History Forum / General / General Topics / December 2006

"You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of
flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame,
than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined." --Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

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 a half a million, had perished in what
was the worst single event massacre of all time.
___

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 tranquillity 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."

February 13/14 1945: Holocaust over Dresden, known as the Florence of
the North. Dresden was a hospital city for wounded soldiers. Not one
military unit, not one anti-aircraft battery was deployed in the city.
Together with the 600.000 refugees from Breslau, Dresden was filled
with nearly 1.2 million people. Churchill had asked for "suggestions
how to blaze 600.000 refugees". He wasn't interested how to target
military installations 60 miles outside of Dresden. More than 700.000
phosphorus bombs were dropped on 1.2 million people. One bomb for every
2 people. The temperature in the centre of the city reached 1600 o
centigrade. More than 260.000 bodies and residues of bodies were
counted. But those who perished in the centre of the city can't be
traced. Approximately 500.000 children, women, the elderly, wounded
soldiers and the animals of the zoo were slaughtered in one night.

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 warning spirits.
Half-sad smiles greeted the laughing girls, but spirits were lifted.

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

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 distinguished this raid was the cold-blooded ruthlessness
with which it was carried out. U.S. Mustangs 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."

****************

Kurt Vonnegut was in Dresden when it was bombed in 1945, and wrote a
famous anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse Five, in 1969.

In February 1945, Vonnegut was witness to another pretty good imitation
of Mt Vesuvius; the firebombing by Allied forces of Dresden, the town
in eastern Germany, during the last months of the Second World War.
More than 600,000 incen-diary bombs later, the city looked more like
the surface of the moon. Returning home to India-napolis after the war,
Vonnegut began writing short stories for magazines such as Collier's
and The Saturday Evening Post, and, seven years later, published his
first novel, Player Piano. ...

Finally, in 1969, he tackled the subject of war, recounting his
experiences as a POW in Dresden, forced to dig corpses from the rubble.
The resulting novel was Slaughterhouse Five. Banned in several US
states - and branded a "tool of the devil" in North Dakota - it carried
the snappy alternative title: "The Children's Crusade: A Duly Dance
with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, a fourth-generation German-American
now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod (and smoking too much)
who, as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of
war, witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden, Germany - the Florence of
the Elbe - a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale: this is a
novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizopfrenic manner of tales of the
planet Tralfamodre, where the flying saucers come from, Peace." ....

In December 1944, Vonnegut was captured by the German army and became a
prisoner of war. In Slaughterhouse Five, he describes how he narrowly
escaped death a few months later in the firebombing of Dresden. "Yes,
by your people [the English], may I say," he insists. "You guys burnt
the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people
died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. I'm fond of your people, on occasion,
but I was just thinking about 'Bomber Harris, who believed in attacks
on civilian populations to make them give up. A hell of a lot of Royal
Air Force guys were ashamed of what Harris had made them do. And that's
really sportsmanship and, of course, the Brits are famous for being
good sports," he concedes.

The Independent, London, 20 December 2001, p. 19

***************

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.*

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, 1,600 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 slaughter; 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 slaughter, 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 let to the mass murder of up to a half million men, women and
children.