Moderator: Moderator
But the Nazi propagandists in fact decreased the real death toll in order not to break the morale of their people at that crucial moment of WW2.
The real death toll was probably 10 or 20 times higher than 25.000. 25.000 dead after 14 hours of incendiary bombing in a city full of 1.000.000 homeless (and unregistered) refugees is a joke !
Werd wrote:But the Nazi propagandists in fact decreased the real death toll in order not to break the morale of their people at that crucial moment of WW2.
What is the source?
The real death toll was probably 10 or 20 times higher than 25.000. 25.000 dead after 14 hours of incendiary bombing in a city full of 1.000.000 homeless (and unregistered) refugees is a joke !
Same question.
Stars & Stripes
London Edition, Saturday, May 5, 1945, Vol. 5, No. 156
Air Raid on Dresden Killed More Than 300,000
by Dan Regan
Stars and Stripes Staff Writer
With the 1st Army, May 3 (Delayed) -- The Allied air raid on Dresden on Feb. 13-14 killed 300,000 persons, according to a report by Dresden police to a group of 600 -- British and French -- prisoners who were given passes by the Germans to enter the American lines.
Nine British PWs were working in Dresden during the raid and said the horror and devastation caused by the Anglo-American 14-hour raid was beyond human comprehension unless one could see for himself.
One British sergeant said,
"Reports from Dresden police that 300,000 died as a result of the bombing didn't include deaths among 1,000,000 evacuees from the Breslau area trying to escape from the Russians. There were no records on them.
"After seeing the results of the bombing, I believe these figures are correct."
[...]
http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/General/Dr ... 50545.html
Eberhard Matthes a lieutenant colonel and General Staff Officer in Dresden at the time of the bombing was one of those responsible for determining the number of victims. According to his data 35,000 corpses were "totally identified", 50,000 were "partially identified" and 168,000 corpses "could no longer be identified." In total Matthes counted 253,000 dead.
http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of ... rld_War_II
Firebombing killed 25,000 in Dresden in 1945: German commission
Findings rebut neo-Nazi claims that as many as a million died in Allied attacks
October 1, 2008
The Associated Press
A special commission in Germany says the Allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945 killed no more than 25,000 people — far fewer than scholars' previous estimates running as high as 135,000.
The team of a dozen experts, including university professors, archivists and military historians, reported Wednesday that four years of research so far has confirmed 18,000 deaths and showed that police and city administrators at the time believed there were about 25,000 victims.
Since the end of the Second World War, scholars have varied in their tally of people killed by waves of British and U.S. bombers on Feb. 13 and 14, 1945, with some estimates running to 135,000 or more.
Recently, neo-Nazis in Germany have offered a sharply inflated figure of 500,000 to one million victims, calling the raid a "bombing Holocaust" and comparing it to Adolf Hitler's murder of six million Jews.
But when a far-right party won seats in Saxony's parliament in 2004 and began promoting such claims, state officials decided a commission was needed to put the matter to rest.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2008 ... mbing.html
In recent times, however, the bombing of countries and of cities has almost become an everyday occurrence, rationalized not only by our political leaders but also presented by our media as an effective military undertaking and as a perfectly legitimate means to achieve supposedly worthwhile objectives. In this context, even the terrible attack on Dresden has recently been rehabilitated by a British historian, Frederick Taylor, who argues that the huge destruction wreaked on the Saxon city was not intended by the planners of the attack, but was the unexpected result of a combination of unfortunate circumstances, including perfect weather conditions and hopelessly inadequate German air defenses.[3] However, Taylor’s claim is contradicted by a fact that he himself refers to in his book, namely, that approximately 40 American “heavies” strayed from the flight path and ended up dropping their bombs on Prague instead of Dresden.[4] If everything had gone according to plan, the destruction in Dresden would surely have been even bigger than it already was. It is thus obvious that an unusually high degree of destruction had been intended.
Military logic - or military minds run amok?, January 14, 2007
The first RAF bombing raid excluded the Marshalling yards, Hauptbanhof, Marienbrücke railway bridge and troop barracks... obvious military targets if you are bombing to disable troop movement. It was -only- during the 2nd bombing raid, seeing that the Altstadt was completely engulfed in flames, that the RAF bomber leader made a snap decision - on his own - to target the fringes, otherwise the second target drop would have been exactly as the first.. the Altstadt itself. This is as much of an admission as you are ever going to get that the 1st and 2nd RAF raids were sent not so much for its military targets but for sheer chaos or "dehousing" as it was called.
The author however, does an excellent job revealing the lack of preparedness for a possible all out air raid, and shows how Dresden was truly undefended that night. When the author, who in no way seeks to minimize the horrors, is finished recounting the devastation inflicted on the inhabitants (told mainly through survivor first hand accounts), and you realize that there is still more come by way of the USAAF,... you are in disbelief.
Taylor is less successful at dispelling the "myth" of strafing. His method is to give credence to anyone who did not witness strafing, and to dismiss accounts of those who did as being "confused and traumatized" people. Yet there is documentation of an order to strafe and Taylor even prints it in his book. There are far too numerous recollections of this happening ( in many cities ) to dismiss out of hand. The official RAF Bomber Command web site page for Dresden 1945... still reads:
"Part of the American Mustang fighter-escort was ordered to strafe traffic on the roads around Dresden to increase the chaos and disruption to the important transportation network in the region."
Anyway, what Taylor spends most of his time on is counting the dead .. and since no one ever went to jail for reducing the number of Dresden victims, his final number is far lower than the 100 to 200 thousand often claimed.Taylor's final number of 30,000 seems low considering the number of refugees in the city, but it appears he has covered every angle on this based on documents that are known to exist.
More serious is Taylor’s insistence that Dresden did constitute a legitimate target, since it was not only an important military centre but also a first-rate turntable for rail traffic as well as a major industrial city, where countless factories and workshops produced all sorts of militarily important equipment. A string of facts, however, indicate that these “legitimate” targets hardly played a role in the calculations of the planners of the raid. First, the only truly significant military installation, the Luftwaffe airfield a few kilometres to the north of the city, was not attacked. Second, the presumably crucially important railway station was not marked as a target by the British “Pathfinder” planes that guided the bombers. Instead, the crews were instructed to drop their bombs on the inner city, situated to the north of the railway station.[5] Consequently, even though the Americans did bomb the station and countless people perished in it, the facility suffered relatively little structural damage, so little, in fact, that it was again able to handle trains transporting troops within days of the operation.[6] Third, the great majority of Dresden’s militarily important industries were not located downtown but in the suburbs, where no bombs were dropped, at least not deliberately.[7]
[5] Olaf Groehler. Bombenkrieg gegen Deutschland, Berlin, 1990, p. 414; Hansen, p. 245; “Luftangriffe auf Dresden,” http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luftangriffe_auf_Dresden, p.7.
[6] “Luftangriffe auf Dresden,” http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luftangriffe_auf_Dresden, p. 7.
[7] Taylor, pp. 152-154, 358-359.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... e24631.htm
It cannot be denied that Dresden, like any other major German city, contained militarily important industrial installations, and that at least some of these installations were located in the inner city and were therefore wiped out in the raid, but this does not logically lead to the conclusion that the attack was planned for this purpose. Hospitals and churches were also destroyed, and numerous Allied POWs who happened to be in the city were killed, but nobody argues that the raid was organized to bring that about. Similarly, a number of Jews and members of Germany’s anti-Nazi resistance, awaiting deportation and/or execution, were able to escape from prison during the chaos caused by the bombing,[8] but no one claims that this was the objective of the raid. There is no logical reason, then, to conclude that the destruction of an unknown number of industrial installations of greater or lesser military importance was the raison d’être of the raid. The destruction of Dresden’s industry – like the liberation of a handful of Jews – was nothing more than an unplanned “by-product” of the operation.
It was crucially important to make it clear to Stalin that the military power of the Western Allies, in spite of recent setbacks in the Belgian Ardennes, should not be underestimated. The Red Army admittedly featured huge masses of infantry, excellent tanks, and a formidable artillery, but the Western Allies held in their hands a military trump which the Soviets were unable to match. That trump was their air force, featuring the most impressive collection of bombers the world had ever seen. This weapon made it possible for the Americans and the British to launch devastating strikes on targets that were far removed from their own lines. If Stalin could be made aware of this, would he not prove easier to deal with at Yalta?
It was Churchill who decided that the total obliteration of a German city, under the noses of the Soviets so to speak, would send the desired message to the Kremlin. The RAF and USAAF had been able for some time to strike a devastating blow against any German city, and detailed plans for such an operation, known as “Operation Thunderclap,” had been meticulously prepared. During the summer of 1944, however, when the rapid advance from Normandy made it seem likely that the war would be won before the end of the year, and thoughts were already turning to postwar reconstruction, a Thunderclap-style operation had begun to be seen as a means to intimidate the Soviets. In August 1944, an RAF memorandum pointed out that “the total devastation of the centre of a vast [German] city…would convince the Russian allies…of the effectiveness of Anglo-American air power.”[13]
I ALREADY responded to a similar review of the leftwing "historian" Frederick Taylor's book on Dresden published by David "Ratface" Cesarani in The Independent earlier this year 2004.
One detail should suffice to show who was correct: Cesarani scoffs at the "obscene" notion that the British government's aim was to teach the Russians a lesson on the strength of the RAF bomber hordes In his seminal history of RAF Bomber Command, author Max Hastings used a document, a two volume British internal monograph, Review of the Work of Int I, which had eluded even my researches -- and this quoted verbatim the briefing notes sent by teleprinter to every squadron of RAF Bomber Command taking part that night.
To quote my book Apocalypse 1945: the Destruction of Dresden: "Bomber Command head- quarters had issued by teleprinter identical briefing instructions to every bomber airfield. The wording, which has survived, makes odd reading now. The seven thousand British airmen were to be told that afternoon that they were about to attack Dresden, 'far the largest unbombed built-up area the enemy has got.' 'The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most,' the telex said; it then added words pregnant with other implications: 'And incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.'
The sporting phrase which occurs to me right now is, I think, Game, set and match.
INCIDENTALLY, Henry Stimson reveals in his diary that one useful purpose of the Hiroshima bombing would be to show the Russians the strength of this new weapon. Here is a passage from vol.iii of Churchill's War (as yet unpublished, of course):
"It was Stimson who formally suggested employing the Bomb. The body-count would be Japanese, but it was the effect on the Russians that counted on him and other statesmen now. As early as May 14, 1945, after talking over this 'hot potato' with General Marshall, he had dictated into his files an opinion that the way to deal with Russia now was to 'let our actions speak for words.' The Russians, he felt, would understand actions better than anything else. 'We (Americans) have got to regain the lead and perhaps do it in a pretty rough and realistic way.' This time, he had reminded Marshall, Washington held all the cards -- 'a royal straight flush,' was how he put it. 'We mustn't fool about the way we play it,' he had said. 'We have coming into action a weapon which will be unique.'
http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/General/Dr ... hPost.html
For the purpose of defeating Germany, Thunderclap was no longer considered necessary by early 1945. But towards the end of January 1945, while preparing to travel to Yalta, Churchill suddenly showed great interest in this project, insisted that it be carried out tout de suite, and specifically ordered the head of the RAF Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, to wipe out a city in Germany’s east.[14] On January 25 the British Prime Minister indicated where he wanted the Germans to be “blasted,” namely, somewhere “in their [westward] retreat from Breslau [now Wroclaw in Poland].”[15] In terms of urban centres, this was tantamount to spelling D-R-E-S-D-E-N. That Churchill himself was behind the decision to bomb a city in Germany’s east is also hinted at in the autobiography of Arthur Harris, who wrote that “the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself.”[16] It is obvious that only personalities of the calibre of Churchill were able to impose their will on the czar of strategic bombing. As the British military historian Alexander McKee has written, Churchill “intended to write [a] lesson on the night sky [of Dresden]” for the benefit of the Soviets. However, since the USAAF also ended up being involved in the bombing of Dresden, we may assume that Churchill acted with the knowledge and approval of Roosevelt. Churchill’s partners at the top of the United States’ political as well as military hierarchy, including General Marshall, shared his viewpoint; they too were fascinated, as McKee writes, by the idea of “intimidating the [Soviet] communists by terrorising the Nazis.”[17] The American participation in the Dresden raid was not really necessary, because the RAF was undoubtedly capable of wiping out Dresden in a solo performance. But the “overkill” effect resulting from a redundant American contribution was perfectly functional for the purpose of demonstrating to the Soviets the lethality of Anglo-American air power. It is also likely that Churchill did not want the responsibility for what he knew would be a terrible slaughter to be exclusively British; it was a crime for which he needed a partner.
[14] Taylor, pp. 185-186, 376; Grayling, p. 71; David Irving. The Destruction of Dresden, London, 1971, pp. 96-99.
[15] Hansen, p. 241.
[16] Arthur Travers Harris, Bomber offensive, Don Mills/Ont., 1990, p. 242.
[17] McKee, pp. 46, 105.
A Thunderclap–style operation would of course do damage to whatever military and industrial installations and communications infrastructure were housed in the targeted city, and would therefore inevitably amount to yet another blow to the already tottering German enemy. But when such an operation was finally launched, with Dresden as target, it was done far less in order to speed up the defeat of the Nazi enemy than in order to intimidate the Soviets. Using the terminology of the “functional analysis” school of American sociology, hitting the Germans as hard as possible was the “manifest function” of the operation, while intimidating the Soviets was its far more important “latent” or “hidden” function. The massive destruction wreaked in Dresden was planned – in other words, was “functional” – not for the purpose of striking a devastating blow to the German enemy, but for the purpose of demonstrating to the Soviet ally that the Anglo-Americans had a weapon which the Red Army, no matter how mighty and successful it was against the Germans, could not match, and against which it had no adequate defenses.
Many American and British generals and high-ranking officers were undoubtedly aware of the latent function of the destruction of Dresden, and approved of such an undertaking; this knowledge also reached the local commanders of the RAF and USAAF as well as the “master bombers.” (After the war, two master bombers claimed to remember that they had been told clearly that this attack was intended “to impress the Soviets with the hitting power of our Bomber Command.”)[18] But the Soviets, who had hitherto made the biggest contribution to the war against Nazi Germany, and who had thereby not only suffered the biggest losses but also scored the most spectacular successes, e.g. in Stalingrad, enjoyed much sympathy among low-ranking American and British military personnel, including bomber crews. This constituency would certainly have disapproved of any kind of plan to intimidate the Soviets, and most certainly of a plan – the obliteration of a German city from the air – which they would have to carry out. It was therefore necessary to camouflage the objective of the operation behind an official rationale. In other words, because the latent function of the raid was “unspeakable,” a “speakable” manifest function had to be concocted.
And so the regional commanders and the master bombers were instructed to formulate other, hopefully credible, objectives for the benefit of their crews. In view of this, we can understand why the instructions to the crews with respect to the objectives differed from unit to unit and were often fanciful and even contradictory. The majority of the commanders emphasized military objectives, and cited undefined “military targets,” hypothetical “vital ammunition factories” and “dumps of weapons and supplies,” Dresden’s alleged role as “fortified city,” and even the existence in the city of some “German Army Headquarters.” Vague references were also frequently made to “important industrial installations” and “marshalling yards.” In order to explain to the crews why the historical city centre was targeted and not the industrial suburbs, some commanders talked about the existence there of a “Gestapo headquarters” and of “a gigantic poison gas factory.” Some speakers were either unable to invent such imaginary targets, or were for some reason unwilling to do so; they laconically told their men that the bombs were to be dropped on “the built-up city centre of Dresden,” or “on Dresden” tout court.[19] To destroy the centre of a German city, hoping to wreak as much damage as possible to military and industrial installations and to communication infrastructures, happened to be the essence of the Allied, or at least British, strategy of “area bombing.”[20] The crew members had learned to accept this nasty fact of life, or rather of death, but in the case of Dresden many of them felt ill at ease. They questioned the instructions with respect to the objectives, and had the feeling that this raid involved something unusual and suspicious and was certainly not a “routine” affair, as Taylor presents things in his book. The radio operator of a B-17, for example, declared in a confidential communication that “this was the only time” that “[he] (and others) felt that the mission was unusual.” The anxiety experienced by the crews was also illustrated by the fact that in many cases a commander’s briefing did not trigger the crews’ traditional cheers but were met with icy silence.[21]
Directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally, the instructions and briefings addressed to the crews sometimes revealed the true function of the attack. For example, a directive of the RAF to the crews of a number of bomber groups, issued on the day of the attack, February 13, 1945, unequivocally stated that it was the intention “to show the Russians, when they reach the city, what our Bomber Command is capable of doing.”[22] Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that many crew members understood clearly that they had to wipe Dresden from the map in order to scare the Soviets. A Canadian member of a bomber crew was to state after the war to an oral historian that he was convinced that the bombing of Dresden had aimed to make it clear to the Soviets “that they had to behave themselves, otherwise we would show them what we could also do to Russian cities.”[23]
[18] Groehler, p. 404.
[19] Ibid., p. 404.
[20] The Americans preferred “precision bombing,” in theory if not always in practice.
[21] Taylor, pp. 318-19; Irving, pp. 147-48.
[22] Quotation from Groehler, p. 404. See also Grayling, p. 260.
[23] Cited in Barry Broadfoot, Six War Years 1939-1945: Memories of Canadians at Home and Abroad, Don Mills, Ontario, 1976, p. 269.
historybuff says:
After reading Taylor's book I am convinced that he is an apologist for the horrible bombing inflicted on the unfortunate residents of that city. By diminishing the numbers of dead and focusing on the activities of the Gestapo he is setting the framework to justify the firebombing. Following the bombings the wretched population had to endure the rape and pillage by the Soviet Army. I am amazed at how the Germans have rebounded from this triple whammy. As for Taylor, shame on him and his lack of compassion!!
http://www.amazon.com/review/R2TZSG45ZE ... tore=books
Book Review: 'Dresden'
By Tom Blackburn, Special to The Palm Beach Post
DRESDEN: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, by Frederick Taylor. HarperCollins; 528 pages; $26.95.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Dresden wasn't a "refugee center." Tens of thousands passed through, but authorities gave them only a day to move on or not be fed. The city had one day's intake of refugees when it was hit.
_______________________________________________________________________
In The Destruction of Dresden, a 1963 bestseller, Irving reported a death toll from the bombing of 135,000. After that number was shown to be a fake, Irving retreated to "up to 100,000." Careful study by Germans and Taylor puts the number closer to between 25,000 and 40,000.
_____________________________________________________________
quoted by David Irving here.
http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/General/Dr ... hPost.html
The problem with Irving is not that he is fabricating the fact of refugees, but that he is fabricating the number - in that he has, or at least he offers us, no source for his numbers which, moreover, seem internally highly inconsistent. In his Preface Irving tells us, in justification to the otherwise astonishing 135,000 asserted death toll, (over three times that of Hamburg, with a population of 1.6 million) that Dresden had swollen to twice its normal size of 650,000, which, he claims, was due to "a massive influx of refugees from the East, Allied and Russian prisoners of war, and thousands of forced laborers." He fails to tell us there or elsewhere the source for his calculation of the over 650,000 population increase.
Nor is he of much help in informing us of the breakdown of its various components, although in Section 2 of his Appendix II (which, although replete with various figures, gives no source for the derivation of any of them) he states that there were "some 300,000 to 400,000 'homeless' refugees in the city before the raids" - by which I assume he meant at the time of the raids. Which would leave 250,000 to 350,000 as the number of POWs and forced laborers. But although there were indeed POW camps in the vicinity of Dresden, there were none in the city itself. As Irving was later informed by the Swiss Red Cross "There were no PoW camps in Dresden itself, and consequently Mr. Kleinert's reports [a Red Cross representative who was inspecting the PoW camps at the time of the air raids] did not even allude to the air raids on the town." Evans Book at 163. So without the PoWs, the balance of the population increase would have to consist of forced laborers, but Irving gives no hint as to what in the world so many were doing there.
One would suppose that a sudden influx of 650,000 people into a city already of that size would have led to generally chaotic conditions, and that is the picture that Irving portrays. Yet Georg Feydt, at the time of the raid the Dresden Civil Defense Engineer, wrote in 1953 that "I cannot imagine a more peaceful and calm picture than Dresden on the afternoon of 13 February 1945." Götz Bergander, who at 18 had been assigned to help accommodate the incoming refugees, writing in 1977 remembered that most of them had somehow been quartered in emergency accomodations. He went on to estimate that on the 13-14 of February 9,000 had been temporarily lodged in the railway stations; 6,000 had been trecking with carts spread out over the whole of the city and 85,000 had been staying in emergency accommodations. There was no forced billeting in private homes or huge temporary camps erected. Bergander then doubled his estimate to include those who may have found their own lodging for the night, resulting in an estimate of 200,000 refugees.
The historian Friedrich Reichert, writing in 1994, quoted witnesses who attested to the fact that there was no billeting of refugees in either private houses or in public parks or squares, pointed out that due to numbers of men who were away on active service Dresden's resident population had dropped to 567,000, and to this added 100,000 temporary refugees to arrive at the city's total population at the time of the raids. Rudolf Förster's Article "Dresden", in Hiller, Jäckel and Rohwer (eds.) Städte in 2. Weltkrieg: Ein Internationaler Vergleich (Essen, 1991) ( Cities in the Second World War: An International Comparison) had come up with the same number of refugees.
And Irving himself wrote, at 106, that military police had been stationed Dresden's outskirts to direct refugees with horses and carts round the city, allowing entrance only to those on foot and those only for three days.
Yet in his 1995 edition Irving's alleged number of refugees in Dresden had increased from the 300,000 to 400,000 stated in one place in his original 1963 Book to "one or two million refugees".
As far as I know, the only attempt Irving ever made was to substantiate his "swollen to its double size" assertion for Dresden's population was in his 1966 Corgi paperback edition where he claimed that the Dresden City authorities had issued 1,250,000 ration cards by the time of the raids, citing statistics "provided by Mr. Howard Gee [further unidentified], who was given them [by whom? unanswered!] during a visit in June, 1963." This fact disappeared from the 1995 edition because as Irving himself admitted he had subsequently become aware that the Allies had dropped millions of fake ration cards to confuse the population and hamper the German administration.
The above is based primarily upon Evans Report and Evans Book at 172-5. Evans concludes at 172 that "It seemed obvious to me in the light of the increase which they underwent between the 1966 and 1995 editions of his book that these figures [as to the number of refugees in Dresden at the time of the raids] were entirely arbitrary. At no point did Irving give a source for any of them. They were figments of his own imagination."
How can you tout a book as an exposé of "The Most Lethal Air Attack in History" and "the single greatest massacre in human history" (see my immediately previous post) without coming up with a death toll far and above that of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Hamburg or any other city bombed to smithereens in WWII?
Answer: You can't!
Next question: how can you produce a death toll in a city of 650,000 population which toll exceeds by over 3 times that produced by the fire storm in Hamburg, which latter city had about 1 million more residents? [ yes, Hamburg may have been better defended, but despite that as Irving himself states, Appendix II, it endured more than twice the tonnage of bombs dropped and had almost twice the number of people rendered homeless as did Dresden.]
And, as a follow up: how can you possibly explain the totally disproportionate death toll of over 20 times that which you yourself quote, at 52, as resulting from the firestorm at Kassel, when Dresden's permanent population was less than 3 times Kassel's, its total homes destroyed less than 3 times Kassel's and the total tonnage of bombs dropped less than 2 times that on Kassel????
Answer to both: Easy! You just pack Dresden to the very hilt with however many refugees you think it takes to give your figure at least a semblance of credibility!
Note: Alexander McGee, who in his The Devil's Tinderbox: Dresden, 1945 (London 1982) ends up taking Seydewitz' original 35,000 figure, and then on the basis of poor air raid protection and the number of refugees in the city (as to neither of which can I understand the relevance to the number of corpses actually counted) suggests it might be doubled to 70,000 "without fear of exaggeration". See Taylor, cited in my immediately preceding post, at 446, and hereafter simply "Taylor".
April 24, 2009 (Friday)
Windsor (England)
I DEPOSIT Jessica at the school gates at 7:55 a.m. She is nodding off during most of the drive; confesses that she sat up until eleven pm last night reading a book. I am so impressed by this No. 5.
A website visitor in North Wales has donated fifty dollars for our website this morning. That's nice. "Keep up the good work," He encourages me: "You will be proved right in the end."
Back at the Public Record Office I continue to turn the pages of the immense volumes of decoded SS and police messages, released from top secret files only a few years ago. I have now read nearly fifty volumes and I have reached the year 1945. This particular volume has over 2,000 pages of flimsy paper, with ten or fifteen much-abbreviated decoded German messages typed on each page: the contents are madly out of sequence, bound into the volume in the order they were decoded weeks or months after the war.
I methodically read each one, and type a copy of those messages I may need for my Heinrich Himmler biography. Hard sledding, but it is worth it. Their value as a source is immense -- nothing here has been written just for post-war window-dressing (as some 1944 and 1945 documents clearly have been): nobody guessed that we would ever be reading these secret code messages.
AS THE day draws on I come across a document which I only half-suspected I might ever find. In 1961, when I was writing my first book "The Destruction of Dresden", I was confidentially approached by a German schoolteacher, Hanns Voigt; he said that after the horrific British air raid, he was put in charge of Dresden's Missing Persons Bureau, Abteilung Tote - the Deceased Section. He built an immense card index, and he kept a diary; and he estimated for me that the final death toll in Dresden would have reached 135,000. This was the figure that I, and after me Kurt Vonnegut and others, always used.
Other city officials gave the same kind of estimates. (Later this year I shall post on my website a full dossier on the Dresden death toll.)
Voigt's estimate was a thorn in the side of both German Governments -- both east and west. They had always played down, even trivialised, the air raid casualty figures caused by the British saturation bombing (even as they hyped the numbers killed in the Jewish tragedy).
Only last year a German Government commission consisting of, not just conformist but kow-towing, line-toeing, bowing-and-scraping historians and Nickeseln, agreed that the death roll in the two hour man-made 1945 holocaust in Dresden was far lower, "only 25,000" (or, if possible, even less).
Without doing any in-depth research -- such scholars are far too important for that -- they relied on the police chief's early March 1945 report (which in fact I was the first to find), because it indicated lower figures than Hanns Voigt's for dead and missing.
In the Deborah Lipstadt Trial, her highly-paid chief expert Professor Richard "Skunky" Evans (left) vilified Voigt; he implied that Voigt was a liar, he questioned whether the Missing Persons bureau had ever existed, and he called him a Nazi with an agenda. (Voigt had, we now know, been given a good post-war position in the Soviet Zone before emigrating legally to the West, so the "Nazi" allegation seems unlikely.) Aping Evans, Mr Justice Gray accused me in his 333-page Judgment of falsifying history.
I was not invited to make any submissions to the Dresden Commission. No surprises there. This afternoon, my quiet patience is rewarded. I have come across this new secret document, signed by the police chief of Dresden, and decoded by the British some weeks after the war.
http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/General/Dr ... de_600.jpg
At 5:55 p.m. on March 24, 1945 -- the day in fact when I turned eight, I remember it vividly -- the Dresden Polizeipräsident reported in code to SS Oberführer Dr. Dietrichs:
Re: Missing Persons Situation in Dresden Air Raid Defence region.
The Lord Mayor of Dresden City has established (a) a Central Bureau for Missing Persons and nine Missing Persons registries; (b) eighty- to one-hundred thousand missing-person notifications are estimated to have been registered so far; (c) 9,720 missing-person notifications have been confirmed as fatalities; (d) to date, information on twenty thousand missing person cases has been given out; (e) accurate statistical data possibly only later.
So Voigt was telling the truth.
Even the "hundred thousand" figure for those reported missing must be an under-estimate. There were over half a million homeless refugees in the streets of Dresden, fleeing the Red Army siege of Breslau to the East. Whole refugee families must have been engulfed by the Dresden holocaust, with nobody surviving to report them as "missing".
Another thing seems brutally clear: those listed as "missing" -- in addition to those bodies formally identified and buried or incinerated by this date -- were never going to return. To use the words of the telegram I found yesterday (see above) they were dead, "carbonised," and unidentifiable.
What do these decoded messages tell us about our own lazy and conformist historians, and about "Skunky" Evans in particular? He, and they, would never have found them. It has taken me these many years. Go the extra mile. Eventually, as this morning's Welshman said, "You will be proved right in the end".
Werd
1. Refuted the claim on axishistory that straffing never occured or if it did, it did not have official sanction.
2. Refuted the claim on axishistory that the entire first wave attacked Prague and not Dresden and that irving has known for decades but pretended not to.
3. Refuted the claim of Taylor that Dresden had enough military significance to warrant being bombed.
Stars & Stripes
London Edition, Saturday, May 5, 1945, Vol. 5, No. 156
Air Raid on Dresden Killed More Than 300,000
by Dan Regan
Stars and Stripes Staff Writer
__________________________________
One British sergeant said,
"Reports from Dresden police that 300,000 died as a result of the bombing didn't include deaths among 1,000,000 evacuees from the Breslau area trying to escape from the Russians. There were no records on them.
"After seeing the results of the bombing, I believe these figures are correct."
And in the 1963 edition, Irving stated in his Preface, at 11, that the air raid:
...is estimated authoritatively to have killed more that 135,000 of the population of a city swollen to twice its peacetime size by a massive influx of refugees from the East, Allied and Russian prisoners of war, and thousand of forced laborers.
135,000 being straddled by Crossman's 120,000 to 150,000.
In that edition, Irving quoted, at 226, a "Top Secret Order of the Day" dated March 23, 1945 which purported to contain an extract from a report by the Dresden Police President stating that 202,040 bodies had been recovered, primarily of women and children, and that the final death toll was expected to exceed 250,000. As his source for this Irving cited Professor Max Seydewitz' Die Zerstörung und Wiederaufbau von Dresden [The Destruction and Rebuilding of Dresden] (Dresden 1955) no page given. And in 1963 Irving agreed with Seydewitz that this "Order of the Day" was a spurious piece of Nazi propaganda. This should be kept in mind as the tale developes.
Irving's promotion of the German propaganda figure of 250,000 came later in his 1966 English edition, by which time he had gotten hold of a piece of paper which, he asserted, led him to change his mind as to the falsity of the "Order of the Day". I'll try to get into this in detail in another post.
As intended, this caused a firestorm, which totally incinerated the old town, and which has been described by the British journalist and historian Phillip Knightley as
... an artificial tornado in which air is sucked into the fire centre at an ever-increasing speed. At Dresden, winds approaching 100 miles an hour swept debris and people into a fire centre where the temperature exceeded 1,000 degrees centigrade. The flames ate everything organic, everything that would burn. People died by the thousands, cooked, incinerated, or asphyxiated. The American planes came the next day to machine-gun survivors as they struggled to the banks ofthe Elbe.
The Passing of Kurt Vonnegut -
An Eyewitness to the Holocaust of Dresden
Christopher Bollyn
12 April 2007
_______________________________
Another eyewitness, the late August Kuklane, had spent time in Dresden looking for his Estonian parents among the hundreds of thousands of refugees that had sought refuge in Dresden during the desperate winter of 1945. Kuklane told me that the number of people estimated to have perished in the city center that had been totally destroyed by fire was about 600,000.
Both Vonnegut and Kuklane witnessed American fighter planes strafing the survivors of the holocaust of Dresden:
"American fighter planes came in under the smoke to see if anything was moving. They saw Billy and the rest moving down there. The planes sprayed them with machine gun bullets but the bullets missed," Vonnegut wrote.
"Then they saw some other people moving down by the riverside and they shot at them. They hit some of them. So it goes."
http://www.erichufschmid.net/TFC/Bollyn ... negut.html
Churchill wanted to roast German refugees
The British historian David Irving quoted on 13 February 1990, on the occasion of a lecture to 45. Anniversary of the destruction of Dresden in the Dresdner culture palace, the war criminal Churchill:
"I would not like to have suggestions, how we can destroy war-important goals in the surrounding countryside of Dresden, i would like have suggestions , how we can roast 600.000 Refugees from Breslau."
However to roast the Germans was Churchill and Roosevelt not enough. On the next morning they sent then low fliying planes,
wich killed survivors, mostly women and children, at the Elbufer (River border of Elbe)with their on-board weapons.
(some historians doubt this, see "Tieflieger over Dresden"
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/3 ... nbunker-21 )
P-51 mustangs of the 352., 356., and 359. Fighter group as well as English Mosquitos shot on 14 February 1945 at defenseless old people, women and children.
Dr. Helmuth Schnatz, the author of several articles on the WW II air war in Germany, was inspired by Bergander's book to undertake his own investigation of the Dresden "strafing" allegation. To this he devoted some 10 years, and finally published the results in his Tiefflieger Über Dresden? Legenden und Wirklichkeit (Low Flying Aircraft Over Dresden? Legends or Reality?) (Cologne, 2000), in which his conclusions demonstrated that Irving's "facts" were in truth nothing more than fantasies.
Certainly, as Mr. Mills suggests, it is possible that one of the Mustang fighter pilots accompanying the US bombers on February 14th took off on a strafing foray as a frolic and adventure of his own. But Irving does not treat that as a possibility, but would have us accept it as a certainty! And there is no documentary evidence to support it, and much documentary evidence as well as tactical and logistical considerations to argue against it - to none of which does Irving pay the slightest heed.
Neal Ascherson
The Observer, Sunday 22 February 2004
_________________________________________________________
Taylor disproves another myth, still widely believed, that the American raiders next morning used fighters to strafe survivors fleeing the city or huddling on the Elbe river meadows. This did not happen.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/f ... .features1
The Dresden target map actually used by Wing Cdr Maurice Smith for the first attack on Dresden. It shows the fan shaped sector he was to attack -- the heart of the famous old city. Those who claim the target was the city's industries or bridges or railroads are lying.
February 27, 2007 (Tuesday)
Budapest (Hungary)
I have begun work on a dossier on the Dresden death roll. The figure I gave in "Apocalypse 1945: the Destruction of Dresden" was produced as one of the examples of my "manipulating history," aka errors, suggested by the defendants in the Lipstadt Trial. They started with, I think nineteen, the judge rejected seven, leaving twelve including this one (it had taken Professor Richard "Skunky" Evans (right) and his team around twenty man-years, reading all my books, to find these "errors": Twelve mistakes in thirty books is not bad, it means I made less than half an error per book. But that is another matter.
It was Hanns Voigt who suggested my estimate of 135,000 as a median figure. Voigt was a senior school teacher (Oberstudienrat) in West Germany when we corresponded. In 1945 he had been appointed director of the Abteilung Tote of the Missing Persons Bureau in Dresden after the violent RAF bombing raid of February 1945 -- i.e. the bureau's Fatalities Section. Not a bad source, I thought at the time I published my book, as a twenty-five year old in 1963.
The communist regime and its successors and left-wing adherents preferred the figure of 35,000 - a figure rejected as ludicrously low by all the experts who had been in Dresden at the time - Lieutenant-General Klaus Mehnert, the city commandant, who suggested 140,000, and Professor Fetscher the (extreme leftwing) director of civil defence in the city in 1945, who thought 180,000 was closer. Karl Bodenschatz, Hermann Göring's Chef des Ministeramtes who visited Dresden a few days after the raids, spoke in captivity of 150,000.
Needless to say "Skunky" Evans went straight for the lowest figure, 35,000, and accused me of deliberately lying.
I cross examined him on this alleged "manipulation" for forty pages of transcript on the 23rd day of the Lipstadt libel trial , on February 21, 2000; at the end of the day I concluded:
Q. Thank you very much, Professor Evans. I have no further questions"
The Judge, Sir Charles Gray, thanked me:
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Well done, Mr Irving. You have completed your cross-examination as you said you would.
Evans' stock answer to my best sources was to dismiss them as "Nazis," and hence discredited. For example, General Kurt Daluege, chief of German police, giving figures on the disproportionately high number of Jews among the insurance scammers before the Nazis came to power, was, said Evans, a Nazi (correct, no doubt), and hence untrustworthy. I offer no prizes for guessing how many "Nazi" sources Evans himself nonetheless uses in his own turgid history books.
As for Hanns Voigt, Evans dismissed him as a "fascist" (his source was Walter Weidauer, the notorious Communist mayor of Dresden who deliberately destroyed the city's remaining monuments to the Saxon kings out of visceral hatred for all monarchies).
Now I receive belated confirmation of Voigt's worth from a Dresden historian, Walter Schaarschmidt, who is publishing a book on the death-roll controversy. Was Voigt a fascist? Hardly, and I am afraid my belief in Evans as a historian of worth is sadly shaken:
Walther Schaarschmidt writes:
I have managed to find the niece of Hanns Voigt in Dresden, Frau Ursula H.. She reports that Voigt was a music teacher, directed the Sachsenwerk works orchestra and elevated it to third place in the DDR [Communist East Germany] in 1954. In 1955 he emigrated "legally" to Bielefeld. Until that moment the authorities had never questioned Voigt! In Bielefeld he directed the school orchestra of the Max-Planck School and composed his own works. He became an Oberstudientrat and ultimately Studiendirector (director of studies). The pupils elected him Best Teacher year after year. From her mother (Mrs Voigt), Frau H. learned that he had been rigorously interrogated by "the Russians" and tortured. . . But he would not budge from his statements. His widow is still living in Bielefeld, but unfortunately she refuses access to his papers.
German editionDoesn't sound like much of a fascist to me. Of course, in the dark and vasty woods that Professor "Skunky" Evans infests, every bush and shadow must look pretty frightening. Read the transcript, however, and see how well he earned the 250,000 dollars he was paid for his neutral testimony by Lipstadt's defence.
After the articles were printed in the Washington Star, Goebbels' went to work on further embellishing the level of destruction that occurred in Dresden. On March 4th, 1945, the official report about of the bombing was nationally published in the German controlled Das Reich weekly newspaper (founded by none other than Goebbels himself). The report demonized the bombing as an uncivilized and unnecessary attack on a defenseless city with the sole intention being the mass-murder of innocent and defenseless civilians.14
Later in March, intentions to foster even more outrage about the bombing increased (not figuratively speaking) exponentially. The Dresden Police and SS issued a supplement to the neutral press by issuing a report entitled “order of the day 47” or as it was known at the time "TR47". While the number of those killed was listed on the report as being just over 20,204, with simple ease they cunningly added a zero to the end making the estimate a whopping 202,040. Several neutral newspapers, as well as the nationally published German paper the Das Reich, took the ten-times higher total as being correct and published the total to their readers. The consequences of the extra zero forever result in the death-toll being so wrongly believed.15
http://www.blex.org/research/dresden.html
In that [1963] edition, Irving quoted, at 226, a "Top Secret Order of the Day" dated March 23, 1945 which purported to contain an extract from a report by the Dresden Police President stating that 202,040 bodies had been recovered, primarily of women and children, and that the final death toll was expected to exceed 250,000. As his source for this Irving cited Professor Max Seydewitz' Die Zerstörung und Wiederaufbau von Dresden [The Destruction and Rebuilding of Dresden] (Dresden 1955) no page given. And in 1963 Irving agreed with Seydewitz that this "Order of the Day" was a spurious piece of Nazi propaganda. This should be kept in mind as the tale developes.
Irving's promotion of the German propaganda figure of 250,000 came later in his 1966 English edition, by which time he had gotten hold of a piece of paper which, he asserted, led him to change his mind as to the falsity of the "Order of the Day". I'll try to get into this in detail in another post.
A Marques of Lisbon has arguments about the 1945 Dresden death toll, Sunday, March 20, 2005
______________________________________________________
I believe there are only three major single-document sources for the Dresden numbers, besides the evidence one could collect through the scattered local information such as the missing person center or the "street books" kept by the searchers who did the clearing of the ruins, apparently pointing to at least 30,000 or 40,000:
TB47 (Tagesbefehl Nr 47, or the Dresden Police and SS "Order of the Day 47", of March 27): This one used to be the best-known estimate, pointing to 202,040 already found dead and to a probable total near 250,000. According to Taylor (Bloomsbury paperback edition, p. 424) it's a faked document, not a post-war one, but one that was leaked at the time to the neutral press by Goebbel's Propaganda Ministry, with the result that (p. 426) "the extent of the wide, long-lasting ripple of international outrage that followed the Dresden bombing represents, at least in part, Goebbels's final, dark masterpiece."
_____________________________________________________________________
Taylor argues as follows (pages 505 - 506):
________________________________________________________________
"If the 'actual figures' were up to 250,000, as the supporters of the fake TB47 had insisted, of what could the rumors possibly have whispered? Millions of dead? Clearly exceptional permission had been granted, in view of the widespread panic and fear aroused by wildly inflated casualty rates in Dresden, for the real (if temporary) numbers of dead to be cited by those in authority. And the real numbers were 20,240 and 25,000 respectively, [sic: the paragraph ends with a comma, apparently leaving the sentence unfinished and the word "respectively" ambiguous].
"There was indeed only one explanation. A zero had been added to these figures for propaganda purposes. Irving duly wrote a letter to The Times of London in which he admitted that the two six-figures estimates quoted in the so-called 'TB47' were 'probably' a Nazi fake."
I think Taylor may have a point, but allow me a couple of comments besides my asking your present opinion on the value of the FR and the SR as documentary evidence.
First of all, it seems to me that if the TB47 really had been "Goebbels's dark masterpiece", one would hardly expect to find in it a forgotten "exceptional permission for the real numbers of dead to be cited", left over from a previous report concerning much smaller figures and sounding odd in the context of the 250,000 projection with no actual rumors greater than that circulating, specially since no official numbers, large or small, were to be publicized anywhere, as Taylor makes clear elsewhere. "Goebbels's clear nonsense" might have been a more appropriate designation for the "masterpiece".
On the other hand, it doesn't surprise me that rumors really could exceed the TB47 figures. After all, most accounts of the preparation of the mission, from the British side, agree that something out of the ordinary was being sought for the "education" of the approaching Soviets, so to speak, resulting in the sort of incendiary bombing plan (cutting off the exit ways, with a second day of bombing to make any relief as difficult as possible etc.) used for inflicting maximum casualties.
And it's clear that the presence of a large number of refugees from Silesia was also known inside, as well as outside, Germany. If the U.S. Armed Forces paper Stars and Stripes itself later quoted Allied PWs who were brought in by the Germans for the relief work, placing the figure at 300,000 plus an indeterminate number among the 1,000,000 evacuees who had no records on them, then it seems clear that rumors may indeed have suggested greater figures than the actual ones in TB47.
Second, if the Dresden casualty figure is brought down to Taylor's 25,000, one is left with the very odd result that Allied air power, employed for exemplary purposes to its full measure and with no restrictions, over a specially vulnerable civilian target of large size, near the end of the War, when Allied air superiority was absolute and German defences nearly inexistent, was less effective than it used to be in previous, much more difficult, operations over Hamburg or Berlin, for instance. I believe the extension of the sad ruins left in Dresden suggest a degree of utter destruction rarely seen elsewhere, rather than a botched mission with only a fraction of the intended results achieved.
Barrington James wrote:Let’s put it this way: 3, 300 tons or 6,600,00 pounds of bombs were dropped on the centre of Dresden, the temperature of the centre of the city got as hot as 1, 800 F….even the asphalt in the streets melted… and those in the bomb shelters actually melted into a human soup. If ten pounds of bombs killed just one person that means 660, 000 people died over the two nights of bombing. Probably more.
"2. DRESDEN WAS A MAJOR RAIL HUB FOR THE MOVEMENT OF TROOPS, MUNITIONS, ETC. Taylor provides solid statistical data about rail movements to support his argument that Dresden's marshaling yards were a legitimate target. Let's assume these yards were critically important. But Allied planners did not consider them to be sufficiently important to include them as a target in the RAF's crushing attack of February 13th - which concentrated on the city's residential quarter. When the USAAF attacked rail facilities the next day, there was no follow up then or later, even though the yards were quickly returned to full operation. It's apparent that much of the "communications hub" argument was added later on as a justification - after the attack took place."
Thursday, October 24, 2013
U.S. drone killings of civilians in Pakistan have WWII precedent
Long before American drones were murdering civilians in Pakistan, American pilots were committing similar war crimes in Germany
In a 1985 autobiography by the American who was the first pilot to break the sound barrier, the author described how, while serving in the US armed forces during World War II in the autumn of 1944, his fighter group was attacking Germany and "...assigned an area fifty miles by fifty miles and ordered to strafe anything that moved...We weren't asked how we felt zapping people. It was a miserable, dirty mission, but we all took off on time and did it ... We were ordered to commit an atrocity, pure and simple, but the brass who approved this action probably felt justified because wartime Germany wasn't easily divided between 'innocent civilians' and its military machine. The farmer tilling his potato field might have been feeding German troops.”
Chuck Yeager, Yeager: An Autobiography (New York: Bantam Books, 1985) pp. 79-80.
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