The WWII Dresden Holocaust -
'A Single Column Of Flame'
2-6-2002
"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
tranquillity 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 o
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 incen-diary bombs later, the
city looked more like the surface of the moon.
Returning home to India-napolis 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 schizopfrenic 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 let to the mass murder of up
to a half million men, women and children.
End of article.
Source: http://rense.com .
The brutal war criminals Roosevelt and Churchill
ordered the destruction of Dresden in 1945. Their
goal was to kill thousands of people.
For more information, visit the ANC website at:
http://ancpage.com .
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