Dresden Bombing. Holocaust?

Let's not turn this into something personal.

Hi Indrid,

So have I. But only one group of people were in a position to know, and that is the German authorities burying the bodies.

The "lengthy and meticulous" SS Final Report prepared a month after the raid says:

"Assessment up to the morning of 10 March: 18,375 fallen (dead), 2,212 seriously injured, 350,000 homeless and long-term rehoused.....The total number of dead, including foreigners, is estimated - on the basis of previous experience and assessments at the time of the bodies' recovery - at approximately 25,000. Beneath the rubble, especially in the inner city, may lie several thousand more fallen, who may for the moment remain totally unrecoverable."

The total of registered burials was eventually 21,171.

Thus, my earlier figure of about 40,000 looks to be at the upper end of the possible range.

Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, apparently added a "0" to the 25,000 estimate of the SS to make 250,000 and a legend was born!

Cheers,

Sid.

Hi Chandernagore,

I fully accept what you say and am much relieved.

In the interests of historical accuracy, I am not only prepared to out myself here publicly as heterosexual, but I am prepared to add that it would not in any way embarrass me if I was not.

Cheers,

Sid.

Roger

Ok, maybe Dresden had many military targets of different sorts. But the scale of the bombardment is still not justified. Germany was crushed anyway. Don't tell me Sid that the allies really cared about the trains passing through Dresden (filled with what? Was Churchill concerned that the Germans could send huge reinforcements on the Eastern front and defeat the Soviets?).
Maybe the bombing of Dresden was not a warcrime from a techincal point of view but most people will always remember it as one of the most terrible warcrimes in history.

Maybe we should avoid "war crime" which had legal ramifications and use the term "atrocity". No one would accuse the mongols of war crimes but many would agree on them indulging in some atrocities here and there.

This post has been edited by Chandernagore on May 30, 2005 11:39 am

Hi Dragos03,

If Germany was crushed anyway, it should have surrendered. It is conventional for the loser to give up fighting, not the winner. Had Germany surrendered earlier we can know for a fact that the bombing would have stopped. How? Because when Germany did surrender in May it did stop.

But Germany didn't surrender for three months after the Dresden bombing. During that time it is probable that another million people died on the Allied side. How does one explain to one's own soldiers that, in order to protect an enemy who won't surrender, one is going to increase their chance of getting killed?

Why would the Western Allies not have cared about the trains passing through Dresden? Remember, it was an Allied war effort. What happened on one front had an impact on others. If the trains were supplying the German Army on the Eastern Front then they were helping to extend the war. If the war was extended, not just more Soviets but more Western Allies were likely to die.

Dresden should be remembered for what it is - one of the more terrible consequences of war. Yet it has a profile that defies the historical reality. It accounts for only about 3% of German dead to aerial bombardment. The Hamburg raid alone killed twice as many people. Pforzheim, Darmstadt and several other places suffered higher proportional losses. Where are the threads on them? In fixating on Dresden particularly I would suggest that all we are doing is allowing Goebbels one last propaganda victory from the grave.

Cheers,

Sid.

Hi Chandernagore,

The misuse of the term "warcrime" is one of my central points. I have always considered that the bombing of Dresden can reasonably be described as barbaric or brutal, like much else in war. I will go and look up a definition of "atrocity".

Cheers,

Sid.

It was not equivalent in numbers and scale, but it still was "murder".

WWII was total war, like WWI. That means everything was for the army.
The question is do you destroy the army or go destroying everything that sustains the army in order not to face its strength? And thats when man invented the nuke...

Agreed. Making differences or scales between the german and allied warcrimes is by no means equivalent of denying the latter. We all know that winning wars makes you impregnable to accusations of this sort, but Dresden or Hamburg did happen. And if we already know the allied reaction to some acts in the past (like Rotterdam or London), it would be quite ludicrous not to ask some light-sheding in this matter.

Sid, the Allies already proved that warcrimes refer only to the actual act of ordering murder, or acting upon that order. If Speer, Donitz or Raeder did not receive the maximum penalty at Nurnberg, even if their acts stood as causes for much of the killing (Speer's production output produced tanks and airplanes, not shopping carts), then it must mean that indirect war effort should not be punishable in the same degree. Dresden disaproves this, thus it is a warcrime.

It's pretty evident that the only reason area bombing was not officially declared a warcrime is that the winning side used the tactic intensively.

I dare say that Bomber Harris should have been hanged. He was more interested in killing as many civilians as possible than winning the war.

Not hanged, strapped to a bomb and thrown off a plane. The nazi leadership that participated in the holocaust would receive their own personal shower. The Commi high-structure minimum-wage jobs at WalMart, without the possibility of creating unions....

this is just sick