Neo-Nazis march as Dresden remembers war dead

Bloody shame!

Just gonna drag this back up as yesterday was the anniversary of the British raid that destroyed most of Dresden, and today is the anniversary of the American raid that destroyed what was left - neo-Nazis or not I think it's worth a thought.

Not the finest point in Britain's war history to be sure.

And it was the Russians who requested it in the first place I believe. But debating the blame is a bit a pointless.

If it was ready, we would have nuked the city.

Nor in US war history.

The blame must ultimately fall on Nazi Germany - nevertheless it's a less than glorious chapter in British military history. As for the Russians requesting it - they merely requested Western aid - Dresden was chosen as a target by the RAF. Churchill is rumoured to have been devastated by such high loss of life.
And as for nuking Dresden - so it's said, though the effect would have been broadly similar - the tonnage of bombs dropped on Dresden and the descriptions of the ensuing firestorm are terrifying.

I'm with Jimbo on this, but there was a tactical reason for hitting Dresden despite its lack of materiel manufacture. It was used more or less as a safe haven, hospital and transfer point for those soldiers returning from the Eastern Front. As the Vietnamese reminded the Americans in the 1960s, kill a man and you take only one man out of the fight; injure a man and you take out at least two. While the utter annihilation was reprehensible, it did serve a purpose in warfare. It wasn't the Americans or British who first called for "total war".

woof.

Germany started it, in 1940...

http://www-lib.usc.edu/~anthonya/war/rott.htm

The allies ended it. You reap what you sow.

Sage words from BadDoggie - the attack certainly wasn't without any purpose whatsoever, but the amount of troops in the city is a matter for debate - certainly there were marshalling yards that formed an important part of the infrastructure of the German rail system in the East - of course RAF attacks were always area raids, and so were arguably not the right choice of attack in order to hit the train tracks and yards - rather an 8th Air Force strike would have been more suitable as they offered a degree of accuracy. Sadly the city was well alight when the Americans arrived and the target obscured by smoke so the Americans just bombed 'blind'...and then there are allegations of U.S. fighters strafing civillians, though these would seem to be the result of 'chinese whispers' and German propaganda.
All in all I don't think we should have done it, but I also don't think that we're to blame - Germany started the war, and in the end merely reaped the rewards of what she had started.

Totally agree. If you play with fire, you'll get burnt.. as my granny would say. Excuse the pun.

Most of the bombing in WW2 would technically qualify as war crimes because it targeted civilians either directly or indirectly but conveniently.

The moral justification for strategic (read terror) bombing is the law of double effect (St Thomas Aquinas attempting to reconcile christianity with the use of force) that is to say we are aiming to destroy the enemys' industrial capacity by bombing areas with factories unfortunately a side effect is killing lots of civilians because these areas have the highest civilian population (workers) and happen to be most suitable for firebombing.

Dresden is the one that the western allies were most uncomfortable with because the moral justification was very thin, the divisions weren't there. For years nobody really talked about it.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse 5 about the bombing of Dresden, which is an interesting read if you like Sci fi.

Picture from last night's memorial events
Spiegel article (German)
Spiegel, related articles in English

Not at the time. Targeting civilians was fair game in WWII. Nobody was trialled at Nuremburg for strategic bombings of cities.

SZ - Bombing of Dresden

Very good article from the SZ on Saturday. Only in german, I'm afraid.

Deliberate targeting of non-combatants (is) and was illegal at the time. Warfare being what it is though, might make things that are repugnant now seem OK at a time when applying moral standards had gone out of the window.

From the Geneva Conventions:

"Civilians are not to be subject to attack. This includes direct attacks on civilians and indiscriminate attacks against areas in which civilians are present."

I think most of the trials at Nuremburg would have focussed on the charges starting an illegal war and crimes against humanity.

it's the way war works...people (civilian and military) get killed.
it's always worked that way and it always will, despite the Geneva convention.

So it was.

THERE'S ONLY 1 BOMBER HARRIS

Nope. World War II was the first war to involve significant civilian casualties. World War One for example was fought predominately on the battle field - German civilians went hungry as a result of our naval blockade granted, but very few were killed by bombs, guns, and gas.
EDIT: Joe's not quite right either - the Geneva Convention was only modified to protect civilians in 1949.

Wouldn't be too sure about that. In August 1914 alone, 6500 french and belgian civilians were killed.

Dresden - 35,000 in one night. And I'm absolutely POSITIVE that World War I was never intentionally waged, in a large scale manner, against civilians. Out of interest where does that stat come from?

The Germans attacked the UK in WWI using those big sausage shapped Zepplins. 550 civilians were killed, but I suppose the scale is small compared to WWII.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWzeppelinraids.htm


Thats what I thought.

To try and assign blame for a single incident, or for the whole war for that matter, seems like a stupid exercise. The fact of the matter is, that atrocities were commited by both sides and the resulting trials had more to do with the 'winners' punishing the 'losers' rather than the 'right' punishing the 'wrong.'

However, it does not change the fact that these things did happen. From the title I assumed that this thread was about the complete lack of disrespect shown by the marching neo-nazis on a day that undoubtedly marks one of the most pivotal events in German history and I still think this is the issue. Not whether or not they deserved it, or who ordered it.

@Jimbo

That figure came from the SZ article linked in my other post. Not backed up with any reference I'm afraid but I'll get one for you. I do know that german troops executed all the male adults that were found in the village of Dinant in the Ardennes, in order to prevent partisan attacks.

WWI atrocities in Belgium

The SZ article was describing how the Hague Agreement of 1908 (an earlier version of the Geneva Accords) never received real support in the pre-WWI german armed forces and led to an general attitude or atmosphere where atrocities were not actively discouraged.

An overview of the figures for WWI:Casulties in WWI

Germany made it into the Top 3 according to this link:

2nd World War site

@Yeti - Well that's interesting then - 31,000 English civilians killed...where were they all? On holiday in France when the Germans attacked? I'd like to know the basis for that - English nurses and other non-combatants working on or near the battlefield? Merchant sailors perhaps?. Having said that, I suppose I'm not quite right in what I said previously - though civilians were never subjected to large scale bombing an awful lot of Germans were starved to death - not as a direct result of violence, but as a result of the blockade...so I'll qualify what I said earlier - World War II was the first war in which civilians found themselves effectively on the front line - thanks for the reply though.

sounds like complete revisionist bollocks.

why?
what the raf did in dresden was a lesson to germany.
it showed war is destructive. germans have seen for their own eyes the destruction it causes.
justified.
the germans should consider themsleves lucky that there is a nation and german people left.
should have destroyed every city and german as a reminder to humanity not to start wars.

Time to "update" the Geneva convention I think. Conventional armys controlled by governments fighting each other are gone. Everyone making decisions at a government level have it too good, even in poorer countries, to risk starting an offensive war in this day and age.

The future will consist of civilians making offensive attacks against countries, as only mere civilians are found in a poor enough state today to consider starting military activities worthwhile.

Plus why should the privledged civilian in wartime, probably still involved in a countries military capability, designing or manufacturing weapons or something be somehow more innocent than the guy who didnt have much choice but to put on a uniform and fight for his country?

The very idea of war crimes is strange anyway, why not make war itself illegal?

@acqua - nah, I don't agree. The justified destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives had, already, I think made the point - Dresden was almost wilful excess on the part of the Allies, and more to make a point to the Russians than the Germans.

That is a very dangerous way of thinking. Just because of the trans-atlantic alliance has prevented a conventional global war between the top 10 nations in the last 60 years, doesnt mean it will always be so.

seeing some of the scum on the streets of dresden yesterday it was a pity it was only 35,000.

if we took that attitute with everyone who started a war, there wouldn't be anyone left. I guess you think we were a bit soft on hiroshoma and nagasaki too?

Remember that the NPD / Reps scum had come from all over Germany and were vastly outwieghed in numbers by locals.

poor locals who manage to vote npd better than anywhere else in germany.

it is a pity that the first atom bomb was not on berlin

*resit replying, resist replying*
Twit.

IMO the bombing of Dresden was an example of bureaucratic and strategic inertia coupled with feelings of revenge. The strategic value of Dresden as a target was pretty minimal, but it was targeted anyway, probably mainly because they had run out of targets. The bombing raids went out like clockwork at that stage and they had to bomb something. The mentality of bomber command was such that Eisenhower had great difficulty in making them stop bombing German cities so that they could participate in D-Day.

Feelings of revenge also had a part to play, as interviews with some of the pilots and planners give out.

Although I would not go as far as to call it a war crime, which diminishes the severity of the things that the Nazis did, I do think it was a terrible and unnecessary thing.

Interestingly Bomber Harris was snubbed by the British government after the war.

why resist?
public forum. if you disagree then say so.
oh and don't let yourself down by getting personal. name calling is childish.
tw@t.

And your wishes for example that Berlin had been atom bombed aren't exactly of rapier intellect Acquascutum.

Question about WW1:

Does any of you knowledgable peeps on here know whether German U boat officers actually knew whether the Lusitania was carrying war supplies, or was it just picked off in an act of wanton killing?

I've read that the ship was delibarately filled with passengers to deter submarine attack as she was carrying american weapons- but I still don't know what the reasons for the actual attack were?

would have ended the war sooner.
would have stopped the ruskis getting there and having a carve up of europe.
there is no difference on dropping the atom bomb on japan or germany. both nations had started wars through aggression, committed atrocities on a major scale. both needed to be taught a lesson.


labour government?

The Russians didn't "carve up" Europe any more than the Americans did.
They agreed on speheres of influence at Yalta.

S'funny that the atom bomb should creep into this thread. I read an interview with Paul W. Tibbets (the pilot of Enola Gay... you know, the plane that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). I don't have a copy, but I think it was in The Observer, either last August or the August before (my memory is getting worse as this grey hair arrives).

In the interview Tibbets was very specific, even going into the training for the drop. Then, suddenly the training changed. The Nazis surrendered before The Manhattan Project was ready. Tibbets claimed that he was initially training to drop the bomb on...

...Munich.

Makes you think huh? Tibbets words, NOT mine.

He claims that the Allies wanted to strike hard and chose the target as symbolic (Dresden was already destroyed, Hamburg firebombed, and Berlin too well defended). Munich represented (at that time) the home of the (Nazi) Movement. Dropping the first atom bomb on Munich would probably have forced an immediate surrender, had the Nazis still been fighting.

The bombing of Dresden is a moot point in my household. My German wife has problems that I cannot excuse nor condone it. This is 2005, NOT 1945. Attitudes and views are very different. I have never been bombed out (my father was born in May 1940 and had been bombed out of 3 houses by the end of the war... the Hawker Hurricane factory was just down the road).

War is hell, and it is always the innocents who bear the brunt, not the warmongers. The 1,000 bomber raid on Dresden has to be taken into the context of the time... which means nothing unless you know people who experienced The Blitz, or Coventry, or have been on the recieving end of bombing.

I prefer to remain not excusing nor condoning. I wasn't even a twinkle in my father's eye when it happened. I just don't know.

All we can do is remember the innocents who perished...

...in ALL wars.

And try to stop it happening again.

Replay and look again. Norman the conquerer... Landed in Hastings, killed the army, road not to London, but around it... Everything he found on the way, every village every man, woman and child, animal whatever, he killed. He burnt the villages to the ground and then approached London from the North. When he got there, he found the goverment very open to the suggestion of surrender.

He later went on to kill most of the North of England in an uprising to the point where in the Doomsday book the land was, many years later, still described as empty an barren. Everyone there was killed.

Rewind.

Roman empire killed and seeded salt on fields of populations they no longer wanted to survive.

Fast forward.

American Indians were salautered in their camps by the US cavelryAFTER a peace deal was brokered.

Fast Forward.

The English in India - The US in 'Nam - The Russians in Afgan' - Need I say more.

The only difference with WWII was the bombs got bigger...

But Dresden was about many things, including revenge. Lets not forget that at the hight of the luftwafe bombing London was bombed for 57 nights in A ROW. Think on how many were killed in that. And lets not forget Conventry that was wiped out, and Portsmouth where the population started to die from hiding out on the moors ever night.

War is dirty. Always has been. Always will be.

What an absolute load of cobblers. The blitz on London killed less than 60,000. The single raid on Dresden killed at least 35,000 and some people argue that the figure is four times that size.
As for looking at the Romans and then the Norman invasion as examples of 'war' waged against 'civilians', that's utter nonsense - these were nothing like wars in the modern sense of the word and the civilian deaths were more down to theological reasons than military or even political aims. The English in India - significant civilian deaths? Sure, people were killed, but hardly any were the result of military aims, so much as of racial cleansing or excess on the part of the troops (or of course the two famines of the 1800's which killed nearly 20m). The same can be said of Vietnam - plenty of civilians were killed, but hardly any as a result of U.S. military policy.
The American extermination of the native Indians wasn't a war either - it was ethnic cleansing, and no different to any other genocide except the victims possessed the means to fight back.
It is an opinion held by almost every historian that I've ever read that World War II was the first war waged where civilians were killed as a direct result of deliberate military strategy, and military strategy that was sanctioned at the highest level.
I don't disagree that war is dirty, and that it always will be, but I do take issue with the idea the civilians have always been a target - that simply isn't true.
BTW - Portsmouth's population hiding and expiring on the moor? That's a new one on me - you mean during WWII to hide from the bombing?

Limited wars have been the norm rather than the exception historically, in these wars rules of conduct have been generally observed.

WW1 & 2 were exceptions to a large extent because the war aims were either or else bacame unlimited. The Roman wars against Carthage were about as total as an ancient society could manage again the war became unlimited because it was a struggle for domination of the civilised world at the time, Carthage was obliterated so thoroughly we know almost nothing of their civilisation,its been estimated that the Roman Empire lost about 10% of its population.

Explicit protection of civilians does come in the 1949 Convention (i stand corrected) but the 1899 Convention and Hague Conventions (1907) do contain 4-5 articles that prohibit attacking undefended towns and villages and destruction or confiscation of private property which would certainly cover strategic bombing. However the laws and customs of war (especially in Europe) pre-exist the Geneva conventions, so it is not necessary to find a section of the Geneva convention to condemn it because there was already an established body of precedents dating from the middle ages, Jus ad Bello, Jus in Bello.

60,000 is in fact more the 35,000 or would you argue that having it all on one night is worse than having it over 5 years? They'd have killed more but over the years people were evacuated. And you are not taking the rest of England into that picture or indeed France and/or Russia. Lots of casualties at Stalingrad...

Norman invasion is classed as the Battle of Hastings, two armies met and fought then Norman made his future job easier by killing loads of civlians. There is no difference and it is not cobblers, you simply dont know your European history well enough.

India? Remember the black hole of calcutter?

'Nam? Remember the picture if the little girl covered in Napalm running away? Friendly Fire became the new buzz word from that war.

And the cavalry killed the last of the "hostile" indians while they slept in their wigwams using cannon fire while under a truce. So much for being able to fight back.

I would like to see a reference to these historians you quote? Looking back through history I can see many examples of force used against civilians. Looking at the present I see many actually happening - (dafur - oh sorry that doesnt count does it).

Please, dont lecture me on history. History happens, then the winner agrees whats happened, the rest is organised fable.

Dressden happened in a war that left the UK on its last legs with no one ready or willing to fight another year. They needed a quick kill solution, to save Allied soliders lives. Just as the Americans quite rightly dropped the bomb on Japan to save allied lives - my father being one of them.

I dont think you mean the black hole of Calcutta. At least not, if your talking about English attrocities.

and friendly fire relates to engagements between troops, where your lot get fired on by others of your lot. nothing to do with civilians.

as an aside, the two attacks on coventry killed about 1200-1300 people. __link__

EDIT: its collateral damage that you're looking for there

Sorry Paul but I will lecture you on history because you know nothing about it yet seem convinced that you do - 60,000 is in fact a figure for ALL British civilian casualties during WWII (I quoted wrong earlier I know - the blitz is something of a misnomer, but let's say it was the 87 day long assault on London, by night - around 35,000 died in that) - Germany's civilian death toll stands at around 2,000,000, and yes, I find it quite terrifying that the Allies had the power to extinguish AT LEAST 35,000 lives in one night (some would say closer to 120,000 - nobody knows as many bodies simply turned to ash in the heat, which reached 1,000C at its hottest).
As for the rest of your post - you seem to have missed my point completely. Civilians do indeed die in wars, be it in instances of collateral damage, or attempted genocide (like the black hole of Calcutta, in which about 125 people died), but WWII was the first in which they were DELIBERATELY targetted by the military as a legitimate military target. 'Nam, Calcutta etc etc etc were all either accidents or war crimes. Dresden and the entire Allied Bombing Campaign was directed by the most senior military figures and therefore an officially sanctioned act.
I don't accept an analogy between U.S. genocide against the native Indians and WW II - they are completey different in almost every single respect, or are you suggesting that Dresden was an attempt at genocide? Or that the extermination of the native Indians was anything other than genocide? As for historical battles almost 1,000 years ago - the culture, art of war and technology are, IMHO, too different to be of any value in comparitive terms. 'War' was waged in quite a different way 1,000 years ago.
As for historians - I've read extensively on the subject of war, particularly WW II - of the most relevance, I would say, are Martin Middlebrook (I've read everything he's ever written), Max Hastings (again, I've read pretty much all of his stuff), Frederick Taylor (just finished his book 'Dresden'), John Erickson, Alan Clarke, Lyn Macdonald, Heinz Guderian...need I go on? I honestly do know my subject quite well.
EDIT: As for actual military gains and Dresden saving Allied lives, I seriously dispute that point - the war was already won, and few, if any, lives were saved by destroying an entire city.