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“[The Dresden firebombing was] the single greatest holocaust by war.”

— Harold Nicolson
British diplomat

The Dresden Holocaust

“Dresden — A True Holocaust
and Act of Heinous Terrorism”
http://www.rense.com/general34/dres.htm

Dresden, 1945

Fifty-eight years ago, 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 half a million — had perished in what was the worst massacre of all time.

As Americans continue to bemoan the loss of fewer than 3,000 at [the] World Trade Center and the Pentagon as they themselves prepare to slaughter many times that number in an act of unprovoked aggression in Iraq, few know — less care — about the campaign of cold-blooded [state] TERRORISM conducted against German civilians during World War II, culminating in the extermination of over 300,000.

The following account, taken from the Feb. 1985 issue of the NS Bulletin, tells us what a REAL holocaust is like.

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 tranquility 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”.

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 waning spirits. Half-sad smiles greeted the laughing girles, but spirits were lifted.

No one realized that in less than 24 hours those same innocent chilren 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.

Women and children targeted

burned corpses in Dresden rubble

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 distinuished this raid was the cold-blooded ruthlessness with which it was carried out. U.S. Mustangs [fighter planes] 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.”

 
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 140,000.¹

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, 16,000 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 slaugher; 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 slaugher, 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 led to the mass murder of up to a half million men, women and children.

NEVER SHALL WE FORGET THE VICTIMS OF THIS UNSPEAKABLE CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY.

 
Note 1:
Although it will never be possible to obtain an exact count of the victims, a reasonable estimate can be adduced by taking the number of registered inhabitants of the city, doubling it by a factor of 2+ to account for undocumented refugees in the city at the time, and then extrapolating the number of dead from analogous instances in other German cities subjected to saturation bombing and aerial atrocitiy during World War II, notably Hamburg, Darmstadt and Pforzheim, inter alia.   back

Related pages

Apocalypse 1945: the Destruction of Dresden
by David Irving

Chronology of Terror

The Geopolitical Strategy of Imperial America

Neighborhood Bully: American Militarism
interview with Ramsey Clark

Related sites

David Irving Index
http://www.codoh.com/irving/irving.html

David Irving is the author of Apocalypse 1945: the Destruction of Dresden

“In the words of the military writer John Keegan: ‘No historian of the Second World War can afford to ignore Irving.’ Few contemporary scholars of the Third Reich have his depth of knowledge, virtually none has met as many of its leading figures and nobody, surely, has unearthed more original material — a private archive known as the ‘Irving Collection’, always generously made available to other researchers, which weighs more than half a ton.”

David Irving’s newsletter: Action Report On-line
http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/index.html

Focal Point Publications
Welcome to the World of Real History
http://www.fpp.co.uk/

Publishers of works of Real History by David Irving and other authors

Institute for Historical Review
http://www.ihr.org/

“This site offers scholarly information and thoughtful commentary, from a revisionist perspective, on a wide range of historical issues, including the ‘Holocaust’, Auschwitz, World War II, Stalin, Hitler, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Hiroshima, Pearl Harbor, the Palestine/Israel conflict, Zionism, the ‘Jewish question’, the Bolshevik revolution, and much more.”

Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust
http://www.codoh.com/

“The aim of this site is to promote intellectual freedom with regard to this one historical event, which in turn will promote intellectual freedom toward all historical events (thus all other issues).

“We have chosen to concentrate on the gas chamber stories and war crimes trials because they are emblematic of the allegedly unique monstrosity of the Germans before and during World War II. We believe it profoundly vulgar, and emasculating, to spend half a century condemning others for their violence and brutality when we have not yet learned to condemn our own, or even recognize it.

“We want to help civilize Americans. We’re not Germans and we’re not Jews (well, some of us are) and we are not focused on how naughty they were or were not. We’re focused on American culture, on the American ideal that liberty has the power to wash a people clean and that there is no liberty without intellectual freedom.”

— Bradley R. Smith
1997

Zundelsite
http://www.zundelsite.org/

This is the website of Ernst Zundel, who is right now being persecuted by the U.S. government and the Zionist lobby which pulls its strings.

You cannot speak freely in America about the Jewish holocaust if you don’t agree with the official story. If you question the official story and speak publicly to a large enough audience, you will be legally, financially and even physically persecuted by the U.S. government and the ADL thugs of the Zionist lobby.

Let the Bloody Truth Be Told:
A Chronology of U.S. Imperialism
http://www.neravt.com/left/invade.htm

A partial list of U.S. military interventions from 1890 to 2001, compiled by Zoltan Grossman. This page also has a list of links to more information on genocidal U.S. imperialism.

U.S. Foreign Policy and Empire:
A Selected Bibliography (1995)
compiled by Will Miller
Department of Philosophy, University of Vermont
http://www.neravt.com/left/miller.htm

“It Began With a Lie”: German TV report refutes government propaganda in Balkan War
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/mar2001/koso-m01.shtml

Bibliography

Apocalypse 1945:
The Destruction of Dresden
by David Irving

A People’s History of the United States:
1492 — Present
by Howard Zinn

Saving Private Power:
The Hidden History of “The Good War”
by Michael Zezima

The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb
by Gar Alperovitz

Lies My Teacher Told Me:
Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
by James Loewen

Inventing Reality:
The Politics of News Media
by Michael Parenti

The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media:
Decoding Spin and Lies in Mainstream News
by Norman Solomon

Manufacturing Consent:
The Political Economy of the Mass Media
by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky

War, Lies & Videotape:
How media monopoly stifles truth
edited by Lenora Foerstel; multiple authors

Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney

The Hidden Persuaders:
What makes us buy, believe – and even vote – the way we do?
by Vance Packard

Body of Secrets:
Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
by James Bamford

In 1962, U.S. military leaders had a top-secret plan for committing terrorist attacks on Americans in Miami and Washington D.C., while blaming Cuba. Codenamed “Operation Northwoods”, the plan was intended to provide the propaganda necessary to create popular support for an invasion of Cuba.

Rogue State:
A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
by William Blum

Killing Hope:
U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since WWII
by William Blum

The Fire This Time:
U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf
by Ramsey Clark

Desert Slaughter:
The Imperialist War Against Iraq
by the Workers League

Blackshirts and Reds:
Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
by Michael Parenti

The Beast Reawakens
by Martin A. Lee

The Culture of Terrorism
by Noam Chomsky

The Real Terror Network:
Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda
by Edward S. Herman

Western State Terrorism
Alexander George, editor; essays by Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, Gerry O’Sullivan and others

Terrorizing the Neighborhood:
American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era
by Noam Chomsky
Pressure Drop Press, 1991

Pirates and Emperors, Old and New:
International Terrorism in the Real World
by Noam Chomsky

The Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
by Gore Vidal

Against Empire
by Michael Parenti

The Sword and the Dollar:
Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race
by Michael Parenti

What Uncle Sam Really Wants
by Noam Chomsky

Deterring Democracy
by Noam Chomsky
New York, 1992

Counterrevoution: U.S. Foreign Policy
by E. & R. Boorstein
New York, 1990

To Kill A Nation:
The Attack on Yugoslavia
by Michael Parenti

Hidden Agenda:
U.S./NATO Takeover of Yugoslavia
by Ramsey Clark, Nadja Tesich, Michel Chossudovsky, Slobodan Milosevic, numerous authors

NATO in the Balkans:
Voices of Opposition
by Ramsey Clark, Nadja Tesich, Sean Gervasi, Sara Flounders, Thomas Deichmann, Gary Wilson and Richard Becker

NATO TARGETS (video)
produced by Gloria La Riva

Derailing Democracy:
The America the Media Don’t Want You to See
by David McGowan

Bloody Hell:
The Price Soldiers Pay
by Daniel Hallock