ZGram - 2/13/2002 - "Apocalypse at Dresden"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

Copyright (c) 2002 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

=46ebruary 13, 2002 - Valentine's Day!

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

There WAS a Holocaust - a Holocaust called "Dresden."  Today 57 years go
the City of Dresden was incinerated by an Allied bombing raid.  The day
will come when February 13 will no longer be called "Valentine's Day."
Instead it will be "Dresden Day" - and Germans WILL NEVER FORGET!

I am running a two-part ZGram on Dresden:

[START]

"Apocalypse at Dresden:  The long-suppressed story of the worst massacre in
the history of the world"
By R. H. S. Grossman

(Excerpts from Esquire, 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.

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.

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.

The prelude to the bombing of Dresden was sounded by the Russian communiqu=
=E9
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
=46ebruary 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.

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.

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.

[END]

(Conclusion to follow tomorrow)

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

Zundelsite comment:

Please keep in mind that this article was written in America - and that the
statistics above, such as the numbers of holocausted people, has never been
settled.

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

Thought for the Day:

Verlag Eidgeno=DF - a Swiss publication - claims 480,000 Dresden victims
"amtlich erfa=DFt", that is, "bureaucratically registered."

A rough breakdown is as follows:

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."

=3D=3D=3D