Fwd: ZGra, - 4/23/2003 - "The Idaho Observer: The Allied Holocaust at Dresden"

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>Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 04:11:26 -0700
>To: zgram-freedomsite.org
>From: Ingrid Rimland <irimland at mail.bellsouth.net>
>Subject: ZGra, - 4/23/2003 - "The Idaho Observer:  The Allied 
>Holocaust at Dresden"
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>ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!
>
>April 23, 2003
>
>Good Morning from the Zundelsite:
>
>Next time you see a photo of a pyre depicting the incineration of 
>hundreds of bodies, don't think Auschwitz - think Dresden!  Those 
>pictures, having been peddled for decades to brainwash the world 
>against Germans, are pictures documenting Allied bombing victims of 
>the beautiful city of Dresden. 
>
>I want to thank Don Harkins, a courageous young American journalist, 
>for publishing this important article.
>
>[START]
>
>The Allied Holocaust At Dresden
>By Don Harkins
>The Idaho Observer
>4-22-3
>
>On Saturday afternoon of February, 14, 2003, my wife, another couple 
>and their son and I arrived at the home of our dear friend Edda West 
>near Nelson, B.C., Canada. We had dinner and spent the evening 
>talking about a variety of things. When we decided to retire late 
>that evening, we gave Edda a copy of the December edition of Current 
>Concerns -- an opposition newspaper from Zurich, Switzerland.
>
>When we awoke the next morning, the morning after the 58th 
>anniversary of the Dresden bombing, Edda described how she had 
>stayed up for hours reading the survivor account of the Dresden 
>bombing in Current Concerns.
>
>That morning turned out to be very special. We knew Edda had been 
>born in Estonia in 1943 and had been transported in a wagon by her 
>mother and grandmother all the way to Germany as they fled their 
>country ahead of the Russians (who had established a pattern of 
>murdering and brutalizing Estonians for centuries). What we didn't 
>know was that she was a Dresden survivor.
>
>For 45 minutes we were all captivated by the story this lovely, 
>passionate woman related as she recounted the horrors of that day. 
>Three years old at the time, she does not remember specifics -- only 
>the horror that she relived over and over again in nightmares until 
>she was 12. However, she lived with her mother and grandmother 
>telling the stories and she retold many of them for us that morning.
>
>I do not believe I have ever been so moved by a person's story in all my life.
>
>When we got back home, I wrote a letter to Eva-Maria Fullner of 
>Current Concerns (with whom The IO trades a subscription) and told 
>her about this experience.
>
>A few weeks later, Eva-Maria called and said she was in New York and 
>wanted to come for a visit. She also asked if Edda could come.
>
>We called Edda who was elated with the thought of coming down to 
>meet Eva-Maria.
>
>The time with Edda and Eva-Maria during the weekend of March 15 was 
>a resumption of the morning of Feb. 15, but it lasted all weekend. 
>We had these amazing conversations that were only interrupted by 
>sleeping.
>
>Edda wrote a 3,900-word surviver account of Dresden that can be 
>found in the April edition of Current 
>Concerns(www.currentconcerns.ch).
>
>We will only excerpt from Edda's story, but we encourage everyone 
>who wants to understand what really happened at Dresden to find the 
>entire article at the website above and, while you are at it, take a 
>look at the article from December as well.
>
>Why? Because the Allies (this time called the Coalition) are about 
>to reduce another large city to rubble and mass murder a lot of 
>innocent people. We think it's important to know that pro-government 
>historians are allowed to bury mass murder stories only when the 
>survivors maintain their silence.
>
>***
>
>The Dresden Bombing: An eyewitness account
>
>by Edda West
>
>My grandmother would always begin the story of Dresden by describing 
>the clusters of red candle flares dropped by the first bombers, 
>which like hundreds of Christmas trees, lit up the night sky - a 
>sure sign it would be a big air raid. Then came the first wave of 
>hundreds of British bombers that hit a little after 10 p.m. the 
>night of February 13-14, 1945, followed by two more intense bombing 
>raids by the British and Americans over the next 14 hours. History 
>records it as the deadliest air attack of all time, delivering a 
>death toll that exceeded the atomic blasts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
>
>In 20 minutes of intense bombing, the city became an inferno. The 
>second bombing raid came three hours after the first and was 
>"intended to catch rescue workers, firefighters and fleeing 
>inhabitants at their fullest exposure." Altogether, the British 
>dropped nearly 3,000 tons of explosives that shattered roofs, walls, 
>windows, whole buildings, and included hundreds of thousands of 
>phosphorous incendiaries, which were small firebombs that sprinkled 
>unquenchable fire into every crevasse they rolled into, igniting the 
>inferno that turned Dresden into a "hurricane of flames."
>
>By the time the Americans flew in for the third and last air raid, 
>smoke from the burning city nearly obliterated visibility. One 
>American pilot recollects, "We bombed from 26,000 feet and could 
>barely see the ground because of clouds and long columns of black 
>smoke. Not a single enemy gun was fired at either the American or 
>British bombers."
>
>The Americans dropped 800 tons of explosives and fire bombs in 11 
>minutes. Then, according to British historian David Irving in his 
>book, The Destruction of Dresden, American P-51 fighter escorts 
>dived to treetop level and strafed the city's fleeing refugees.
>
>My grandmother described the horrific firestorm that raged like a 
>hurricane and consumed the city. It seemed as if the very air was on 
>fire. Thousands were killed by bomb blasts, but enormous, untold 
>numbers were incinerated by the firestorm, an artificial tornado 
>with winds of more than 100 miles an hour that "sucked up its 
>victims and debris into its vortex and consumed oxygen with 
>temperatures of 1,000 degrees centigrade."
>
>Many days later, after the fires had died down, my grandmother 
>walked through the city. What she saw was indescribable in any human 
>language. But the suffering etched on her face and the depths of 
>anguish reflecting in her eyes as she told the story bore witness to 
>the ultimate horror of man's inhumanity to man and the stark 
>obscenity of war.
>
>Dresden, the capital of Saxony, a centre of art, theatre, music, 
>museums and university life, resplendent with graceful architecture 
>-- a place of beauty with lakes and gardens -- was now completely 
>destroyed. The city burned for seven days and smoldered for weeks.
>
>My grandmother saw the remains of masses of people who had 
>desperately tried to escape the incinerating firestorm by jumping 
>head first into the lakes and ponds. The parts of their bodies that 
>were submerged in the water were still intact, while the parts that 
>protruded above water were charred beyond human recognition. What 
>she witnessed was a hell beyond human imagination; a holocaust of 
>destruction that defies description.
>
>It took more than three months just to bury the dead, with scores of 
>thousands buried in mass graves. Irving wrote, "an air raid had 
>wrecked a target so disastrously that there were not enough 
>able-bodied survivors left to bury the dead."
>
>Confusion and disorientation were so great from the mass deaths and 
>the terror, that it was months before the real degree of devastation 
>was understood and authorities, fearful of a typhus epidemic, 
>cremated thousands of bodies in hastily erected pyres fueled by 
>straw and wood.
>
>German estimates of the dead ranged up to 220,000, but the 
>completion of identification of the dead was halted by the Russian 
>occupation of Dresden in May.
>
>Elisabeth, who was a young woman of around 20 at the time of the 
>Dresden bombing, has written memoirs for her children in which she 
>describes what happened to her in Dresden. Seeking shelter in the 
>basement of the house she lived in she writes, "Then the detonation 
>of bombs started rocking the earth and in a great panic, everybody 
>came rushing down. The attack lasted about half an hour. Our 
>building and the immediate surrounding area had not been hit. Almost 
>everybody went upstairs, thinking it was over but it was not. The 
>worst was yet to come and when it did, it was pure hell. During the 
>brief reprieve, the basement had filled with people seeking shelter, 
>some of whom were wounded from bomb shrapnel.
>
>"One soldier had a leg torn off. He was accompanied by a medic, who 
>attended to him but he was screaming in pain and there was a lot of 
>blood. There also was a wounded woman, her arm severed just below 
>her shoulder and hanging by a piece of skin. A military medic was 
>looking after her, but the bleeding was severe and the screams very 
>frightening.
>
>"Then the bombing began again. This time there was no pause between 
>detonations and the rocking was so severe, we lost our balance, and 
>were tossed around in the basement like a bunch of ragdolls. At 
>times the basement walls were separated and lifted up. We could see 
>the flashes of the fiery explosions outside. There were a lot of 
>fire bombs and canisters of phosphorous being dumped everywhere. The 
>phosphorus was a thick liquid that burned upon exposure to air and 
>as it penetrated cracks in buildings, it burned wherever it leaked 
>through. The fumes from it were poisonous. When it came leaking down 
>the basement steps somebody yelled to grab a beer (there was some 
>stored where we were), soak a cloth, a piece of your clothing, and 
>press it over your mouth and nose. The panic was horrible. Everybody 
>pushed, shoved and clawed to get a bottle.
>
>"I had pulled off my underwear and soaked the cloth with the beer 
>and pressed it over my nose and mouth. The heat in that basement was 
>so severe it only took a few minutes to make that cloth bone dry. I 
>was like a wild animal, protecting my supply of wetness. I don't 
>like to remember that.
>
>"The bombing continued. I tried bracing myself against a wall. That 
>took the skin off my hands -- the wall was so hot. The last I 
>remember of that night is losing my balance, holding onto somebody 
>but falling and taking them too, with them falling on top of me. I 
>felt something crack inside. While I lay there I had only one 
>thought -- to keep thinking. As long as I know I'm thinking, I am 
>alive, but at some point I lost consciousness.
>
>"The next thing I remember is feeling terribly cold. I then realized 
>I was lying on the ground, looking into the burning trees. It was 
>daylight. There were animals screeching in some of them. Monkeys 
>from the burning zoo. I started moving my legs and arms. It hurt a 
>lot but I could move them. Feeling the pain told me that I was 
>alive. I guess my movements were noticed by a soldier from the 
>rescue and medical corps.
>
>"The corps had been put into action all over the city and it was 
>they who had opened the basement door from the outside. Taking all 
>the bodies out of the burning building. Now they were looking for 
>signs of life from any of us. I learned later that there had been 
>over a hundred and seventy bodies taken out of that basement and 
>twenty seven came back to life. I was one of them -- miraculously!
>
>"They then attempted to take us out of the burning city to a 
>hospital. The attempt was a gruesome experience. Not only were the 
>buildings and the trees burning but so was the asphalt on the 
>streets. For hours, the truck had to make a number of detours before 
>getting beyond the chaos. But before the rescue vehicles could get 
>the wounded to the hospitals, enemy planes bore down on us once 
>more. We were hurriedly pulled off the trucks and placed under them. 
>The planes dived at us with machine guns firing and dropped more 
>fire bombs.
>
>"The memory that has remained so vividly in my mind was seeing and 
>hearing humans trapped, standing in the molten, burning asphalt like 
>living torches, screaming for help which was impossible to give. At 
>the time I was too numb to fully realize the atrocity of this scene 
>but after I was 'safe' in the hospital, the impact of this and 
>everything else threw me into a complete nervous breakdown. I had to 
>be tied to my bed to prevent me from severely hurting myself 
>physically. There I screamed for hours and hours behind a closed 
>door while a nurse stayed at my bedside.
>
>"I am amazed at how vivid all of this remains in my memory. 
>(Elizabeth is in her late 70s at the time of this writing). It is 
>like opening a floodgate. This horror stayed with me in my dreams 
>for many years. I am grateful that I no longer have a feeling of 
>fury and rage about any of these experiences any more -- just great 
>compassion for everybody's pain, including my own.
>
>"The Dresden experience has stayed with me very vividly through my 
>entire life. The media later released that the number of people who 
>died during the bombing was estimated in excess of two hundred and 
>fifty thousand -- over a quarter of a million people. This was due 
>to all the refugees who came fleeing from the Russians, and 
>Dresden's reputation as a safe city. There were no air raid shelters 
>there because of the Red Cross agreement.
>
>"What happened with all the dead bodies? Most were left buried in 
>the rubble. I think Dresden became one mass grave. It was not 
>possible for the majority of these bodies to be identified. And 
>therefore next of kin were never notified. Countless families were 
>left with mothers, fathers, wives, children and siblings unaccounted 
>for to this day." [end quote]
>
>According to some historians, the question of who ordered the attack 
>and why, has never been answered. To this day, no one has shed light 
>on these two critical questions. Some think the answers may lie in 
>unpublished papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, 
>Winston Churchill and perhaps others. History reports that the 
>British and American attack on Dresden left more than 2-1/2 times as 
>many civilians dead as Britain suffered in all of World War II, and 
>that one in every 5 Germans killed in the war died in the Dresden 
>holocaust.
>
>Some say the motive was to deliver the final blow to the German 
>spirit -- that the psychological impact of the utter destruction of 
>the heart centre of German history and culture would bring Germany 
>to its knees once and for all.
>
>Some say it was to test new weapons of mass destruction, the 
>phosphorous incendiary bomb technology. Undoubtedly the need for 
>control and power was at the root. The insatiable need of the 
>dominators to exert control and power over a captive and fearful 
>humanity is what drives acts of mass murder like the Dresden 
>firebombing and Hiroshima.
>
>I think there was also an additional hidden and cynical motive which 
>may be why full disclosure of the Dresden bombing has been 
>suppressed. The Allies knew full well that hundreds of thousands of 
>refugees had migrated to Dresden in the belief that this was a safe 
>destination and the Red Cross had been assured Dresden was not a 
>target. The end of the war was clearly in sight at that point in 
>time and an enormous mass of displaced humanity would have to be 
>dealt with. What to do with all these people once the war ended? 
>What better solution than the final solution? Why not kill three 
>birds with one stone? By incinerating the city, along with a large 
>percentage of its residents and refugees, the effectiveness of their 
>new firebombs was successfully demonstrated. Awe and terror was 
>struck in the German people, thereby accelerating the end of the 
>war. And finally, the Dresden firebombing ensured the substantial 
>reduction of a massive sea of unwanted humanity, thereby greatly 
>lessening the looming burden and problem of postwar resettlement and 
>restructuring.
>
>We may never know what was in the psyche of those in power or all 
>the motives that unleashed such horrific destruction of civilian 
>life - the mass murder of a defenseless humanity who constituted no 
>military threat whatsoever and whose only crime was to try to find 
>relief and shelter from the ravages of war. Without the existence of 
>any military justification for such an onslaught on helpless people, 
>the Dresden firebombing can only be viewed as a hideous crime 
>against humanity, waiting silently and invisibly for justice, for 
>resolution and for healing in the collective psyches of the victims 
>and the perpetrators.
>
>The Idaho Observer
>P.O. Box 457
>Spirit Lake, Idaho 83869
>Phone: 208-255-2307
>Email: observer at coldreams.com
>Web:
>http://idaho-observer.com
>http://proliberty.com/observer/
>
>