Holocaust
Today we begin the commemoration for the fallen victims of the Dresden Firebombing of Feb 13-15, 1945.
Germany's surrender was just weeks away...Germany was beaten. Churchill wanted revenge, and he wanted to impress Stalin.
English and American planes fire-bombed Dresden, a beautiful Venice-like city with absolutely no strategic military importance. The only manufactured items being made in Dresden at the time was fine china and some cigarettes...
The Allied goal : merely to terrorize civilian Germans.
The famous writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was there...he described a "single column of flame" burning the skin off of thousands of panicked women and children... "mothers clutched their babies as they ran down the streets... their hair and dresses on fire...either dying from the flames or they were crushed by collapsing buildings."
The city's zoo keeper recorded the awful dying screams of the elephants he was forced to abandon...
At least 50,000 died... maybe 500,000 died...( the city's normal population was 600,000, but had recently doubled in size to over 1,200,00, due to refugee influx, mainly from Breslau. This is one reason why many current estimates of the carnage underreports the death toll).
Churchill's sadism knew no bounds. He was never hauled into the docket at the Nurenburg war crimes trial- Ironically, the prosecution showed pictures of piles of dead bodies from the Dresden disaster to the media and the court, and claimed that this was evidence of Nazi atrocities committed agianst the Jews in the concentration camps.
The Dresden firebombing was a more horrific and deadly attack than was the Axis assault on London, Coventry, and the American launched Hiroshima bombing, all combined.
Another irony- the only part of the city that could conceivably be considered a military threat- the railway station- was purposedly ignored, so the allied bombers could concentrate on killing the civilian survivors who had taken refuge on the banks of the Elbe river and in the city's central park.
Participating allied pilots, who were just following orders, were awarded medals for heroic valor.
Germany's surrender was just weeks away...Germany was beaten. Churchill wanted revenge, and he wanted to impress Stalin.
English and American planes fire-bombed Dresden, a beautiful Venice-like city with absolutely no strategic military importance. The only manufactured items being made in Dresden at the time was fine china and some cigarettes...
The Allied goal : merely to terrorize civilian Germans.
The famous writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was there...he described a "single column of flame" burning the skin off of thousands of panicked women and children... "mothers clutched their babies as they ran down the streets... their hair and dresses on fire...either dying from the flames or they were crushed by collapsing buildings."
The city's zoo keeper recorded the awful dying screams of the elephants he was forced to abandon...
At least 50,000 died... maybe 500,000 died...( the city's normal population was 600,000, but had recently doubled in size to over 1,200,00, due to refugee influx, mainly from Breslau. This is one reason why many current estimates of the carnage underreports the death toll).
Churchill's sadism knew no bounds. He was never hauled into the docket at the Nurenburg war crimes trial- Ironically, the prosecution showed pictures of piles of dead bodies from the Dresden disaster to the media and the court, and claimed that this was evidence of Nazi atrocities committed agianst the Jews in the concentration camps.
The Dresden firebombing was a more horrific and deadly attack than was the Axis assault on London, Coventry, and the American launched Hiroshima bombing, all combined.
Another irony- the only part of the city that could conceivably be considered a military threat- the railway station- was purposedly ignored, so the allied bombers could concentrate on killing the civilian survivors who had taken refuge on the banks of the Elbe river and in the city's central park.
Participating allied pilots, who were just following orders, were awarded medals for heroic valor.
Labels: Never forget
posted by Zero at 4:39 PM
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