- (Excerpts from Esquire Magazine, November 1963)
-
- Were all the crimes against humanity committed during
World War II the work of Adolf Hitler's underlings? That was certainly
the impression created by the fact that only Germans were brought to trial
at Nuremberg. Alas! It is a false impression. We all now know that in
the terrible struggle waged between the Red Army and the German Wehrmacht,
the Russians displayed their fair share of insensate inhumanity. What
is less widely recognized - because the truth, until only recently, has
been deliberately suppressed - is that the Western democracies were responsible
for the most senseless single act of mass murder committed in the whole
course of World War II.
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- 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 into the instrument of
Allied justice. Whether measured in terms of material destruction or by
loss of human life, this "conventional" air raid was far more
devastating than either of the two atomic raids against Japan that were
to follow it a few months later. Out of 28,410 houses in the inner city
of Dresden, 24,866 were destroyed, and the area of total destruction extended
over 11 square miles.
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- As for the death roll, the population, as we shall see,
had been well night doubled by a last minute influx of refugees fleeing
before the Red Army; and even the German authorities - usually so pedantic
in their estimates - gave up trying to work out the precise total after
some 35,000 bodies had been recognized, labeled and buried. We do know,
however, that the 1,250,000 people in the city on the night of the raid
had been reduced to 368,519 by the time it was over; and it seems certain
that the death toll must have greatly exceeded 71,879 at Hiroshima. Indeed,
the German authorities were probably correct who, a few days after the
attack, put the total somewhere between 120,000 and 150,000.
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- The prelude to the bombing of Dresden was sounded by
the Russian communiqué of January 12, 1945, which announced that
the Red Army had resumed its offensive all along the front, and was advancing
into Prussia and Silesia. This news could hardly have been more embarrassing,
either to General Dwight D. Eisenhower whose armies were still recovering
from the humiliating effects of General von Rundstedt's Christmas offensive
in the Ardennes, or to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister
Churchill who were now preparing for the Yalta Conference due to start
on February 4. Since the postwar settlement was bound to be discussed
with Josef Stalin in terms not of principle but of pure politics, Sir Winston
felt that the impression created by the Red Army's occupation of Eastern
Europe and advance deep into Germany must somehow be countered. But how?
The obvious answer was by a demonstration right up against the Red Army
of Western air power. What was required, he decided, was a thunderclap
of Anglo-American aerial annihilation so frightful in the destruction it
wreaked that even Stalin would be impressed.
-
- January 25 was the day when the decision was taken that
resulted in the blotting out of Dresden. Until then, the capital of Saxony
had been considered to famous a cultural monument and so futile a military
target that even the Commander in Chief of Bomber Command, Air Marshal
Sir Arthur Harris, had given it hardly a thought. All its flak batteries
had been removed for use on the Eastern front; and the Dresden authorities
had taken none of the precautions either in the strengthening of air raid
shelters or in the provision of concrete bunkers that had so startlingly
reduced casualties in other German cities subjected to Allied attack. Instead,
they had encouraged rumors that it would be spared either because Churchill
had a niece living there or else because it was reserved by the Allies
as their main occupation quarters. These rumors were strengthened by the
knowledge that no less than some 25,000 Allied prisoners were quartered
in and around the city, and that its population had doubled to well over
a million in recent weeks by streams of refugees from the East.
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- We must now turn back and see what the airmen had been
planning. Sir Arthur Harris was quick to seize the opportunity presented
by the Prime Minister's insistence that Bomber Command must make its presence
felt in Eastern Germany. Since 1941, by a slow process of trial and error
which had cost him many thousands of air crews, he had perfected his new
technique of "saturation precision bombardment." First, daylight
operations over Germany had been discarded as too costly; then, with raiding
confined to nighttime, target bombing, after a long period of quite imaginary
success, had been abandoned as too wildly inaccurate. The decision was
taken to set each city center on fire and destroy the residential areas,
sector by sector.
-
- In this new kind of incendiary attack, highly trained
special crews were sent ahead to delineate a clearly defined target area
with marker flares, nicknamed by the Germans "Christmas trees."
When this had been done, all that remained for the rest of the bomber
forces was to lay its bomb carpet so thickly that the defense, the A.R.P.,
the police, and the fire services would all be overwhelmed.
-
- This fire-raising technique was first used with complete
success in the great raid on Hamburg. Thousands of individual fires conglomerated
into a single blaze, creating the famous "firestorm."
-
- The Hamburg firestorm probably killed some 40,000 people:
Three quarters by carbon monoxide poisoning as a result of the oxygen
being sucked out of the air; the rest by asphyxiation.
-
- As soon as permission had been given to destroy Dresden,
Air Marshal Harris decided to achieve this by a deliberately created firestorm,
and to increase the effect he persuaded the Americans to split the available
bombers into three groups. The task of the first wave was to create the
firestorm. Three hours later, a second and much heavier night force of
British bombers was timed to arrive when the German fighter and flak defenses
would be off guard, and the rescue squads on their way. Its task was to
spread the firestorm. Finally, the next morning, a daylight attack by
the Eighth Air Force was to concentrate on the outlying areas, the new
city.
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- Two-pronged attacks had been successfully carried out
during 1944 against a number of German towns. The three-pronged attack
employed at Dresden was unique and uniquely successful. The first wave,
consisting of some two hundred fifty night bombers, arrived precisely on
time and duly created a firestorm.
-
- The second force - more than twice as strong and carrying
an enormous load of incendiaries - also reached the target punctually and
undisturbed by flak or night fighters, spent thirty-four minutes carefully
spreading the fires outside the first target area. Finally, to complete
the devastation, some two hundred eleven Flying Fortresses began the third
attack at 11:30 a.m. on the following morning. Without exaggeration, the
commanders could claim that the Dresden raid had "gone according to
plan." Everything which happened in the stricken city had been foreseen
and planned with meticulous care.
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- Dresden is one of those German cities which normally
devotes Shrove Tuesday to Carnival activities. But on February 13, 1945,
with the Red Army 60 miles away, the mood was somber. The refugees, who
were crowded into every house, each had his horror story about Russian
atrocities. In many parts of the city, and particularly around the railway
station, thousands of latecomers who could find no corner in which to sleep
were camping in the bitter cold of the open streets. The only signs of
Carnival spirit, when the sirens sounded at 9:55 p.m. were the full house
at the circus and a few gangs of little girls wandering about in fancy
dress. Though no one took the danger of a raid very seriously, orders
must be obeyed and the population just had time to get down to its shelters
before the first bombs fell at nine minutes past the hour.
-
- Twenty-four minutes later, the last British bomber was
on its way back to England, and the inner city of Dresden was ablaze.
Since there were no steel structures in any of its apartment houses, the
floors quickly capsized, and half an hour after the raid was over the firestorm
transformed thousands of individual blazes into a sea of flames, ripping
off the roofs, tossing trees, cars and lorries into the air, and simultaneously
sucking the oxygen out of the air raid shelters.
-
- Most of those who remained below ground were to die painlessly,
their bodies first brilliantly tinted bright orange and blue, and then,
as the heat grew intense, either totally incinerated or melted into a thick
liquid sometimes three or four feet deep. But there were others who, when
the bombing stopped, rushed upstairs. Some of them stopped to collect
their belongings before escaping, and they were caught by the second raid.
But some 10,000 fled to the great open space of the Grosse Garten, the
magnificent royal park of Dresden, nearly one and a half square miles in
all.
-
- Here they were caught by the second raid, which started
without an air-raid warning, at 1:22 a.m. Far heavier than the first -
there were twice as many bombers with a far heavier load of incendiaries
- its target markers had been deliberately placed in order to spread the
fires into the black rectangle which was all the airmen could see of the
Grosse Garten. Within minutes, the firestorm was raging across the grass,
ripping up some trees and littering the branches of others with clothes,
bicycles and dismembered limbs that remained hanging for days afterwards.
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- The most terrible scenes in the inner city took place
in the magnificent old market square, the Altmarkt. Soon after the first
raid finished, this great square was jam-packed with panting survivors.
When the second raid struck, they could scarcely move until someone remembered
the huge concrete emergency water tank that had been constructed to one
side. This tank was a hundred by fifty yards by six feet deep. There
was a sudden stampede to escape the heat of the firestorm by plunging into
it. Those who did so forgot that its sloping sides were slippery, with
no handholds. The nonswimmers sank to the bottom, dragging the swimmers
with them. When the rescuers reached the Altmarkt five days later, they
found the tank filled with bloated corpses, while the rest of the square
was littered with recumbent or seated figures so shrunk by the incineration
that 30 of them could be taken away in a single bathtub.
-
- But perhaps the most memorable horror of this second
raid occurred in the hospitals. In the last year of the war, Dresden had
become a hospital city, with many of its schools converted into temporary
wards. Of its 19 hospitals, 16 were badly damaged and three, including
the main maternity clinic, totally destroyed. Thousands of crippled survivors
were dragged by their nurses to the banks of the River Elbe, where they
were laid in rows on the grass to wait for the daylight. But when it came,
there was another horror. Punctually at 11:30 a.m., the third wave of
bombers, the two hundred eleven American Flying Fortresses, began their
attack. Once again, the area of destruction was extended across the city.
But what the survivors all remember were the scores of Mustang Fighters
diving low over the bodies huddled on the banks of the Elbe, as well as
on the larger lawns of the Grosse Garten, in order to shoot them up. Other
Mustangs chose as their targets the serried crowds that blocked every road
out of Dresden. No one knows how many women and children were actually
killed by those dive-bombing attacks. But in the legend of Dresden destruction,
they have become the symbol of Yankee sadism and brutality, and the inquirer
is never permitted to forget that many choirboys of one of Dresden's most
famous churches were among the victims.
-
- For five days and nights, the city burned, and no attempt
was made to enter it. Then at last the authorities began to grapple with
the crisis and to estimate the damage. Of Dresden's five theatres, all
had gone. Of her 54 churches, nine were totally destroyed and 38 seriously
damaged. Of her 139 schools, 69 ceased to exist and 50 were badly hit.
-
- But some things had survived destruction. The few factories
Dresden possessed were outside the city center, and soon were at work again.
So too was the railway system. Within three days, indeed, military trains
were running once again right through the city, and the marshaling yards
- untouched by a bomb - were in full operation. It was as though an ironical
fate had decided that the first firestorm deliberately created by mortal
men should destroy everything worth preserving and leave untouched anything
of military value.
-
- In their salvage work, the Nazis relied on some 25,000
Allied prisoners of war, concentrated in and around the city. Dresden,
as was known very well in London and Washington, was not only a hospital
city but a prisoner-of-war city - still another reason why the authorities
assumed it would not be attacked. Faced with the appalling scenes of suffering,
the prisoners seemed to have worked with a will, even after some of their
fellow prisoners had been shot under martial law for looting.
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- What Dresdeners chiefly remember, of these first days
after the raid, is the disposal of the bodies. Throughout the war, German
local authorities had been extremely careful to show great respect for
death, enabling relatives wherever possible to identify and to bury their
own dead. At first, this procedure was followed in Dresden. But weeks
after the raid there were still thousands of unopened cellars under the
smoldering ruins, and the air was thick with the fog and sweet stench of
rotting flesh. An S.S. commander made the decision that the daily procession
of horse-drawn biers from the city to the cemeteries outside must be stopped.
If plague was to be prevented, the rest of the corpses must be disposed
of more speedily. Hurriedly, a monstrous funeral pyre was constructed
in the Altmarkt. Steel shutters from one of Dresden's biggest department
stores were laid across broken slabs of ironstone. On this macabre gridiron,
the bodies were piled with straw between each layer, soaked with gasoline
and set ablaze. Nine thousand corpses were disposed of in this way, and
eight cubic meters of ash were then loaded into gasoline containers and
buried in a graveyard outside the city, 25 feet wide and 15 feet deep.
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- ___
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- Copyright (c) 2002 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where
Truth is Destiny
-
- Please keep in mind that this article was written and
published by by a prestigious, mass circulation magazine (Esquire, 1963)
in America - and that the statistics above, such as the true numbers of
holocausted people during those murderous Allied air assaults, has never
been settled.
-
- Verlag Eidgenoß - a Swiss publication - claims
480,000 Dresden victims "amtlich erfaßt", that is, "bureaucratically
registered."
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- A rough breakdown is as follows:
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- 37,000 infants and toddlers 46,000 public school children
55,000 wounded and sick people, doctors, nurses, Red Cross helpers, and
nurses aides 12,000 firemen, soldiers, medical aides, bunker assistants
and anti-aircraft police 330,000 simply listed as "men, women and
youth."
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- What is not known is that Field Marshal Montgomery and
other Allied military leaders used the horrors of Dresden and Hamburg to
blackmail the Doenitz government (after the suicide of Hitler) into an
early surrender by threatening the Germans with more Hamburgs and more
Dresdens if they did not unconditionally surrender then and there.
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