hit something important, to a rather more precise business with accurate location of targets and nearer pin-point bombing, at least by the Allied forces. The Luftwaffe was less a force in the latter stages, so a lot of their early bombing – such as the Baedeker Raids – were rather of the former sort. Exeter, I believe, suffered from such an ‘architectural rearrangement’ early in the war, despite not being of particular military significance, as did other places.
Quite honestly, beyond the trite, “All war is horrible, and best avoided”, I don’t know what to add to the discussion.
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February 15, 2015 at 11:31 am -
Actually, having done some basic research after posting the comment (ahem!) about Baedeker raids, it’s a bit more complicated. Here’s a link – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baedeker_Blitz
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February 15, 2015 at 11:34 am -
Neither was it me who used the phrase “crime of war”, but it does seem incredibly apt.
Gildas quotes Churchill as writing: “the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed”… seems some of today’s evil-mongers have learned a lesson about increasing the terror. What was that about the sins of the fathers?
Before anyone jumps on me – I’m not defending them. I know that 1939 – 1045 was an existential crisis for this country. I’m pointing out that history has many lessons to teach.
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February 16, 2015 at 1:35 am -
But then I played on the derelict bombsites of Coventry as a child. The bricks had been pushed into to the edges of the roads, great head high heaps covering the sites of what they used to be, and this 20+ years later. Half the centre of the beautiful mediaeval city was absent. It still is. The Coventy that was was all but killed that night. I know a man – still alive but only just – who as a teenage boy watched from his bedroom window in Atherstone the fire-glow in the sky. I would guess some 20 miles distant to the NE or thereabouts. I imagine it would be like watching Westminster burn from Windsor or thereabouts.
Perceptions and experience are different but the dead of Coventry have their own mass grave just along the London Road to the SE of the city, just outside the inner ring road. Brothers-in-arms and now in death. It is instructive to visit there and ponder a while. But the toll does not measure the wickedness. That Dresden was unnecessary is hindsight. Perhaps the wisest of the wise were uneasy, and Churchill was not always wise and never squeamish. It is also a point to consider, and wonder at, that today’s Germans do not lightlly bleat about the ending of the war. And how many French civilians were killed in the barrage in preparation for D-Day? And how many perished in NW France in the next few weeks? All war is horrible, and is pretty much mad by definition. Conducting war by tea-room rules is a tough ask. Hoping that our granddads did just that without us having yet asked is tougher still.
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February 17, 2015 at 12:43 pm -
Coventry had 1,236 civilians killed out of a population of around 300,000.
Hull, with a comparable population, lost 1,140 civilians, and similarly had the ancient heart of the city destroyed, but nobody talks about Hull much. Not outside of Hull, at any rate.
The estimates for Dresden are in teh region of 25,000 out of a population of some 650,000.
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February 15, 2015 at 10:53 am -
It is a serious mistake to look at events in the early half of the twentieth century with the eyes of the twenty-first. Has the Archbishop also apologised to the French for all those who Henry and his band of brothers slaughtered out of hand after Agincourt?
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February 15, 2015 at 11:04 am -
“It is a serious mistake to look at events in the early half of the twentieth century with the eyes of the twenty-first. Has the Archbishop..”
Some would say that it is the job of the ArchBish to look at events in the early half of the C20 with the eyes of the First century AD!
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February 15, 2015 at 11:33 am -
Many things in war can be reviewed with 20/20 vision after the event. The comments from those who authorised it show that. Would they have continued? Perhaps but maybe with changes. We will never know.
My view though is that we should ignore who initiated and took part in these events, too much time has passed, but remember the results of event when we are considering what to do in the future.
Why don’t we look at more events like Blair’s handling of the Iraq War and consider the events that let up to that rather than pointlessly looking back 70 years.
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February 15, 2015 at 11:45 am -
Because people are still alive who witnessed those events in Dresden? Because every bit of history has something to teach us? Because a significant time lapse gives us a better chance to evaluate rather than still being emotionally caught up in recent events? Because (although frustratingly slowly) we ARE looking at the Iraq war?
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February 15, 2015 at 11:50 am -
“BD – Whilst I think the words, “a Crime of War, not a War Crime” are wise ones in connection with Dresden, I can’t claim them as mine.”-Engineer
“Neither was it me who used the phrase “crime of war”, but it does seem incredibly apt.”-WinsockIt might have been Biker Bob or Fat Steve or any other one of the more-intelligent-more-articulate-than-me minds that seem to populate this site. Not sure where the ‘crime of war’ quote comes from originally, maybe Grass?
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February 15, 2015 at 12:29 pm -
It was not a game of football, this. Keeping score, as people are wont to do now, was not an issue then. Dresden represented an important transit point in Germany – rail junctions in particular. It was deemed an important target at the time.
Kurt Vonnegut painted a surreal picture of events in his book Slaughterhouse 5 – he himself had been captured when his unit was overrun in the Ardennes offensive (The battle of the Bulge) and found himself there.
Any death by bombing is ghastly, of course; ordinary folk, going about their business, being suddenly incinerated, or suffocated or simply blown to atoms. The same applied in Coventry, Cardiff, Southampton, London. Liverpool, etc.
V2 rockets were still arriving in Britain at that stage – untargeted ballistic weapons, completely indiscriminate in their targeting (and only used against civilian populations – never against troops) and no-one knew from whence they came. Dresden, as a major railhead, was thus deemed as important.
The crushing of Germany was an important step in the final resolution of the War, because it had dragged on too long; it had cost the Allies very dear (and the preservation of one Allied soldier was held to be worth many more of the enemy – rightly), so the judgement to destroy Dresden was one made in two minds; to accelerate the collapse of German morale and, as important, save further losses.
A similar calculation was probably made regarding the bombardment of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war, the Zeppelin raids of 1915-16, the Condor Legion’s destruction of Guernica, the Japanese attacks in China, the destruction of the French fleet in 1940, the firestorm in Tokyo or the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And so on. It is the projection of power. Power wins wars.
Only in retrospect are these acts crimes of war. Except when you read the contemporary accounts and attempt to put them in our context. See Archibald Forbes on the destruction wrought on Paris, for example.
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February 15, 2015 at 9:51 pm -
Portsmouth got hit badly as well, the Germans did thousands of pounds worth of improvements
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February 17, 2015 at 12:57 pm -
Plymouth too. Their improvements were of the Bauhaus style just to rub it in…
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/large/8420.jpg
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February 15, 2015 at 12:48 pm -
This is all wise, sober stuff, with the caveat that (I suspect) the majority of us have not lived through a war and so have no first-hand experience of the effect it can have on one’s moral compass (to borrow a dreadful phrase). Here’s my 2 cents’ worth.
I was living in an East African country in the 1980s when there was a military coup, a not uncommon event in those days. Those of us not lucky enough to get out at the first sign of trouble – the airport being one of the first places to be closed down, followed by the telephone and electricity utilities – were stuck there for the duration. I learned a few things during that experience – that artillery shells passing overhead create a sonic boom like a thunderclap, that a safe room in the house and a cool-box full of beers are no substitute for being somewhere else, and that empty wooden crates with the stencilled legend “Urgent: Tractor Bearings” could be found after the fighting was over, piled up next to abandoned gun emplacements. The boxes had in fact contained small shells and mortar bombs, a testament to the depravity of the outer fringes of the arms trade.
But it was the effect on me that I remember most. After the coup was over, dead bodies lay strewn all over the city. As an expatriate manager my job was to get our local operations back to normal as quickly as possible. I recall being really annoyed at the inconvenience of having to drive round the corpses in a zig-zag fashion on the way to the office. And appalled by the sweet stench of decaying flesh and the sight of ballooning bodies in the tropical heat. And upset by an unexploded mortar bomb, whose fins could be seen sticking up on one of the greens at the local golf course. I had become completely callous and selfish, with scarcely a thought for the well-being of anybody else.
Imagine what it must have been like to suffer through years of war and deprivation. The news that a city in the enemy country had been bombed to bits would have been welcomed, I think. It is only with the luxury of peace and hindsight that we can look back dispasssionately, armchair general style, and criticise what was done and how it could have been done better. I’ll bet that Londonners at the time, having been subjected to blitz, doodlebug and V-missile attacks, had no such misgivings.
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February 15, 2015 at 1:37 pm -
“I’ll bet that Londonners at the time, having been subjected to blitz, doodlebug and V-missile attacks, had no such misgivings.”
Indeed not (having known some of them in their later lives) but, unlike the majority of the German survivors of civilian bombings, they then passed on that, totally understandable, attitude of “completely callous and selfish, with scarcely a thought for the well-being of anybody else” (in regard to German civilian deaths) to the next generations. Not only that , the successive generations got told that it had all been done in our name and we should be grateful for the freedoms we have (an ever shortening list) to the ‘heroes of Bomber Command’ [sic Daily Mail] .
Just one example; the other day I mentioned to someone (Brit, born after WW2) that my Prussian Father-in-Law didn’t want to fly to the UK for his Grandson’s wedding. When that someone then asked me why he, Father-in-Law, was scared of aeroplanes I said that it was perhaps having been strafed by an allied fighter plane as a child and that that may have ‘put him off planes’. Without a seconds’ hesitation the person I was talking to came back with a venomous “as I bet the British kids strafed by NAZI planes feel that way too!”
It’s the moral ‘football scoring’ (to misquote Robert Edwards) that pisses me off I suppose.
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February 15, 2015 at 1:22 pm -
Wise and insightful comments as I would expect. Is it any more important that 25,000 died than say 25? Was it necessary? Was it just? What about judging “them and then” from the perspective of “us and now”? I am pretty sure that if I had experienced “the Blitz” and maybe lost a home or loved ones to that, or the V1’s or V2’s, I would have danced with delight at the news. Sitting in my study, safe and with a glass of wine on a Sunday afternoon, I might feel differently. This, then, is the relativism which I seek to explore – just as our new landlord has done when we come to the cases of so called “historic” abuse, some of which is just criminal sexual assault, and some of which appears to me to have been the product of the prevailing climate at the time, and different norms and values. I present no easy answers, but when I heard the personal account of the British soldier mentioned, I felt profound regret and sorrow.
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February 15, 2015 at 9:04 pm -
Then perhaps you could feel profound sorry and regret for the London, East-Enders who sheltered night-after-night in flimsy, damp and dark Anderson shelters, school basements or any other ill-prepared shelter as the docks were pounded for forty nights in a row during the blitz. That would include my mother, who forever after was terrified of thunder and so claustrophobic that she was terrified of flying on a plane to visit her newborn grandsons. She is just one example and was extremely fortunate, consider the unfortunate not killed outright but buried alive and sometimes drowned or succumbed to gas leaks, they might have preferred a quick death from asphyxia.
Perhaps it is time for the BBC and Welby to turn their minds to Hallsville School, Canning Town and Bethnal Green tube station as well as others on Clydeside, Hull, Portsmouth et al.
My mother never hated Germans, but she had a bitter dislike of Churchill and the English “war planners” that left the civilian population so exposed.
War has some dreadful results, I see no benefit in second-guessing strategic actions.
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February 15, 2015 at 9:49 pm -
When my son was small I knew an elderly woman via my work. As one does she was introduced to the new baby, and duly made a fuss of the little-un, finally pressing some money into his little palm “for luck” as used to be the way. Anyhow, some time later I got to talking to her and pressed a little as to her own apparent lack of children because I was curious. Since she was of Irish extraction I anticipated a sad tale of how it was not by choice but she had been unable to have children. Instead, she calmly told me wbout how she in fact had had seven children and how she was with them all in the shelter one night in the Blitz. She had no idea what had happened but it must have been a direct hit. All she knew was that she had woken up in hospital some time later. Her children had all been buried already.
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February 15, 2015 at 1:27 pm -
I should, of course, for additional context, have added the well known comments attributed to Arthur “Bomber” Harris:
“The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put that rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now, they are going to reap the whirlwind”
It derives, I believe, from the Book of Hosea (8:7)
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February 15, 2015 at 1:44 pm -
When Generals start quoting the bible then it’s usually a sign something morally indefensible-even-by-standards-of-their-time is about to happen.
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February 15, 2015 at 2:05 pm -
Indeed, it might have been in April of the same year that they found out what it was, and perhaps felt the Krauts had deserved Dresden even more than they had before.
“As it drove into Germany, the 11th Armoured Division occupied the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15, 1945, pursuant to an April 12 agreement with the retreating Germans to surrender the camp peacefully. When the 11th Armoured Division entered the camp, its soldiers were totally unprepared for what they found… ”
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10006188-
February 15, 2015 at 3:08 pm -
I have mentioned before that my Granddad was one of those “tommy’s puking in the sun” , what he saw that day he never spoke of and I dare say if I had ever asked him he would have, understandably, thought the Krauts deserved a lot more than Dresden…especially as I’m fairly sure he caught the aftermath of the “Celle Hare Hunt” (a particularly evil event that few have ever heard of here). I would imagine what contact he had with the local Celleraners in Celle aftewards must have been ‘tense’….even for a chirpy cockney chappy -whose own young family back in London had been constantly bombed (My Ol’Nan used to claim that his son , my dad, didn’t have a bath the whole war cos everytime she got the tin bath out, the Sirens went…mind you, she also used to claim that ‘them doctors ‘ad ‘ad h’away wif all ‘er h’insides and w’eplaced it wif straw’…..)
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February 15, 2015 at 2:28 pm -
Actually, the Germans started it all – not in Basil Fawlty terms – but during the First World War, by making hit and run raids on coastal towns by ship, and Zeppelin raids, and later by Gotha biplane bombers. Britain was gearing itself to retaliate using the huge Vickers Vimy bombers that Alcock and Brown later crossed the Atlantic in, but hadn’t really got started when the Armistice was signed. Zeppelins, incidentally, flew so high that they couldn’t normally be hit by AA fire, nor shot down by fighters.
It was to be expected that they would conquer Belgium and the Netherlands and would re-run their offensives, with Britain easy to get to for them, but Germany more distant for us, and this is precisely what they did, having perfected their strategies in Spain during their Civil War. The relative ranges meant that the German bombers flew even in 1940 with fighter escorts, whereas this was possible for us only later in the war.
At the time of the Dresden raids, V2s were still being launched at London. It was not clear then how long the war in Europe would go on. However, it was clear that the Germans had their own nuclear programme, and it was equally clear that their V1 cruise missiles and V2 ballistic missiles were ahead of anything we had. Moreover, the V2 was absolutely unstoppable, as it was supersonic. It was known that the Germans had advanced nerve gasses, and a biological weapons programme. Ceramics production in Dresden was a fundamental war technology for these weapon systems. You must remember that nuclear weapons were being readied in the US, and they used some technologies developed in the UK, such as gas diffusion for separating different Uranium isotopes, reliant on porous ceramics. (Centrifuges appear to be the better technology now). Dresden had to go, and it had to go as completely as possible, and if not to stop the Germans having it, but to stop the Russians too.
Churchill, by the way, was most probably peddling disinformation. After all, we didn’t let on to the Russians we had cracked Enigma, which they used into the 1960s, and we didn’t let on to the Americans that we had computers, either.
Without a continuation of the bombing campaign, the war might have lasted longer in Europe, long enough to have seen the deployment and use of nuclear weapons. They surrendered in May, just a few of months short of Hiroshima. Incidentally, area bombing of Japanese cities was going on at the same time.
The Archbishop also used an expression of regret. In politics, this is not saying sorry. Regret is regret that it happened, not an apology for doing it.
I’ve seen the German cities in the Ruhr shortly after the war, and I’ve also seen the damage wrought in Britain. Dresden had to go.
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February 15, 2015 at 3:16 pm -
“it had to go as completely as possible, and if not to stop the Germans having it, but to stop the Russians too.”
Now that’s an interesting point and one I have never given much thought too, although I really should have as I do know to what extent the Russians ‘raped’ Germany after the war….transporting entire factories back Za Rodinu .
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February 15, 2015 at 2:34 pm -
The “free city” of Danzig is 95% German. Along with its surrounding German area of East Prussia, Danzig was isolated from the German mainland by the harsh post-World War I treaties. Formerly German territory now belongs to Poland, cutting right through the Prussian/Pomeranian region of Germany. As had been the case with Germans stranded in Czechoslovakia, the Germans in Poland (those not expelled in 1919) are a persecuted minority.
Hitler tries to solve the problem of the “Polish Corridor” peacefully. He proposes that the people living in Danzig, and the “corridor” be permitted to vote in a referendum to decide their status. If the region returns to German sovereignty, Poland will be given a 1 mile wide path, running through Germany to the Baltic Sea so that it would not be landlocked.
The Poles consider Hitler’s solution, but behind the scenes, Poland is urged by FDR to not make any deals with Germany. When it becomes apparent to Hitler that Poland will not allow a referendum, he then proposes another solution – international control of the formerly German regions. This sensible offer is also ignored. The Globalists intend to use foolish Poland as the match which ignites World War II.
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February 15, 2015 at 3:21 pm -
” He proposes that the people living in Danzig, and the “corridor” be permitted to vote in a referendum to decide their status. If the region returns to German sovereignty, ”
I seem to recall hearing that or something similar recently….oh that’s right, it was on the News last night…some place called ‘Ukraine’…
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February 15, 2015 at 4:41 pm -
Quote: ‘Hitler tries to solve the problem of the “Polish Corridor” peacefully.’
Peacefully? How out of character. Had the man no shame?
Or perhaps he would peacefully renege on his peaceful solution a few months later.
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February 15, 2015 at 4:43 pm -
It seems apologists forget who started WWII.
Those who live by the sword …etc
WWi – Their bombers could reach London from continental airfields; their major cities were out of range of Allied bombers:-
“Over the course of 1917, German bombers threatened to engulf London in firestorms – a portent of the London Blitz and the Battle of Britain over twenty years later. They were determined to bring London to its knees.
“The First Blitz took place over eight nights in 1917, but it was the second wave of attacks in the summer of 1918, following the development of the ‘Elektron’ incendiary bomb, that came within an ace of obliterating London. The margin between the survival of the world’s greatest capital city and its total destruction came down to less than one hour.”
http://www.amazon.co.uk/First-Blitz-Neil-Hanson/dp/0552155489
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February 15, 2015 at 6:46 pm -
“It seems apologists forget who started WWII.”
Refresh my apologistic memory,that’d be Churchill, right? Ultimatum to Germany and then declared a ‘State Of War exists’? No matter how many justifications or ‘excuses’, no matter how ‘hobson’ the choice, in the end Churchill started ‘our’ bit of WW2. Does anyone think for a moment that a later PM (besides Mrs T of course) would have kept to the treaty with Poland? Can you imagine Tony Blair esq…… ?
Slightly off topic but does anyone else recall the media ‘squit’ when Blair came to power because he was born AFTER WW2? Pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the standard, very lopsided, British view of European history. Did Le Figaro say “Zoot alors! Nicolas Sarkozy BORN AFTER WW2! “? The New York Times screamed “BILL CLINTON DIDN’T SERVE IN WW2″?
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February 15, 2015 at 8:38 pm -
Wasn’t it Neville Chamberlain who delivered the ultimatum to Germany?
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February 15, 2015 at 9:44 pm -
Yes, it was indeed Chamberlain, in September 1939. Churchill did not become PM until May 1940.
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February 15, 2015 at 9:55 pm -
I did know, but wasn’t sure if the Dwarf had ‘inside information’. You never know with some of the folk here…
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February 16, 2015 at 2:00 am -
No doubt he was there…
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February 16, 2015 at 11:56 am -
No, just an addled Dwarf brain .I always get Chamberlain confused with Attlee too and since cheaper online car insurance appeared, the name “Churchill” causes me to think of….
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February 15, 2015 at 4:55 pm -
My dad was one of the first to enter Bergen-Belsen. Funnily enough he felt Dresden was more than justified.
It’s easy to think of Dresden as just saving allied lives. It also saved thousands in concentration camps by shortening the war.
Shock horror Germans burned. But not as many as in the gas ovens, that was the real horror of the war.
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February 15, 2015 at 5:01 pm -
If we’re going to go down the “‘e started it first, Miss!” road, I present the 1807 Copenhagen Bombardment!
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February 15, 2015 at 5:17 pm -
The Polish-British Common Defense Pact contains promises of British military assistance in the event that Poland is attacked by another European country. This builds upon a previous agreement (March 1939) between the two countries, and also France, by specifically committing to military action in the event of an attack.
With this agreement, powerful Zionist-Globalist forces in the UK have now trapped the reluctant Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, as well as France and Poland. All that is left to do now is for Polish border thugs to deliberately provoke Germany into action and get the ball rolling.
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February 17, 2015 at 1:13 pm -
Oh dear….
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February 15, 2015 at 6:47 pm -
If we’re going to go down the “‘e started it first, Miss!” road, I present the 1807 Copenhagen Bombardment!
+1 (although i admit I had never heard of the Copenhagen Bombardment).
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February 15, 2015 at 5:29 pm -
I was a 17-year old Londoner when Dresden was bombed. I don’t remember anyone in my heavily bombed working-class neighbourhood paying it particular attention. It was just another bombing and most people would have thought the Germans had it coming to them. After six years, anything that helped end the war, and save further loss of life by Allied military forces, was welcome.
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February 15, 2015 at 5:32 pm -
Just as most of the blitz victims of London, Coventry, Liverpool etc. were not the ones directly visiting death and destruction on the German lands, so most of the citizens of Dresden were not the ones running the concentration camps or sending remote death missiles towards Britain. But all of them were collateral casualties of warfare which had, from the early days of that century, spread out from soldier-on-soldier battlefields into the everyday lives of the civilian component of the combatant nations. Not only would the civilians suffer the financial and supply penalties of wartime, now they would join the lists of the dead and wounded. Once ‘total war’ has developed, then there is no hiding place for any part of the participant nations.
This does not defend the bombing of Dresden, nor make the suffering of its victims any less, but it was an entirely expected consequence of whole nations becoming involved in the process of war.
Chances are, most of the current victims and displaced of Ukraine and Syria didn’t actually want to be part of any war, they just wanted to get on with their lives, but ‘total war’ has meant they became victims, whether of a single mis-aligned mortar or of a thousand bomber raid.
To the person who is killed, it’s a 100% death-rate and that’s not a good result. -
February 15, 2015 at 6:47 pm -
On another site I found this: Original source not shown.
“Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester, is also far the largest unbombed built-up the enemy has got. In the midst of winter with refugees pouring westwards and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium. The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front, to prevent the use of the city in the way of further advance, and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.”
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February 15, 2015 at 7:02 pm -
“incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.”
Amazon says, in the blurb to ‘The Firebombing Of Dresden” , it was “As a Royal Air Force memo put it before the attack,”
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February 15, 2015 at 6:48 pm -
If we hold a black and white approach to the war Allies good Axis evil then we may find justifications for the bombing of Dressden..
In reality both sides committed atrocities, let us nor forget that the Allies included the Russians whose leader Josef Stalin was more brutal than Hitler in the number of people killed or starved by his policies of collectivisation and industrialisation.
Wars will always have unintended consequences and at times allow certain individuals to promote strategies that in more peaceful times would be abhorrent to right thinking people.
The question to ask did the bombing of Dresden help the war effort, well consider the following Marshall Zhukov, mechanized forces by January 31, 1945, were at Küstrin, on the lower Oder, only 40 miles from Berlin. The war for all intense and purposes in Europe was drawing to a rapid end. Did the bombing serve any strategic purpose at this stage in the war and in hindsight it may not have been the case or was Dresden a test run for Japan as the allies would need to discover the impact of this level of bombing?
In no way am I criticising the millions of servicemen who served in the armed forces in this conflict including my own father. The fact is that war is not a X box game , it is a policy that has dreadful unintended consequences and people die horrible deaths and as long as we use war as a policy of solving problems then more people will be killed in the games of our so called leaders. -
February 15, 2015 at 7:31 pm -
If it was a strategic attack, then the authorities would have washed their hands by simply revealing the facts.
So I think it was purely a terror attack; and I suspect it was not just the Germans who were to be intimidated, but also the Russians.
WW2 was in the bag; the next problem was peace with Stalin.
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February 15, 2015 at 10:04 pm -
A friend of mine once lived in Dresden where he acquired an ashtray that has been partially melted by the inferno. It’s an extraordinary and very poignant object – one side was melted over the edge of a table (or suchlike), not unlike Dali’s clock.
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February 15, 2015 at 11:28 pm -
The words ‘Coventry’ and ‘hypocrisy’ come to mind…
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February 15, 2015 at 11:36 pm -
I’m fascinated that some here seem to talk as if the outcome of bombing Dresden was predictable. Were there no bombing missions where the German interceptors ‘got lucky’? Were there no bombing missions where the target indicators fell in the wrong places? Were there no bombing missions where crashed aircraft or German decoys caused bombs to be dropped in the wrong places?
Dresden could be seen as the consequence of the many variables that played a part in affecting the destructiveness of a bombing raid just falling into place by chance. War is often a game of chance. The detonation of HMS Hood, with the loss of 1415 lives and only 3 survivors, is an example of what can happen when the attacker gets ‘lucky’.
I was fortunate to spend some time with resident of Kiel, who had experienced the bombing there as a child. He told me that he had said to his mother, “Who are these flying devils who are trying to kill us?”. He said that his mother had then said, “They are not devils, my son, we are trying to do the same to them”.
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February 17, 2015 at 1:43 pm -
The bombing of Balham tube station was very much a lucky hit. From my own research I concluded that one aircraft was trying to hit the surface railway line that runs perpendicular to the Underground. The aircraft was travelling from west to east, but the bomb drifted some 100 metres to the north as it fell. It was a 1,400 kg semi-armour piercing type, designed for attacking fortified targets, with the result that it did not explode when it hit the surface of Balham High Road, but rather after it had penetrated some 8 metres of ground and eventually hit the cast iron segments of a passageway between the tube platforms. Sixty-six people sheltering on the platforms were either killed by the explosion, suffocated by the collapse of the tunnel, or drowned in the slurry of water and sewerage from the severed mains that ran immediately below the road surface. Had the bomb not drifted, or had it been release a second earlier or a second later, it would have either hit the intended surface railway target, or else building either side of the road; had it been a different type of bomb, it could not have had reached the tunnel. It was pure and terrible bad luck that it was what it was, and it did what it did.
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February 16, 2015 at 12:19 am -
Why talk of Dresden but not of firebombing of Tokyo?
Or the deaths in Leningrad. I suppose these are not trendy.-
February 16, 2015 at 8:13 am -
They’re not in the EU – we’re all supposed to be one friendly Euro-family now, hence the PR blitz.
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February 16, 2015 at 7:57 am -
I was a toddler when this happened. A few here will be older, probably many younger.
These things were horrible, and it seems to me that cruelty of the worst kind is simply a kind of bidding up enabled by the capacity to do it and the dehumanisation of practice.
I never saw the destroyed Europe but well recall the bomb sites of southern England; I haven’t seen the European concentration camps either. I’ve visited Oradour sur Glane several times; with the detachment of decades of peace it’s difficult to understand how that could be done.
But it was.
Because we have so much evidence of what went on we can wring our hands over events long gone, and of which few participants survive.
We can’t change any of these things.
Aren’t there current mass killings & cruelties we’d be better taking an interest in?
Just a view. -
February 16, 2015 at 8:05 am -
A bit late to this party (drinking and chasing women doesn’t do itself y’know
) and I find it hard to disagree with any of the comments.
I would just make two observations:
1. It’s easy to criticise the actions of men long dead, I doubt if any of them enjoyed their work, leaving aside things like the Dirlwanger Brigade and the Tottenkopsverband (sp?) and doubtless a few dubious Allied units like the NKVD. They saw it as an odious necessity to end a war that was bleeding the country white.
2. A lot of the problem, to put it that way, is that we haven’t had a major war since, so we have a couple of generations brought up in the luxury of peace who can complain of something they never have and hopefully never will take part in. -
February 16, 2015 at 2:13 pm -
http://www.vintag.es/2015/02/interesting-then-and-now-photos-of.html
“Interesting Then and Now Photos of Dresden 70 Years Ago, After the Firebombing”
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February 16, 2015 at 2:33 pm -
Gotta admire the resilience of the human spirit. The woman in this one appears to be smiling for the camera!!…
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_tgl4CJNN9c/VN4-aNoywYI/AAAAAAABSTE/CZY8jpd4UsU/s1600/Dresden%2B-%2BThen%2Band%2BNow%2B(3).jpg-
February 16, 2015 at 2:42 pm -
The Wiki on “Trümmerfrau” is worth a read…unfortunately it doesn’t make much of the cultural/literary contribution they made to Post War Germany….probably cos they wore SKIRTS and some even smoked….poor subjugated dears that they were…
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February 16, 2015 at 2:49 pm -
Russia lost 28 million people saving us from the Nazis.
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February 16, 2015 at 3:10 pm -
Churchill probably never knew:
“In 1947, the Soviets liked to boast that their victory had been won with “the least possible losses”, and usually gave a figure of only seven million war dead. But, during the late 1950s, the Soviet leadership saw that a higher figure might be advantageous for propaganda purposes. The now familiar figure of “20 million Russian war dead” did not actually emerge until the 1960s, during Khrushchev’s time.”
http://newsweekly.com.au/article.php?id=1337
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February 16, 2015 at 11:53 pm -
When the usual suspects who use Dresden as a stick to attack the British establishment with spend as much time excoriating Stalin for his actions in allowing the Germans a free hand to slaughter over 150,000 of the inhabitants of Warsaw in the autumn of 1944, then I’ll give them the time of day. In the meantime I’ll take claims of ‘war crimes’ against the British as the politically motivated nonsense they undoubtedly are.
) and I find it hard to disagree with any of the comments.
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