DresdenHolocaust1

Dresden Holocaust - 1
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The WWII Dresden Holocaust -
'A Single Column Of Flame'

"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, Jr

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 not only was it reduced to flaming
ruins, but an estimated one-third of its inhabitants, possibly
as many as a half a million, had perished in what was the
worst single event massacre of all time.

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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.

In fact, little had been done to provide the ancient city of
artists and craftsmen with anti-aircraft defenses. One
squadron of planes had been stationed in Dresden for
awhile, but the Luftwaffe decided to move the aircraft to
another area where they would be of use. A gentlemen's
agreement seemed to prevail, designating Dresden an
"open city."

February 13/14 1945: Holocaust over Dresden, known as the
Florence of the North. Dresden was a hospital city for
wounded soldiers. Not one military unit,
not one anti-aircraft battery was
deployed in the city. Together with the
600.000 refugees from Breslau, Dresden
was filled with nearly 1.2 million people. Churchill had asked
for "suggestions how to blaze 600.000
refugees". He wasn't interested how to
target military installations 60 miles
outside of Dresden. More than 700.000
phosphorus bombs were dropped on
1.2 million people. One bomb for every
2 people. The temperature in the centre
of the city reached 1600 % centigrade. More than 260.000
bodies and residues of bodies were counted. But those who
perished in the centre of the city can't be traced.
Approximately 500.000 children, women, the elderly,
wounded soldiers and the animals of the zoo were
slaughtered in one night.

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
shivering in the bitter cold.

However, 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 warning spirits. Half-sad smiles greeted
the laughing girls, but spirits were lifted.

No one realized that in less than 24 hours those same
innocent children would die screaming in Churchill's
firestorms. But, of course, no one could know that then. The
Russians, to be sure, were savages, but at least the
Americans and British were "honorable."

So, when those 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? They appear to have been
political, rather than military. 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. 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.

One eyewitness who survived told of seeing "young women
carrying babies running up and down the streets, their
dresses and hair on fire, screaming until they fell down, or
the collapsing buildings fell on top of them."

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 of Allied sadism.

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."

MELTING HUMAN FLESH

Others hiding below ground died. But they died painlessly--
they simply glowed bright orange and blue in the darkness.
As the heat intensified, they either disintegrated into cinders
or melted into a thick liquid--often three or four feet deep in
spots.

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. The city was
spared no horror. A flock of vultures escaped from the zoo
and fattened on the carnage. Rats swarmed over the piles of
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 above) was in Dresden when it was
bombed in 1945, and wrote a famous anti-war
novel, Slaughterhouse Five, in 1969.

In February 1945, Vonnegut was witness to another pretty
good imitation of Mt Vesuvius; the firebombing by Allied
forces of Dresden, the town in eastern Germany, during the
last months of the Second World War. More than 600,000
incen-diary bombs later, the city looked more like the
surface of the moon. Returning home to India-napolis after
the war, Vonnegut began writing short stories for
magazines such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post,
and, seven years later, published his first novel, Player
Piano. ... (The later politicians in England, France, Russia,
the U.S. and even Germany, put the actual death toll at less
than 50,000.   How can this be when many of the victims
melted into streams of liquid, incindiary bombs, burned out
homes and shelters, due to three massive bombing raids,
and then to complete the carnage, fighter planes machine
gunned running women and children, plus the fact that an
American POW camp and two refugee camps were
completely gutted. The politicians even tried to cover up
the carnage by saying that the various factories were
producing munitions, missles and other war material -
another lie of vast proportions.   The German-American
World Historical Society estimates that the Dresden dead
are estimated to be between 250,000 to 700,000. Seem
impossible? Well so does the estimates given by the
Allies. Without bodies, it is impossible to prove anything!)

Finally, in 1969, he tackled the subject of war, recounting his
experiences as a POW in Dresden, forced to dig corpses
from the rubble. The resulting novel was Slaughterhouse
Five. Banned in several US states - and branded a "tool of
the devil" in North Dakota - it carried the snappy alternative
title: "The Children's Crusade: A Duly Dance with Death, by
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, a fourth-generation German-American
now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod (and
smoking too much) who, as an American infantry scout hors
de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire bombing
of Dresden, Germany - the Florence of the Elbe - a long time
ago, and survived to tell the tale: this is a novel somewhat in
the telegraphic schizopfrenic manner of tales of the planet
Tralfamodre, where the flying saucers come from, Peace." ....

In December 1944, Vonnegut was captured by the German
army and became a prisoner of war. In Slaughterhouse Five,
he describes how he narrowly escaped death a few months
later in the firebombing of Dresden. "Yes, by your people
[the English], may I say," he insists. "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. I'm fond of your
people, on occasion, but I was just thinking about 'Bomber
Harris, who believed in attacks on civilian populations to
make them give up. (Harris was so happy with the slaugher
that he literally jumped with joy like a mentally disturbed
person. A hell of a lot of Royal Air Force guys were ashamed
of what Harris had made them do. And that's really
sportsmanship and, of course, the Brits are famous for being
good sports," he concedes.

Kurt Vonnegut died in New York City a couple of years ago
from natural causes...

The Independent, London, 20 December 2001, p. 19

***************

The death toll was staggering. The full extent of the Dresden
Holocaust can be more readily grasped if one considers that
well over 250,000 -- possibly as many as a half a million or
more persons died within a 14-hour period, whereas
estimates of those who died at Hiroshima range from 90,000
to 140,000.*

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.

In one ironic note, Dresden's only conceivable military
target -- its railroad yards -- was ignored by Allied bombers.
They were too busy concentrating on helpless old men,
women and children.

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.
But, of course, they could not have been tried, because
there were "only following orders."

This is not to say that the mountains of corpses left in
Dresden were ignored by the Nuremberg Tribunal. In one
final irony, the prosecution presented photographs of the
Dresden dead as "evidence" of alleged National Socialist
atrocities against Jewish concentration-camp inmates!

Churchill, the monster who ordered the Dresden slaughter,
was knighted, and the rest is history. The cold-blooded
sadism of the massacre, however, is brushed aside by his
biographers, who still cannot bring themselves to tell how
the desire of one madman to "impress" another one let to
the mass murder of up to a half million men, women and
children.

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Dresden: An Allied Air Raid with Axis Tactics
By Rachel Jordan

During the Second World War, the German home front
suffered many air raids. Most of these raids were intended
to destroy war-production factories, supply routes or
military installations. On the 13 and 14 of February 1945,
American and British forces attacked a different target,
Dresden. Located on the Elbe, Dresden was a cultural center
of Germany. It held Zwinger Palace, Dresden State Opera
House, and historic churches, such as Hofkirche and
Kreuzkirche. In February 1945, it also housed refugees, who
sought sanctuary in one of the few relatively safe cities. On
February 13 and 14, 1945, this beautiful, historic refugee-
haven became the site of “the most controversial episode in
the strategic air offensive against Germany” (Messenger
311). Why was this city with little military importance
targeted? Other than location, what made the attack so
controversial? And what happened afterwards?

Wanting to bring an end to the war, both the Americans and
British intensified bombing in 1944 and 1945. But because
German morale and synthetic oil production were
maintained in the face of numerous strategic bombings of oil
targets, the Allies changed to “wreaking havoc among the
civilian population” (Hart 610). However, havoc was not the
only goal. The Americans and British made separate air
attacks on the city to prove to the fast-approaching Russians
that America and England were aiding the Soviet push on
the eastern front with the best available aircraft (Messenger
311). Even with these two common aims, the orders given
directly to British and American aircrews did vary and had
little to do with destroying German morale or impressing the
Soviets.British flight crews were informed they would bomb
“Gestapo Headquarters and poison-gas plants” (Irving 382).
Meanwhile, the Americans “aimed at the railroad
marshalling yards” (Beck 178).

Attacking Dresden could be justified, but the intensity of the
attack created controversy. The Allies brought out many of
their best planes and most destructive bombs for the raid.
Many of the bombs were incendiaries, which are, as the
Bomber Command Internet site reports, fire bombs
constructed with magnesium that are dropped in clusters
and spread over the drop site. As Messenger recounts, 13
February brought 796 Lancaster bombers and 9 Mosquitoes
from the Royal Air Force (RAF). In 3 hours, they dropped
1,478 tons of explosive bombs and 1,182 tons of incendiaries
(Messenger 311). Likewise, the American Flying Fortresses
and Liberators, as Beck recounts, dropped 1,800 explosive
bombs and 136,800 fire sticks.American planes completed
the raid when they returned and unleashed 3,700 more
explosive bombs on Dresden (Beck 178). As a cultural
center, not a military stronghold, Dresden held few
obstacles that could interfere with the pilots’ missions. The
only decoys were “neat rectangles tidily… scattered at
regular intervals across the ground” (Irving 390). British
forces quickly identified the decoys and refrained from
wasting their bombs (Irving 390).

Not only did the incendiary explosives increase the severity
of the bombing, but also the timing stimulated controversy.
The Allies were aware of the mass of refugees, yet they still
“machine-gunned the fleeing population” as they ran to
escape the flames and explosions (Black). The citizens were
in an equally hopeless situation. When the first bombs
started falling, the citizens were merely warned to “keep
sand and water handy” (Irving 387). Incendiaries caused the
temperature to climb to degrees previously unheard of in
Germany or Europe, 1800 degrees Fahrenheit (Black). The
fires depleted oxygen and suffocated those who made it to
bomb shelters. Although many different estimates exist, the
best reports and research, published more than fifty years
after the war, conclude at least 35,000 people died, mostly
women, children and the elderly.Meanwhile, the few
surrounding military installations remained unharmed.

Along with destroying morale, the Allies demolished “80 per
cent of the city”—a city that is still being rebuilt (“Dresden”).
The city still carries scars that have never completely
healed. The Zwinger Palace was partially rebuilt with the
original golden color, yet much of the black soot caused by
the bombs remains. However, Zwinger was not the only
building that could not be quickly restored to its former
splendor. Forty years passed before the Opera House could
reopen (Ardagh 322). Although an “estimated 300 million
Marks” was spent on the Opera House, money could not be
spared to repair all of the damaged areas.(Ardagh 384).

However, in some regards the American and British
campaigns were successful.The war with Germany ended a
few months later, 8 May 1945, and the British and Americans
left very little for their soon-to-be foes, the Russians, to hold.
The Russians resented being left with a devastated city and
were quick to use the attack as propaganda against their
former allies. Once Dresden came under Soviet control as
part of East Germany, as Davidson mentions, the Soviets
used the attack as evidence that democratic countries,
especially the United States, were vicious war criminals
(119). American visitors were welcomed with comments that
Dresden was their work that had become Russia’s “job to
clean …up” (Davidson 129).

The attack on Dresden could not match the cruelties of the
Nazi regime.Perhaps, the raid, as Anglican bishop Simon
Barrington-Ward remarks, was a result of Hitler’s evil deeds
spreading and causing everyone to respond with more evil
(“Church”). Though some temporary goals may have been
met, the results were an unconfirmable 35,000 dead, a
cultural treasure chest annihilated, and, as Messenger notes,
Allied leaders like Winston Churchill wondering if the right
decision had been made (312).

Works Cited

Ardagh, John.Germany and the Germans. New York: Harper,
1987.

Beck, Earl R.Under the Bombs: The German Home Front,
1942-1945. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1986.

Black, John. “The Truth about the 1945 Bombing of
Dresden.” Workers World. Feb. 1995.

“Bomber Command:Death by Moonlight.” Online. Internet.
06 October 2000. Available: http://www.valorandhorror.
com/BC/Tactics/Bombs.htm.

“Church Leaders Mark Dresden Bombing.” Christian
Century. 112 (1995): 234.

Davidson, Eugene.The Death and Life of Germany. New
York: Knopf, 1959.

“Dresden.” Online. Internet. 28 September 2000. Available:
http://www.milton-ave.u-net.com/Dresden%20(DE).htm

Hart, B. H. Liddell. History of the Second World War. New
York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971.

Irving, David.“Dresden.”The War in the Air: The Royal Air
Force in World War II.

Ed. Gavin Lyall. New York: William Morrow, 1968. 382-391.

Messenger, Charles.“Dresden, raid on.” The Oxford
Companion to World War II.

Ed. I. C. B. Dear. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. 311-312.

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