ZGram - 2/14/2002 - "Apocalypse at Dresden" - Part II

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

Copyright (c) 2002 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

=46ebruary 14, 2002 - Valentine's Day!

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

=46or simplicity's sake, I am repeating yesterday's introduction for the
second part of this Commemoration for the Victims of Dresden, "Valentine's
Day, 1945"

There WAS a Holocaust - a Holocaust called "Dresden."

Yesterday and today, 57 years, go the City of Dresden was incinerated by
horrendous Allied bombing raids.  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!

[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)

{Part II}

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.

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.

=46or five days and nights, the city burned, and no attempt was made to ente=
r
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.

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.

[END]

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

Zundelsite comment:

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 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."

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.

But the most disgusting, generally unknown detail is that the Allied
propagandists used excerpts of the mass cremations of the German bombing
victims as "Jewish concentration camp victims being burned by the Nazis."

=3D=3D=3D

Thought for the Day:

"God hath sifted a nation that he might send choice grain into this
wilderness."

(William Stroughton)