WAR CRIMES


DRESDEN

‘You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.’ (Kurt Vonnegut)

On the evening of February 13, 1945, an orgy of genocide and barbarism began against a defenseless German city, one of the greatest cultural centers of northern Europe. Within less than 14 hours it was reduced to flaming ruins.
Toward the end of World War II, as Allied planes rained death and destruction over Germany, the old Saxon city of Dresden lay like an island of tranquillity amid desolation. Famous as a cultural center and possessing no military value, Dresden had been spared the terror that descended from the skies over the rest of the country.
On ‘Shrove Tuesday’, February 13, 1945, a flood of refugees fleeing the Red Army 60 miles away had swollen the city’s population to well over a million. Each new refugee brought fearful accounts of Soviet atrocities. Little did those refugees, retreating from the Red terror, imagine that they were about to die in a horror worse than anything Stalin could devise.
Normally, a carnival atmosphere prevailed in Dresden on Shrove Tuesday. In 1945, however, the outlook was rather dismal. Houses everywhere overflowed with refugees, and thousands were forced to camp out in the streets. But the people felt relatively safe; and although the mood was grim, the circus played to a full house that night, as thousands came to forget for a moment the horrors of war. Bands of little girls paraded about in carnival dress in an effort to bolster waning spirits.
When the first alarms signaled the start of 14 hours of hell, Dresden’s people streamed dutifully into their shelters. But they did so without much enthusiasm, believing the alarms to be false, since their city had never been threatened from the air. Many would never come out alive, for that ‘great democratic statesman’ Winston Churchill, in collusion with that other ‘great democratic statesman’ Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had decided that the city of Dresden was to be obliterated by saturation bombing.
What where Churchill’s motives? Historians unanimously agree that Dresden had no military value. What industry it did have, produced only cigarettes and china. But the Yalta Conference was coming up, in which the Soviets and their Western allies would sit down like ghouls to carve up the shattered corpse of Europe. Maybe Churchill wanted a trump card: a devastating ‘thunderclap of Anglo-American annihilation’ with which to impress Stalin. That card, however, was never played at Yalta, because bad weather delayed the originally scheduled raid. Yet Churchill insisted that the raid be carried out, to disrupt and confuse the German civilian population behind the lines.
Dresden’s citizens barely had time to reach their shelters. The first bomb fell at 10:09 p.m. The attack lasted 24 minutes, leaving the inner city a raging sea of fire. Precision saturation bombing had created the desired firestorm. A firestorm is caused when hundreds of smaller fires join in one vast conflagration. Huge masses of air are sucked in to feed the inferno, causing an artificial tornado. Those persons unlucky enough to be caught in the rush of wind are hurled down entire streets into the flames. Those who seek refuge underground often suffocate as oxygen is pulled from the air to feed the blaze, or they perish in a blast of white heat – heat intense enough to melt human flesh.
There was a three-hour pause between the first and second raids. The lull had been calculated to lure civilians from their shelters into the open again. To escape the flames, tens of thousands of civilians had crowded into the Grosser Garten, a magnificent park nearly one and a half miles square.
The second raid came at 1:22 a.m. with no warning. Twice as many bombers returned with a massive load of incendiary bombs. The second wave was designed to spread the raging firestorm into the Grosser Garten. It was a complete ‘success’. Within a few minutes a sheet of flame ripped across the grass, uprooting trees and littering the branches of others with everything from bicycles to human limbs. For days afterward, they remained bizarrely strewn about as grim reminders.
At the start of the second air assault, many were still huddled in tunnels and cellars, waiting for the fires of the first attack to die down. At 1:30 a.m. an ominous rumble reached the ears of the commander of a Labor Service convoy sent into the city on a rescue mission. He described it this way: ‘The detonation shook the cellar walls. The sound of the explosions mingled with a new, stranger sound which seemed to come closer and closer, the sound of a thundering waterfall; it was the sound of the mighty tornado howling in the inner city.’
Shortly after 10:30 on the morning of February 14, the last raid swept over the city. American bombers pounded the rubble that had been Dresden for a steady 38 minutes. But this attack was not nearly as heavy as the first two. However, what distinguished this raid was the cold-blooded ruthlessness with which it was carried out. U.S. Mustangs appeared low over the city, strafing anything that moved, including a column of rescue vehicles rushing to the city to evacuate survivors. One assault was aimed at the banks of the Elbe River, where refugees had huddled during the horrible night.
In the last year of the war, Dresden had become a hospital town. During the previous night’s massacre, heroic nurses had dragged thousands of crippled patients to the Elbe. The low-flying Mustangs machine-gunned those helpless patients, as well as thousands of old men, women and children who had escaped the city. When the last plane left the sky, Dresden was a scorched ruin, its blackened streets filled with corpses.
A Swiss citizen described his visit to Dresden two weeks after the raid: ‘I could see torn-off arms and legs, mutilated torsos and heads which had been wrenched from their bodies and rolled away. In places the corpses were still lying so densely that I had to clear a path through them in order not to tread on arms and legs.’

Kurt Vonnegut was in Dresden when it was bombed in 1945, and wrote a famous anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse Five, in 1969.

Allied apologists for the massacre have often ‘twinned’ Dresden with the English city of Coventry. But the 380 killed in Coventry during the entire war cannot begin to compare with over 1,000 times that number who were slaughtered in 14 hours at Dresden. Moreover, Coventry was a munitions center, a legitimate military target. Dresden, on the other hand, produced only china – and cups and saucers can hardly be considered military hardware.
It is interesting to further compare the respective damage to London and Dresden, especially when we recall all the Hollywood schmaltz about the ‘London blitz’. In one night, 1,600 acres of land were destroyed in the Dresden massacre. London escaped with damage to only 600 acres during the entire war.
If ever there was a war crime, then certainly the Dresden Holocaust ranks as the most sordid one of all time. Yet there are no movies made today condemning this fiendish slaughter; nor did any Allied airman, or Sir Winston, sit in the dock at Nuremberg. In fact, the Dresden airmen were actually awarded medals for their role in this mass murder.


De luchtoorlog
Tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog zijn 161 Duitse steden verwoest, met een onherstelbaar verlies van werelderfgoed. De geallieerde bombardementen kostten het leven van ruim 500.000 mensen, waaronder 75.000 kinderen van jonger dan 14 jaar. Het hoge aantal burgerslachtoffers was nadrukkelijk de bedoeling van de chef van het ‘Bomber Squad’, Arthur Harris, daarin gesteund door Churchill. Ook al was de oorlog door de ontwikkelingen aan het Duitse oostfront praktisch al gewonnen door de geallieerden, men mikte op een miljoen Duitse doden en 25 miljoen daklozen, om zo de vijand te demoraliseren. Na de oorlog nam Churchill afstand van ‘Bomber Harris’, die nochtans in 1992 een door koningin Elisabeth onthuld standbeeld kreeg. [...] Het centrum van Berlijn werd door de Amerikanen op 3 februari 1945 weggevaagd: 25.000 doden. (En dan te bedenken dat nota bene in Berlijn, aan het einde van de oorlog, nog ruim 6000 Joden ondergedoken zaten bij Duitsers…) Dresden, het ‘Florence aan de Elbe’, een van de mooiste steden van Europa, was volgestroomd met vluchtelingen – dit feit was de geallieerden bekend – toen de stad met brandbommen werd verwoest: 35.000 doden. Hierbij werd tegen de burgerbevolking het afschuwelijke napalm ingezet (door de Amerikanen ook gebruikt tijdens de Vietnamoorlog). De meeste burgerslachtoffers in de Tweede Wereldoorlog zijn gevallen door Amerikaanse en Britse bombardementen; toch heeft niemand van de verantwoordelijken voor een tribunaal ter berechting van oorlogsmisdadigers gestaan.