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by rense.com
Buildings exposed
to 1,600 degrees C, or 2,880 F in the midst of a fire tornado did not collapse.
(World Trade Center Fire only reached 800 degrees C, or 1,400 degrees F)
2-6-2
"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.
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 tranquility 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 degrees 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 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 incendiary bombs later,
the city looked more like the surface of the moon. Returning home to
Indianapolis 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.
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 schizophrenic
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. 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.
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
-- 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 led to the mass murder of up to a half
million men, women and children.
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