- Hamburg firebombing
-
- . . . There is not a doubt in my mind that the Lancaster,
the B17 and the B24 were built for the purpose of inflicting massive civilian
casualties on the German populace. It was, in my opinion, one the greatest
war crimes ever perpetrated. Colonel Robin Olds, surely one of the finest
officers and fighter pilots ever to serve in the USAF, stated more than
once that the so-called strategic bombing program was ineffective, wasteful
and pointless.
-
- The eighth air force lost 80,000 men killed in the skies
of Europe.
- And, the futility of the so-called strategic bombing
program was illustrated very clearly by the fact that Germany reached its
highest point of war material production in the last months of the war.
Colonel Olds was of the opinion, widely shared I might add, that fighter
bombers carrying a single bomb flying low and fast would have been far
more effective against German military and strategic targets.
-
- He said that a single Mustang could have dropped a five
hundred pound bomb through the window of any factory in Germany. It is
very difficult to do that when you are flying in formation at 25,000 feet.
He also emphasized that this would have greatly minimized
- civilian casualties. His career suffered because of
his outspoken criticism. I suspect that he knew the real reason for the
so-called "strategic bombing." It is was GENOCIDE.
-
- Why does it always take 50+ years for truth to surface,
and WHY does it usually come from outside this country?
-
- Churchill's Most Barbaric War Crime
-
- This is an awesome and humbling document. I shall circulate
it to non rw people, and will continue to circulate it for years. Every
time we find someone writing about the non-existent gas chambers, we should
send them this.
-
- I should make one or two alterations- Inserting @ 'Lindeman'
that he was Jewish, and the architect of the terror bombing. And Re; the
Luftwaffe V RAF. The Luftwaffe built only light, maneuverable, low altitude
bombers, designed for ground support and unsuitable for genocidal terror-bombing.
Whereas, the British and the Americans built huge bombers, which were designed
and were being built, well before the war for the express purpose of blanket
terror-bombing of civilians - they could have had no other purpose. -JB
-
- Present time - it should be pointed out to all, that
this atrocity and even more is what the Jewish state have in store for
Iranian civilians soon.
-
- By Randulf Johan Hansen
-
-
- Who Started the Blitz?
-
-
-
- Between 1940 and 1945, sixty-one German cities with a
total population of 25 millions were destroyed or devastated in a bombing
campaign initiated by the British government. Destruction on this scale
had no other purpose than the indiscriminate mass murder of as many German
people as possible quite regardless of their civilian status. It led to
retaliatory bombing resulting in 60,000 British dead and 86,000 injured.
The British and the USA also bombed France, resulting in 60,000 civilian
dead.
-
-
- Hidden from the public
-
- 'It is one of the greatest triumphs of modern emotional
engineering that, in spite of the plain facts of the case which could never
be disguised or even materially distorted, the British public, throughout
the Blitz Period (1940-1941), remained convinced that the entire responsibility
for their sufferings rested on the German leaders.' Advance to Barbarism,
F.J.P. Veale.
-
-
- 'It may be Inconvenient History but England rather than
Germany initiated the murderous slaughter of bombing civilians thus bringing
about retaliation. Chamberlain conceded that it was "absolutely contrary
to International law." It began in 1940 and Churchill believed it
held the secret of victory. He was convinced that raids of sufficient intensity
could destroy Germany's morale, and so his War Cabinet planned a campaign
that abandoned the accepted practice of attacking the enemy's armed forces
and, instead made civilians the primary target. Night after night, RAF
bombers in ever increasing numbers struck throughout Germany, usually at
working class housing, because it was more densely packed.' The Peoples'
War, Angus Calder. London, Jonathan Cape, 1969.*
-
-
- Hitler forced to retaliate
-
- 'Hitler only undertook the bombing of British civilian
targets reluctantly three months after the RAF had commenced bombing German
civilian targets. Hitler would have been willing at any time to stop the
slaughter. Hitler was genuinely anxious to reach with Britain an agreement
confining the action of aircraft to battle zones... Retaliation was certain
if we carried the war into Germany... there was a reasonable possibility
that our capital and industrial centres would not have been attacked if
we had continued to refrain from attacking those of Germany... We began
to bomb objectives on the German mainland before the Germans began to bomb
objectives on the British mainland... Because we were doubtful about the
psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was
we who started the strategic bombing offensive, we have shrunk from giving
our great decision of May 11th, 1940, the publicity it deserves.' J.M.
Spaight, CB, CBE, Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry, Bombing Vindicated.
-
-
- 'The attack on the Ruhr was therefore an informal invitation
to the Luftwaffe to bomb London. The primary purpose of these raids was
to goad the Germans into undertaking reprisal raids of a similar character
on Britain. Such raids would arouse intense indignation in Britain against
Germany and so create a war psychosis without which it would be impossible
to carry on a modern war.' The Royal Air Force, 1939-1945, The Fight at
Odds, p. 122. Dennis Richards, Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
-
-
-
- High Street, Düren, June 1946. Shown is
Victor Gollancz
-
-
- The most uncivilised form of warfare
-
- The eminent British war historian and strategist Captain
Sir Basil Liddell Hart declared that by this strategy victory had been
achieved "through practising the most uncivilised means of warfare
that the world had known since the Mongol invasions" (The Evolution
of Warfare. 1946, p. 75).It was "absolutely contrary to international
law" (Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain).
-
- 'The inhabitants of Coventry, for example, continued
to imagine that their sufferings were due to the innate villainy of Adolf
Hitler without a suspicion that a decision, splendid or otherwise, of the
British War Cabinet, was the decisive factor in the case.' F.J.P. Veale,
Advance to Barbarism, p. 169.
-
-
-
- Düren, 1946
-
- Slaying in the name of the Lord
-
- 'I am in full agreement [with terror bombing]. I am all
for the bombing of working class areas in German cities. I am a Cromwellian
I believe in "slaying in the name of the Lord!"' Sir Archibald
Sinclair, Secretary for Air.
-
-
-
- Hamburg, 1946
-
-
- Industrial workers, wives and children targetted
-
- 'They [the British Air Chiefs] argued that the desired
result, of reducing German industrial production, would be more readily
achieved if the homes of the workers in the factories were destroyed; if
the workers were kept busy arranging for the burial of their wives and
children, output might reasonably be expected to fall... It was concentrated
on working class houses because, as Professor Lindemann maintained, a higher
percentage of bloodshed per ton of explosives dropped could be expected
from bombing houses built close together, rather than by bombing higher
class houses surrounded by gardens.' Advance to Barbarism, F.J.P. Veale.
-
-
-
-
- Hamburg, 1946
-
- So cowardly it had to be hidden
-
- 'One of the most unhealthy features of the bombing offensive
was that the War Cabinet and in particular the Secretary for Air,
Archibald Sinclair (now Lord Thurso), felt it necessary to repudiate publicly
the orders which they themselves had given to Bomber Command.' R.H.S. Crossman,
MP, Labour Minister of Housing. Sunday Telegraph, 1 October 1961.
-
-
- By weight, more bombs were dropped on the city of Berlin
than were released on the whole of Great Britain during the entire war.
- All German towns and cities above 50,000 population were
from 50% to 80% destroyed. Hamburg was totally destroyed and 70,000 civilians
died in the most appalling circumstances whilst Cologne was likewise turned
into a moon-scape. As Hamburg burned the winds feeding the three mile high
flames reached twice hurricane speed to exceed 150 miles per hour. Trees
three feet in diameter on the outskirts of the city were sucked from the
ground by the supernatural forces of these winds and hurled miles into
the city-inferno, as were vehicles, men, women and children.
-
- 'What we want to do in addition to the horrors of fire
is to bring the masonry crashing down on the Boche, to kill Boche and to
terrify Boche' 'Bomber' Butch Harris, quoted in the Sunday Times, 10 January
1993.
-
-
-
- Hamburg, 1946
-
-
- Dresden: Children machine-gunned
-
- The strafing of columns of refugees by both American
and British fighter planes was par for the course: "it is said that
these [zoo] animals and terrified groups of refugees were machine-gunned
as they tried to escape across the Grosser Garten by low-flying planes
and that many bodies riddled by bullets were found later in this park"
(Der Tod von Dresden, Axel Rodenberger, 25 February 1951). In Dresden,
"even the huddled remnants of a children's' choir were machine-gunned
in a street bordering a park" (David Irving, The Destruction of Dresden).
"I think we shall live to rue the day we did this, and that it [the
bombing of Dresden] will stand for all time as a blot on our escutcheon"
(Richard Stokes, M.P.).
-
- '... the long suppressed story of the worst massacre
in the history of the world. The devastation of Dresden in February, 1945,
was one of those crimes against humanity whose authors would have been
arraigned at Nuremberg if that court had not been perverted. Rt. Hon. Richard.
H.S. Crossman, MP, Labour Government Minister.
-
-
-
-
- Hamburg, 1946
-
-
- Firestorm of Hamburg
-
- 'Its horror is revealed in the howling and raging of
the firestorms, the hellish noise of exploding bombs and the death cries
of martyred human beings as well as the big silence after the raids. Speech
is impotent to portray the measure of the horror, which shook the people
for ten days and nights and the traces of which were written indelibly
on the face of the city and its inhabitants. No flight of imagination will
ever succeed in measuring and describing the gruesome scenes of horror
in the many buried air shelters. Posterity can only bow its head in honour
of the fate of these innocents, sacrificed by the murderous lust of a sadistic
enemy.' The Police President of Hamburg.
-
-
- 'Three-hundred times as many people died in Hamburg during
the ten-day blitz as died in Coventry during the entire course of the war...
Not even Hiroshima and Nagasaki, suffering the smashing blows of nuclear
explosions, could match the utter hell of Hamburg.' Martin Caidin, The
Night Hamburg Died, Ballantyne Books, NY, 1960.
-
-
-
-
- Hamburg, 1946
-
- The children
-
- 'Of the children these dreadful nights, what can be said?
Their fright became horror and then panic when their tiny minds became
capable of grasping the fact that their parents could no longer help them
in their distress. They lost their reason and an overwhelming terror took
over. Their world had become the shrieking centre of an erupting volcano
from which there could be no physical escape. Nothing that hell offered
could be feared more. 'By the hand of man they became creatures, human
in form but not in mind. Strangled noises hissed from them as they staggered
pitifully through the streets in which tar and asphalt ran as streams.
Some of these tiny creatures ran several hundred feet. Others managed only
twenty, maybe ten feet. Their shoes caught fire and then their feet. The
lower parts of their legs became flickering sticks of flame. Here were
Joans of Arcs... thousands of them. All who had perished unjustly on the
fires of the Middle Ages were as nothing when compared with what was happening
that night. 'The sounds of many were unintelligible and undoubtedly many
more called for their parents from whom they were parted by death or by
accident. They grasped their tortured limbs, their tiny burning legs until
they were no longer able to stand or run. And then they would crash to
the ground where they would writhe in the bubbling tar until death released
them from their physical misery.' Martin Caidin.
-
-
-
- Hamburg, 1946
-
-
- Phosphorous, used contrary to international law
-
- 'Men, women and children too, ran hysterically, falling
and stumbling, getting up, tripping and falling again, rolling over and
over. Most of them managed to regain their feet and made it to the water.
But many of them never made it and were left behind, their feet drumming
in blinding pain on the overheated pavements amidst the rubble, until there
came one last convulsing shudder from the smoking "thing" on
the ground, and then no further movement.' Martin Caidin, The Night Hamburg
Died.
-
- 'Phosphorous burns were not infrequent.' U.S. Strategic
Bombing Survey.
-
- 'Phosphorous was used "because of its demonstrated
ability to depress the morale of the Germans."' Official British source.
-
- 'Even the senseless and highly culture-destroying terror
acts, against for example, Lubeck and Dresden, carried out by the Allied
pilots, should have been investigated and brought before a proper court
of justice.' Major General H. Bratt, Royal Swedish Army.*
-
- 'A nation which spreads over another a sheet of inevitably
deadly gases or eradicates entire cities from the earth by the explosion
of atomic bombs, does not have the right to judge anyone for war crimes;
it has already committed the greatest atrocity equal to no other atrocity;
it has killed amidst unspeakable torments hundreds of thousands
of innocent people.' Hon. Lydio Machado Bandeira de Mello, Professor of
Criminal Law; author of more than 40 works on law/philosophy.*
-
- 'As for crimes against humanity, those governments which
ordered the destruction of German cities, thereby destroying irreplaceable
cultural values and making burning torches out of women and children, should
also have stood before the bar of justice.' Hon. Jaan Lattik. Estonian
statesman, diplomat and historian.*
-
-
-
- Hamburg, 1946
-
-
- From Michael Walsh, Witness to History, Historical Review
Press 1996. Edited, with additions marked * by the National Journal. Photographs
from Victor Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, Victor Gollancz Ltd, London 1947.
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