- 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 half a million--had perished in what was the worst
massacre of all time. Compare this with the 50 to 100 times less than that
who died in the recent attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
The following account, taken from the February 1985 issue of the NS Bulletin,
tells us what REAL terrorism is like.
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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 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.
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- 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 as an "open city."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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 waning spirits. Half-sad
smiles greeted the laughing girls, but spirits were lifted.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- What were 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- WOMEN AND CHILDREN TARGETED
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- 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."
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- 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, thousands of civilians had crowded
into the Grosser Garten, a magnificent park nearly one and a half miles
square.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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:
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- "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."
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- MELTING HUMAN FLESH
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- 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 ciders or melted into a thick liquid--often
three or four feet deep in spots.
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- 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.
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- 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 bands of the Elbe River, where refugees had huddled during the horrible
night.
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- 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 other old men, women and
children who had escaped the city.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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 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.
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- Allied apologists for the massacre have often "twinned"
Dresden with the English city of Coventry. But the 380 souls 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!
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- 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.
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- In one ironic note, Dresden's only conceivable military
target--its railroad years--was ignored by Allied bombers. They were too
busy concentrating on helpless old men, women and children.
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- If there ever 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 slaugher; 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 they were "only following
orders."
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- 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!
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- Churchill, the monster who ordered the Dresden slaughter,
was knighted and the rest of his career 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 to a half million men, women
and children.
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- To this day, those responsible for this unspeakable act
of terrorism and barbarism have never had the decency to apologize to the
victims or their families. They have been too busy preparing other acts
of terrorism and barbarism. They have no moral credibility in judging others.
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- Never forget.
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