DresdenHolocaust2

Dresden Holocaust - 2

The Truth about the 1945
Bombing of Dresden

By John Black, Workers World, 23 February 1995

It is now the 50th anniversary of the terror bombing and burning of the
non-military cultural center of Dresden, Germany. Somewhere between 35,000
and 135,000 civilians were killed in the Feb. 13-14, 1945 attack. (The very fact is
that more than a half million innocent women, children, elderly, refugees from
the east, and American Prisoners of War housed in Dresden, were murdered by
the English and American Bombing Raids on February 13 and 14, 1945; many of
the killed formed rivers of liquid, whereas no bodies could be found due to the
types of bombs used. It is impossible to prove the amount of victims murdered
by the two days and nights of continuous bombing raids with five hundred to
one thousand bombers utilized in each raid. Churchhill and Bomber Harris
orchestrated all of these raids, and the reporting by the news media that the
City of Dresden had many munition and war manufacturing plants is not true, but
a fabrication by the propaganda ministers of the Allied Nations, in an attempt to
justify the reasoning of the raids. After all, they had to show their love for
Communist Joseph Stalin, their beloved Butcher of the Soviet Union, who the
Allies lovingly called 'Uncle Joe'!!!)

The crimes of Nazi Germany should not prevent the U.S. working-class
movement from re-examining the aims of U.S. and British imperialism's vicious
bombing of Dresden's civilians as World War II drew to a close.

Dresden was a center of cultural and architectural wonders, including the
famous Zwinger Museum and Palace and the cathedral, the Frauenkirche. There
were no military objectives of any consequence in the city--its destruction
could do nothing to weaken the Nazi war machine. U.S. and British air warfare
had left Dresden intact until that point.

By February 1945, refugees fleeing westward before the onrushing Red Army
had doubled Dresden's population. The Soviet military forces were poised to
seize the city from the Nazis. It was at that moment that the military and political
strategists of Britain and the United States decided to launch a terror bombing
attack.

Winston Churchill was Britain's prime minister then. He was also responsible for
war strategy, especially regarding its political aims. Churchill's goal in Europe
was not only to destroy the military machine of Britain's rival--Germany--but to
stop the advance of the Soviet Union. With the latter in mind, he decided to
bomb Dresden.

Churchill, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin
had just met at Yalta to discuss the division of post-war Europe. Churchill's goal
in bombing Dresden was to impress the Soviets with the air power of the
Western allies and to make sure that the Red Army would seize a dead city.

BOMBING CREATED A FIRESTORM

During three waves of attacks, over 1,300 British and U.S. bombers dropped
more than 3,300 tons of bombs on Dresden. Many of the bombs were
incendiaries.

The incendiaries dropped on the old city center started a firestorm--a huge
blaze that sucked the oxygen from the air. Temperatures soared as high as
1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. This had not been seen before in Europe, although
U.S. bombing started a firestorm in Tokyo and the atomic bombs in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki also set off firestorms.

Low-flying planes machine-gunned the fleeing population along the banks of
the Elbe river. A fourth attack on Dresden concentrated its bomb load on the
roads used by the fleeing population.

The cultural center of the city was totally destroyed. Meanwhile, the only
possible military or economic targets--the barracks in the city's north and the
train station where trains carrying reserves for the Eastern Front might
depart--were left untouched.

A look at aerial maps of the city before and after the terror attacks clearly shows
the large white oil tanks owned by British-controlled Shell Oil. These tanks
remained entirely untouched by the bombardment.

Official figures issued by the new city government of Dresden, set up in the
wake of the city's surrender to the Red Army, indicate that 35,000 people--mostly
women, children and older people--suffocated in the firestorm or burned to
death. Other studies give a much higher casualty figure for the attack. The
presence of so many refugees made accurate counts difficult.

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       Bombing of Dresden

           The National Archives

In 1941 Charles Portal of the British Air Staff advocated that entire cities
and towns should be bombed. Portal claimed that this would quickly
bring about the collapse of civilian morale in Germany. Air Marshall Arthur
Harris agreed and when he became head of RAF Bomber Command in
February 1942, he introduced a policy of area bombing (known in
Germany as terror bombing) where entire cities and towns were targeted.

One tactic used by the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air
Force was the creation of firestorms. This was achieved by dropping
incendiary bombs, filled with highly combustible chemicals such as
magnesium, phosphorus or petroleum jelly (napalm), in clusters over a
specific target. After the area caught fire, the air above the bombed area,
become extremely hot and rose rapidly. Cold air then rushed in at ground
level from the outside and people were sucked into the fire.

In 1945, Arthur Harris decided to create a firestorm in the medieval city of
Dresden. He considered it a good target as it had not been attacked
during the war and was virtually undefended by anti-aircraft guns. The
population of the city was now far greater than the normal 650,000 due to
the large numbers of refugees fleeing from the advancing Red Army.

On the 13th February 1945, 773 Avro Lancasters bombed Dresden. During
the next two days the USAAF sent over 527 heavy bombers to follow up
the RAF attack. Dresden was nearly totally destroyed. As a result of the
firestorm it was afterwards impossible to count the number of victims.
Recent research suggest that 35,000 were killed but some German
sources have argued that it was over 100,000.

1) Internal Royal Air Force memo (January, 1945)

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.

(2) After the Second World War Air Marshall Arthur Harris came under
attack for the bombing raid on Dresden. In his autobiography he
explained why he ordered the bombing of the city in February, 1945.

With the German army on the frontiers of Germany we quickly set up GH
and Oboe ground stations close behind the front line and this ensured the
success of attacks on many distant objectives when the weather would
otherwise have prevented us from finding the target. At the same time the
bombers could fly with comparative safety even to targets as distant as
Dresden or Chemnitz, which I had not ventured to attack before, because
the enemy had lost his early warning system and the whole fighter
defence of Germany could therefore generally be out-manoeuvred.

In February of 1945, with the Russian army threatening the heart of
Saxony, I was called upon to attack Dresden; this was considered a target
of the first importance for the offensive on the Eastern front. Dresden had
by this time become the main centre of communications for the defence of
Germany on the southern half of the Eastern front and it was considered
that a heavy air attack would disorganise these communications and also
make Dresden useless as a controlling centre for the defence. It was also
by far the largest city in Germany - the pre-war population was 630,000 -
which had been left intact; it had never before been bombed. As a large
centre of war industry it was also of the highest importance.   "However, it
has been proven that Dresden was an open city. No war materials were
manufactured here. There were no German fighter planes in Dresden, and
the one (single) anti-aircraft gun was un-manned and inoperable. There
were two refugee camps in Dresden and one 'prisoner-of-war' camp
housing American prisoners. And to make sure that no one escaped the
bombing attacks, fighter planes strafed the women and children that were
fleeing from the bombardments."

An attack on the night of February 13th-14th by just over 800 aircraft,
bombing in two sections in order to get the night fighters dispersed and
grounded before the second attack, was almost as overwhelming in its
effect as the Battle of Hamburg, though the area of devastation -1600
acres - was considerably less; there was, it appears, a fire-typhoon, and
the effect on German morale, not only in Dresden but in far distant parts of
the country, was extremely serious. The Americans carried out two light
attacks in daylight on the next two days.

I know that the destruction of so large and splendid a city at this late stage
of the war was considered unnecessary even by a good many people
who admit that our earlier attacks were as fully justified as any other
operation of war. Here I will only say that the attack on Dresden was at the
time considered a military necessity by much more important people than
myself, and that if their judgment was right the same arguments must
apply that I have set out in an earlier chapter in which I said what I think
about the ethics of bombing as a whole.

(3) Alexander McKee, Dresden 1945: the Devil's Tinderbox (1982)

From a firestorm there is small chance of escape. Certain conditions had
to be present, such as the concentration of high buildings and a
concentration of bombers in time and space, which produced so many
huge fires so rapidly and so close together that the air above them
super-heated and drew the flames out explosively. On the enormous scale
of a large city, the roaring rush of heated air upwards developed the
characteristics and power of a tornado, strong enough to pick up people
and such them into the flames.

(4) Margaret Freyer was living in Dresden during the firestorm created on
13th February, 1945.

The firestorm is incredible, there are calls for help and screams from
somewhere but all around is one single inferno.

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.

(5) Otto Sailer-Jackson was a keeper at Dresden Zoo on 13th February,
1945.

The elephants gave spine-chilling screams. The baby cow elephant was
lying in the narrow barrier-moat on her back, her legs up in the sky. She
had suffered severe stomach injuries and could not move. A 90 cwt. cow
elephant had been flung clear across the barrier moat and the fence by
some terrific blast wave, and stood there trembling. I had no choice but to
leave these animals to their fate.

I had known for one hour now that the most difficult task could ever bring
was facing me. "Lehmann, we must get to the carnivores," I called. We did
what we had to do, but it broke my heart.

(6) Lothar Metzger was a child living in Dresden during the war. He wrote
about his experiences of the raid in May, 1999.

About 9:30 pm the alarm was given. We children knew that sound and got
up and dressed quickly, to hurry downstairs into our cellar which we used
as an air raid shelter. My older sister and I carried my baby twin sisters, my
mother carried a little suitcase and the bottles with milk for our babies. On
the radio we heard with great horror the news: "Attention, a great air raid
will corne over our town!" This news I will never forget.

Some minutes later we heard a horrible noise - the bombers. There were
nonstop explosions. Our cellar was filled with fire and smoke and was
damaged, the lights went out and wounded people shouted dreadfully. In
great fear we struggled to leave this cellar. My mother and my older sister
carried the big basket in which the twins were lain. With one hand I
grasped my younger sister and with the other I grasped the coat of my
mother.

We did not recognize our street any more. Fire, only fire wherever we
looked. Our 4th floor did not exist anymore. The broken remains of our
house were burning. On the streets there were burning vehicles and carts
with refugees, people, horses, all of them screaming and shouting in fear
of death. I saw hurt women, children, old people searching a way through
ruins and flames.

We fled into another cellar overcrowded with injured and distraught men
women and children shouting, crying and praying. No light except some
electric torches. And then suddenly the second raid began. This shelter
was hit too, and so we fled through cellar after cellar. Many, so many,
desperate people came in from the streets. lt is not possible to describe!
Explosion after explosion. It was beyond belief, worse than the blackest
nightmare. So many people were horribly burnt and injured. lt became
more and more difficult to breathe. lt was dark and all of us tried to leave
this cellar with inconceivable panic. Dead and dying people were trampled
upon, luggage was left or snatched up out of our hands by rescuers. The
basket with our twins covered with wet cloths was snatched up out of my
mothers hands and we were pushed upstairs by the people behind us.
We saw the burning street, the falling ruins and the terrible firestorm. My
mother covered us with wet blankets and coats she found in a water tub.

(7) Members of the RAF bombing crews became increasingly concerned
about the morality of creating firestorms. Roy Akehurst was a wireless
operator who took part in the raid on Dresden.

It struck me at the time, the thought of the women and children down
there. We seemed to fly for hours over a sheet of fire - a terrific red glow
with thin haze over it. I found myself making comments to the crew: "Oh
God, those poor people." It was completely uncalled for. You can't justify
it.

(8) After the war Robert Saunby, Deputy Air Marshal at Bomber Command,
commented on the bombing of Dresden.

That the bombing of Dresden was a great tragedy none can deny. It is not
so much this or the other means of making war that is immoral or
inhumane. What is immoral is war itself. Once full-scale war has broken
out it can never be humanized or civilized, and if one side attempted to do
so it would be most likely to be defeated. That to me is the lesson of
Dresden.

(9) Winston Churchill, memorandum to Air Marshall Arthur Harris (28th
March 1945)

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, should be
reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land.
We shall not, for instance, be able to get housing material out of Germany
for our own needs because some temporary provision would have to be
made for the Germans themselves. 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.

(10) John Black, The Truth about the 1945 Bombing of Dresden (23rd
February 1995)

Dresden was a center of cultural and architectural wonders, including the
famous Zwinger Museum and Palace and the cathedral, the Frauenkirche.
There were no military objectives of any consequence in the city - its
destruction could do nothing to weaken the Nazi war machine. U.S. and
British air warfare had left Dresden intact until that point.

By February 1945, refugees fleeing westward before the onrushing Red
Army had doubled Dresden's population. The Soviet military forces were
poised to seize the city from the Nazis. It was at that moment that the
military and political strategists of Britain and the United States decided to
launch a terror bombing attack.

Winston Churchill was Britain's prime minister then. He was also
responsible for war strategy, especially regarding its political aims.
Churchill's goal in Europe was not only to destroy the military machine of
Britain's imperialist rival - Germany - but to stop the advance of the Soviet
Union. With the latter in mind, he decided to bomb Dresden...

Official figures issued by the new city government of Dresden, set up in
the wake of the city's surrender to the Red Army, indicate that 35,000
people - mostly women, children and older people - suffocated in the
firestorm or burned to death. Other studies give a much higher casualty
figure for the attack. The presence of so many refugees made accurate
counts difficult.

Apologists for the bombing point to Nazi Germany's own crimes.
Following the war's end, however, the U.S. and Britain occupiers were
quick to allow all but the top Nazi leaders to play a role in western
Germany - to gain these criminals as allies against the USSR. To reach the
same political goal, the U.S. and British rulers could easily sacrifice more
than 35,000 non-combatants with the bombing of Dresden.

(11) Michael Burleigh, review of Frederick Taylor's book, Dresden:
Tuesday 13 February 1945, The Guardian (7th February, 2004)

Attempts to treat the bombing of Dresden as a war crime perpetrated
against the innocent inhabitants of a historical cultural centre of no
industrial or military significance began two days after the attack. This
was the handiwork of the Nazi propaganda supremo Goebbels, whose
"spin doctors" exaggerated the city's population by a factor of four to
support the wild claim that two million refugees from the east had been
caught by the raids, and who doctored the number of corpses publicly
burned (with the help of the SS who had some experience of these tasks)
by adding an extra nought to the actual figure of 6,856....

Frederick Taylor's well-researched and unpretentious book is a robust
defence of the Dresden raids that counters recent attempts to recast the
nation that gave the world Auschwitz as the second world war's principal
victims, attempts that stretch back to the time of Goebbels. They continue
in the form of criminalizing RAF Bomber Command's supremo Bert
"Bomber" Harris for a high-level strategy that was largely designed to
show Stalin that his western allies were actually fighting if not in, then at
least above, Nazi Germany...

Taylor skilfully interweaves various personal accounts of the impact of
the raids on the permanent or temporary population of Dresden, including
its slave-labour force. But the main thrust of his book is to defend a
mission that was merely successful rather than exceptional. It came at the
conclusion of a long war that, while generally brutalizing and dulling
moral sensitivities, also had clear enough justification in the fight between
good and evil.

(12) David Pedlow, letter to The Guardian (14th February, 2004)

My father was one of the "anonymous RAF meteorological officers (who)
finally sealed Dresden's fate". A chronically short-sighted school teacher,
he went into the Meteorological Office at the beginning of a war that he
had hoped would not happen, but that he felt was utterly necessary. He
knew he would be part of a process that sent young men out to risk their
lives, and that inevitably - given the inadequacies of bomb-aiming and
weather-forecasting techniques - would lead to a considerable number of
civilian casualties.

The Dresden briefing was only one of many that he routinely attended,
and even before the crews left the ground he was troubled because of
one notable omission from the routine.

Normally, crews were given a strategic aiming point - anything from a
major factory in the middle of nowhere to a small but significant railway
junction within a built-up area. The smaller the aiming point and the
heavier the concentration of housing around it, the greater would be the
civilian casualties - but given that the strike was at a strategic aiming point
those casualties could be justified.

Only at the Dresden briefing, my father told me, were the crews given no
strategic aiming point. They were simply told that anywhere within the
built-up area of the city would serve.

He felt that Dresden and its civilian population had been the prime target
of the raid and that its destruction and their deaths served no strategic
purpose, even in the widest terms; that this was a significant departure
from accepting civilian deaths as a regrettable but inevitable
consequence of the bomber war; and that he had been complicit in what
was, at best, a very dubious operation.

(13) Paul Oestreicher, The Guardian (3rd March, 2004)

The RAF quickly learnt what the German air force had not: to create a
firestorm that would destroy city centres and kill all who lived there. In
Hamburg, two years before Dresden, at least 40,000 died.

Britain was fighting for its very existence. Nevertheless, George Bell, the
most astute and morally courageous of the English bishops, rose in the
House of Lords to brand the mass killing of civilians a war crime. A lonely
voice, yes, but not the only voice. The debate has gone on ever since.

City by city, Germany was laid waste. The cost to bomber command was
high. Many crews felt they were on suicide missions. Taylor destroys the
myth that Dresden was a special case; it was simply the last major city left
intact. Yes, this "Florence of the north" was a cultural gem, but so were
Würzburg and Nuremberg. Dresden had its war factories, too, and its
railyards. Why spare architectural treasures, why be deterred by refugees
fleeing the Red Army, when the whole point was to kill and create chaos?
With victory just weeks away, an even worse fate befell the small city of
Pforzheim, famous only for its jewellery; a third of its people were killed.

In Coventry, on the 50th anniversary of the attack, the German president
Richard von Weizsäcker spoke of his nation's guilt; but when the Queen
visited Dresden, she failed to lay a wreath at the cathedral ruins. Her
advisers feared tabloid headlines. And, who knows, someone might throw
an egg. It was a sad failure of diplomacy. Yet maybe a few have accepted
that in war, however just the cause, no one emerges with clean hands.
Saying sorry is not a sign of weakness.

As early as the 60s a group of young people went from Coventry to help
to rebuild a Dresden hospital destroyed by British bombs; and when, on
June 22, a golden cross tops out the rebuilt cathedral - the famous
Frauenkirche - it will be a gift of the people of Britain, including,
personally, the Queen. The British Dresden Trust commissioned a
London goldsmith whose father had flown that terrible night over
Dresden.

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