Bombings and War Crimes Questions

[TruthSeeker7]

How were the bombings of Allied cities like Warsaw, London, Belgrade, Piraeus, Rotterdam, Stalingrad, etc. different from the absolute flattening of German cities by Allied forces. Of course Wikipedia wants to make it sound like the Germans strafed children, and I found an article that says Germans purposely targeted civilians in Warsaw.

https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/ge ... nts-reveal

I have a feeling this is falsified and German cities were the real victim here, could someone provide me with some context to refute that the Germans committed aerial war crimes like the Allies?

[OtherSheep]

How were the bombings of Allied cities like Warsaw, London, Belgrade, Piraeus, Rotterdam, Stalingrad, etc. different from the absolute flattening of German cities by Allied forces. Of course Wikipedia wants to make it sound like the Germans strafed children, and I found an article that says Germans purposely targeted civilians in Warsaw.

https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/ge ... nts-reveal

I have a feeling this is falsified and German cities were the real victim here, could someone provide me with some context to refute that the Germans committed aerial war crimes like the Allies?

Dresden was literally holocausted after the war was already won. And it was full of civilians who were THE target. Dresden can answer a whole lot of questions about what you rightfully call falsified history.

What happened to this mountain of German shoes? did they make it to the camps for distribution? where they were then photographed and labelled h-v shoes.

"From the 17,295 corpses delivered to the Heidefriedhof, the burial squads removed all intact outer clothing and footwear. A mountain of shoes and boots resulted. By March 26 they filled a five-ton truck; it was sent to the labour camps for distribution."

What did the Communists do with those buckets of German wedding rings? dump them in a box and call it h-v rings.

"By May 6, related Voigt, he had collected between ten and twenty thousand of these gold rings, stored in two gallon buckets in the ministry of the interior building on Königsufer. ... Red Army officials moved into the ministry buildings and the complete collection of valuables including the wedding rings was transported without further ado as booty to the Soviet Union."

"I am become death, destroyer of worlds," said the bomb-maker of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The real answer to your question is Offence vs Defence. According to the UN law or against all of the laws of mankind.

[Hannover]

In the future I suggest that you search first, it's all here.

Nonetheless, they were legitimate military targets, including Warsaw were leaflets were dropped beforehand.
Any German 'retaliations' were long after Germany begged the Allies to stop target civilian centers.
There is no proof of Germans strafing children. Zionist dominated Wikipedia? LOL
We do know from stated fact (ex.: pilot Chuck Yeager, ) that the Allies did strafe and attack transports of food & medicine into the camps greatly increasing disease death tolls
ex:
Who started bombing civilians first: Germany or Great Britain’
http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=8172

War-Invocation: From May 11th to September 6th, 1940
viewtopic.php?f=20&t=10225

Hitler only undertook the bombing of British civilian targets reluctantly three months after the RAF had commenced bombing German civilian targets. Hitler would have been willing at any time to stop the slaughter. Hitler was genuinely anxious to reach with Britain an agreement confining the action of aircraft to battle zones... Retaliation was certain if we carried the war into Germany... there was a reasonable possibility that our capital and industrial centres would not have been attacked if we had continued to refrain from attacking those of Germany... We began to bomb objectives on the German mainland before the Germans began to bomb objectives on the British mainland... Because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic bombing offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May 11th, 1940, the publicity it deserves.'

- J.M. Spaight, CB, CBE, Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry, Bombing Vindicated.

Considerations Affecting The Design Of The Ideal Bomber Aircraft For The Royal Air Force March 1938
https://archive.org/details/Considerati ... eMarch1938

British War-Initiation: Irving's View:
viewtopic.php?f=20&t=7364

More on the British initiation of terror bombings of civilians here:
http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1786&p=11006
With a list of German towns, cities where the civilian population was illegally terror bombed long before German retaliation.

excerpts:

http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/Churchill/ ... plies.html

..........the British, by their own admission, initiated unrestricted bombing of civilian areas ought to merit for them membership in the select society of "war criminals." The unbelieving reader need only consult the testimony of the British officials J. M. Spaight and Sir Arthur Harris, for incontrovertible proof of this charge.99 A decision of the British Air Ministry made on May 11, 1940, to attack targets in Western Germany instituted the practice of bombing purely civilian objectives. This "epoch-making event," as F. J. P. Veale correctly describes it, marked an ominous departure from the rule that hostilities are to be limited to operations against enemy military forces alone.100 Spaight, former Principal Secretary of the Air Ministry, makes the following amazing comment on the decision of May 11, 1940:
Because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic bombing offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May 11, 1940, the publicity it deserves. That surely was a mistake. It was a splendid decision.101
But the "great decision," the "splendid decision" of May 11, 1940, which was ultimately to cost the lives of millions, including thousands of Mr. Spaight's own countrymen, was to have an even more grisly sequel, for, according to Sir Charles Snow who had charge of selecting scientific personnel for war research in Great Britain in World War II, F. A. Lindemann, a Cabinet member and confidant of Churchill, produced in early 1942 a remarkable Cabinet paper on the subject of the strategic bombing of Germany:
It described, in quantitative terms, the effect on Germany of a British bombing offensive in the next eighteen months (approximately March 1942-September 1943). The paper laid down a strategic policy. The bombing must be directed essentially against German working-class houses. Middle-class houses have too much space round them, and so are bound to waste bombs ...102
One wonders if it was the cultivated humanitarianism inherent in this decision to assure the death of more working class Germans per bomb which entitled the Allies, and in particular the British, to sit in moral judgment on German leaders at Nuremberg in 1946!
99. J. M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated (London: Geoffrey Bles, Ltd., 1944) and Sir Arthur Harris, bomber Offensive (London: Collins, 1947).
100. F. J. P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism (Apppleton: C. C. Nelson Publishing Company, 1953), p. 122.
101. Spaight, op. cit., p. 7.
102. C. P. Snow, Science and Government (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 48.

Letter to PBS on fraudulent 'documentary' about the 'Blitz'

Dr. A.R. WESSERLE
16 March 1981
PBS Television "The Blitz"

Sirs:

Rarely have I come across a television broadcast more vicious in intent and more warped in execution than your recent "Blitz on Britain." As a survivor of the mass air raid executed against my native city of Prague, Bohemia, on the Christian Holy Day of Palm Sunday, 1945, by the Anglo-American strategic bomber force - a raid that maimed or murdered thousands a few seconds before the conclusion of the Second World War - I say this:

1. There can be no comparison between the brutality of the Anglo-American bomber offensive, on one hand, and the minimality of the German-Italian efforts, on the other. As the commander of the British strategic air offensive, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris shows in his Bomber Offensive (Macmillan, New York, 1947) 23 German cities had more than 60 percent of their built-up area destroyed; 46 had half of it destroyed. 31 communities had more than 500 acres obliterated: Berlin, 6427 acres: Hamburg, 6200 acres; Duesseldorf, 2003; Cologne (through air attack), 1994. By contrast, the three favorite targets of the Luftwaffe: London, Plymouth and Coventry, had 600 acres, 400, and just over 100 acres destroyed.

2. Anglo-American strategic bombers, according to official sources of the West German government in 1962, dropped 2,690,000 metric tons of bombs on Continental Europe; 1,350,000 tons were dropped on Germany within its 1937 boundaries; 180,000 tons on Austria and the Balkans; 590,000 tons on France; 370,000 tons on Italy; and 200,000 tons on miscellaneous targets such as Bohemia, Slovakia and Poland. By contrast, Germany dropped a total of 74,172 tons of bombs as well as V-1 and V-2 rockets and "buzz bombs" on Britain - five percent of what the Anglo-Saxons rained down on Germany. The Federal German Government has established the minimum count - not an estimate - of 635,000 German civilians were killed in France, Italy, Rumania, Hungary, Czecheslovakia, and elsewhere.

3. Both Germany and Britain initiated air raids on naval and military targets as of 3 September 1939. However, when the British attacks on port installations in Northern Germany ended in disaster, with a devastating majority of bombers downed - the Battle of the German Bight - Britain switched over to less costly night air raids on civilian targets such as Berlin and the Ruhr industrial region. By contrast, Germany replied in kind only in the winter months of 1940/41, a year later. Observers indubitably British, such as the late Labour Minister Crossman, the scientist and writer C.P. Snow, and the Earl of Birkenhead, have demonstrated that it was not Germany but Britain that, after May, 1940, unleashed an official policy of unrestricted and unlimited raids on civilian populations under its new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and his science advisor, Dr. Lindemann. Professor Lindemann, the later Viscount Cherwell, coolly calculated that, by using a force of 10,000 heavy bombers to attack and destroy the 58 largest German cities, one-third of the population of Germany would be "de-housed." The assumption, of course, also was that out of those 25-27 million homeless at least ten percent - 2.5 to 3 million people - would be killed. On this score alone, Winston Churchill and his advisors deserve to rank among the maddest mass murderers in history. In fact, as West German records show, 131 German towns were hit by heavy strategic raids. Only the courage of the Luftwaffe pilots, the effectiveness of the air defense network and the strength of the fire fighting organization worked together to prevent a bloodbath to the extent envisioned by the Prime Minister.

4. Blood baths did occur when conditions were right. When the Anglo-American bombing policy reached its first grand climax in a raid on Hamburg that stretched over several days and nights in July, 1943, a minimum of 40,000 to 50,000 civilians burned to death. With the defensive power of the Reich worn down in the second half of 1944 and in 1945, the Anglo-Saxons indulged in ever more massive extermination raids against Europe. Communities of little or no military value, even if attacked previously, were now pulverized, preferably under conditions of the utmost horror. Christian holy days, and dates and sites of famous art festivals were select occasions for raids. Many of the most beautiful cities of Europe and the world were systematically pounded into nothingness, often during the last weeks of the war, among them: Wuerzburg, Hildesheim, Darmstadt, Kassel, Nürnberg, Braunschweig. Little Pforzheim in south-west Germany had 17,000 people killed. Dresden, one of the great art centers and in 1945 a refuge for perhaps a million civilians, was decimated with the loss of at least 100,000 souls. Europe from Monte Cassino to Luebeck and Rostock on the Baltic, from Caen and Lisieux in France to Pilsen, Prague, Bruenn, Budapest and Bucharest reeled under the barbaric blows of the bombers.

5. Nor did the extermination raids stop with Europe. Cigar-chomping General Curtis LeMay demonstrated in. the Far East that record kills could be achieved without resort to atomic weapons. By applying the lessons learned in Europe to the wooden architecture of the Asian mainland and Japan he raised "fire storms" which surpassed even those of Hamburg, n Japanese civilians were killed through bombing. Millions of others fell victim to it, from Mukden, Manchuria, to Rangoon, Burma. It goes without saying that LeMay and his colleagues could not have carried out their campaigns of mass annihilation without the backing of the highest political leaders in the land. In fact, the United States Government had placed orders for the immediate development of four-engined, superheavy, very-long-range bombers (the XB 15, the B-17, the XB 19, the B-24 and the B-29) starting in 1934. Thus, the Roosevelt Administration had begun to lay plans for offensive, strategic, global war back in 1933, the year of its inception. With the later exception of Britain, none of the other "large" powers followed suit: neither France, Italy and Germany, nor Soviet Russia and Japan the latter with extensive holdings in the Pacific. These are sobering facts. PBS, with its record of fine programming, has much to lose if it insists on presenting biassed reports such as "Blitz on Britain" or "UXB." If you care to tap the unplumbed depths of sentimentality, envy and hatred, start a comic strip. In the meantime, we'll change channels.
Give poor Alistair Cooke, who has been mightily discomfited of late, a much-needed respite.

Sincerely, Dr. A.R. Wesserle

Source: Reprinted from The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 381-384.

In addition:

“As early as 1953 H.M. Stationary Office published the first volume of a work ‘The Royal Air Force’, 1939-1945 entitled ‘The Fight at Odds’, a book described as “officially commissioned and based throughout on official documents which had been read and approved by the Air Ministry Historical Branch.” The author , Mr. Dennis Richards, states plainly the destruction of oil plants and factories was only a secondary purpose of the British air attacks on Germany which began in May 1940. The primary purpose of these raids was to goad the Germans into undertaking reprisal raids of a similar character on Britain. Such raids would arouse intense indignation in Britain against Germany and so create a war psychosis without which it is impossible to carry on a modern war. Mr Dennis Richards writes: “If the Royal Air Force raided the Ruhr, destroying oil plants with it’s most accurately placed bombs and urban property with those that went astray, the outcry for retalliation against Britain might prove too strong for the German generals to resist. The attack on the Ruhr, in other words, was an informal invitation to the Luftwaffe to bomb London “. p. 122

This passage merely confirmed what Mr. Spaight had so incautiously disclosed in 1944 in his by then forgotten book ‘Bombing Vindicated’. The popular belief that Hitler started unrestricted bombing still persisted and is, in fact, widely held at present day.

The third and last phase of the British air offensive against Germany began in March 1942 with the adoption of the Lindemann Plan by the British War Cabinet, and continued until the end of the war in May, 1945. The bombing during this period was not, as the Germans complained, indiscriminate. On the contrary, it was concentrated on working-class houses because, as professor Lindemann maintained, a higher percentage of bloodshed per ton of explosives dropped could be expected from bombing houses built close together, rather than by bombing higher class houses surrounded by gardens.”

source: ‘Advance to Barbarism - the Development of Total Warfare’, by F.J.P. Veale, p.184-185

- Hannover

[TruthSeeker7]

Yes, I am aware of what side Wikipedia is on.

In these articles it specified German started the "indiscriminate" bombing of Poland. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strateg ... rld_War_II

Here is the claim of German strafing in Warsaw.
In the gallery there is a picture captioned
"A Polish girl cries over the body of her 14-year-old sister who was strafed by German dive bombers, September 1939"
There are also pictures claiming the German destruction of civilian homes and hospitals (not sure about them).

The picture here of Rotterdams city center looks pretty bad, I know if it was a legitimate target. I believe the Hague convention prevents bombing of historic non military targets.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_ ... _Rotterdam


You told me a lot of good facts about how the bombing of Germany was a war crime, it definitely was, but I just don't know how that is different from what Germany did to these other cities. I'm looking at photos and it looks like Germany did their fair share of indiscriminate bombing and terror bombing. I just want to know why Germany was in the right while the Allies did war crimes. How do I prove that the Allies were monsters when I keep getting sent these pictures of what the Germans did to cities like seen in these wiki articles?

[Breker]

As was stated above, why don't you search first?

Rotterdam has been covered, rather well.
search.php?keywords=rotterdam&fid%5B0%5D=20
i.e.:
On the Hague convention: bombing of cities when under military occupation, as was the Rotterdam, are subject to attack.
And no, Holland was not neutral. Holland and Belgium allowed use of their airspace for British & French military aircraft against Germany.

You may also want to see these:
Dutch/Belgian "Neutrality" In 1939-40: viewtopic.php?f=20&t=12153
Why did Hitler invade so many "neutral": European countries?: viewtopic.php?f=20&t=12421

So please tell us how you know what was 'indiscriminate German terror bombing'? Wikipedia?
Of course you see pictures of bombing sites by Germany, they were legit targets, especially after the Allied terror bombing campaign got into swing.
"Historical sites"? Seriously? Ask the Germans about the loss of their "historical sites"
I suggest that you actually read what was / is presented to you.
B

[Otium]

None of the bombing of Allied cities compared to the destruction the Allied reaped on German cities. To compare the two is impossible. The Allies pioneered city bombing and started the indiscriminate bombing of civilians at a time when Hitler forbade it:

about, Jeschonnek of the Air Force begged to be allowed to bomb London’s residential districts, since, he said, there was no sign of “mass panic” in London while these areas were being spared. Admiral Raeder enthusiastically supported some terror bombing. Hitler, however, thought concentration on military objectives was more important. “Bombing with the object of causing a mass panic,” he said, “must be left to the last.”

[...]

The Fuehrer has decided:...The air attacks against London are to be continued and the target area expanded against military and other vital installations (e.g., railway stations). Terror attacks against purely residential areas are reserved for use as an ultimate means of pressure.

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), Pp. 771, 772

and:

Göring fought a more chivalrous war than his enemies, as befitted the last commander of the Richthofen Squadron. He employed the tactical air force with moderation during the 1939 Polish campaign; although the contemporary British and French propaganda claimed differently, the captured secret dispatches of the French air attaché in Warsaw, later published by the Nazis, documented this unexpected restraint. On Hitler’s orders, in the first days of the war Göring issued orders that sharply limited the operations of his crews – forbidding them to use poison gas, to attack civilian targets, or to sink Red Cross ships, and flatly embargoing London as a bombing target. [...] ‘Whatever happens,’ the field marshal said, with a ponderous attempt at sincerity, ‘the efforts of the German government as well as myself will be directed to waging war in the most humane manner possible.’ Germany, he emphasized, would take no initiative whatever against either Britain or France. [...] field marshal göring had planned to open his assault on Britain with an immediate surprise attack on the British Fleet anchored at Scapa Flow, its base in the north Scottish isles. Hitler forbade it. Each side still hoped to restore the peace, and the British also remained initially inactive, as did the French.

David Irving, Göring: A Biography (Focal Point Publications, 2010), Pp. 272

The bombing of Rotterdam appears to have been mostly accidental, and was certainly planned on military ground. It killed 900 people, but Churchill inflated the figure to 30,000:

Air supremacy was again decisive, as in Norway. Göring’s air force had displayed its power on May 14 against Rotterdam: Thirty-six bombers were dispatched to silence an artillery position in the old port city. Soon after they took off, the Dutch fortress commander capitulated, and Göring’s paratroop general, Student, fired red signal flares to halt the bombing attack. One wave, however, missed the flares and completed its bombing run. The resulting fires got out of hand and ravaged the old city, killing nine hundred people.

Göring was unrepentant. ‘I’ll tell you what happened,’ he said heatedly under interrogation. ‘The fire brigades were so scared to death that they refused to move out and do anything about the fires. You can ask the burgomaster of Rotterdam about that and he will tell you the same thing. All those stories of “thousands of dead”’ – Churchill had repeatedly talked of ‘thirty thousand’ killed at Rotterdam, to justify his own strategic air offensive – ‘are pure invention.’ [...] Churchill routinely wrote of 'thirty thousand dead’ in Rotterdam, e.g., in his letter to the king of Sweden, Aug. 2, 1940.

Irving, Göring, p. 288f., 543

and:

One startling fact is that the deliberate bombing of civilian targets in World War II for its own sake was not, in fact, begun by the Germans. It was one of the first effects of Winston Churchill’s arrival in Downing Street. Neville Chamberlain, like most conservative politicians of his era, was appalled by the idea of such attacks and had held back the RAF from bombing German territory. Churchill was not so restrained. Why did he act? Overy records that the deliberate bombing of cities in World War II was not a retaliation against Hunnish barbarism, but definitely begun by the RAF, on 11 May 1940, long before the Blitz.16 The turning point was a minor, ineffectual RAF raid on the town which was then known as München Gladbach (and is now known as Mönchengladbach) in western Germany. This was not, as some claim, a righteous response to Germany’s notorious bombing of Rotterdam. It cannot have been, because Rotterdam was not bombed until 14 May, three days later. What is more, German bombing of Rotterdam, barbarous as it no doubt was, formed part of a military operation to capture that city. It was not bombing for its own sake, a tactic not used before in the 1939–45 war (though Germany had used it in the Great War).

Peter Hitchens, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Pp. 184

The German Aerial attacks were never brought up in the indictment or judgement at Nuremberg, the invention of this as some German atrocity came about by mainly British propagandists that sought to relativize the devastating British bombing campaign against German cities that as we will see, had no military or strategic impact on the outcome of the war. All justifications for the British bombing throughout the war rests on nothing but their own insistence and deflection. They spend their time puffing out their chests moralising about the phoney Holocaust but shrivel up when faced with the consequences of the mass violence perpetrated by British terror bombers.

‘For obvious reasons no serious allegations were raised against Germany’s aerial warfare,’ said defence lawyer Otto Kranzbühler delicately, while reluctant to break the taboo imposed by the Allies on Germany’s historians on this awkward topic.970 Thus there was no mention in either the indictment or the judgement of the German V-weapons or the Luftwaffe’s aerial attacks on Rotterdam, Coventry, Warsaw, and London. Scarcely less momentous for the German people was the judges’ confirmation that the liquidation operations in Germany were generally unknown to the public, which meant that there could be no talk of a collective guilt for those crimes.971

David Irving, Nuremberg: The Last Battle (Focal Point Publications, 2nd edition, 2004), Pp. 312

Hannover is correct, Warsaw had thorough warning before being bombed.

At three o’clock on the afternoon of the sixteenth, Luftwaffe aircraft released over Warsaw several tons of leaflets giving the civilian population twelve hours to leave by two specified roads. At six p.m. the next day, the Deutschland Sender broadcast an invitation to the Polish forces to send officers to the German lines for negotiations to begin at ten p.m. Any officers who turned up for negotiations were to be instructed to hand to their commandant an ultimatum calling for the unconditional surrender of the capital by eight a.m. the next day. Arrangements for the evacuation of the diplomatic corps would be made on request. By 11:45 a.m. on the eighteenth no Polish officer had appeared at the German lines. Hitler’s attempts to obtain the city’s bloodless capitulation were sufficient to give him a clear conscience about destroying Warsaw when the time came.

David Irving, Hitler's War and the War Path (Millennium Edition, Focal Point Publications, 2002), Pp. 232

Irving, in his 1977 edition of 'Hitler's War', is even more explicit about Hitler trying to achieve the bloodless capitulation of Warsaw. Making multiple attempts to negotiate their surrender:

By September 16, 1939, the greatest strategic triumph of the campaign was complete : the Polish army optimistically assembled at Posen for the attack on Berlin had been encircled, and Kutno had been captured by the Fourth and Eighth armies. In a model operation that the legendary Field Marshal von Schlieffen himself could not have improved on, a former corporal had destroyed the last vestiges of Polish military strength west of the Vistula. The bold pincer operation starting from bases nearly two hundred miles apart could have been blunted by a successful Polish stand, but now it was only a matter of days before Warsaw itself fell.

Hitler had begun to debate the fate of that city with Jodl on the fifteenth. As has been noted he was particularly eager to have the capital in his hands by the time the U.S. Congress reconvened. Since he wanted to avoid the high casualties inherent in house-to-house fighting, he hoped that the mere threat of concerted ground and air attack would bluff the city’s commandant into capitulating. On the thirteenth he had repeatedly plagued General Blaskowitz for estimates on how long it would take to starve the city into submission, and a few days later he worried at his own liaison officer with the same question. The General Staff, erroneously believing that the armies parked outside Warsaw would not be immediately needed for other purposes, favored a bloodless siege of the Polish capital ; but this would take weeks and Hitler could not spare the time.

Early on the sixteenth a German officer carried to the Polish lines a written ultimatum giving the commandant six hours in which to surrender unconditionally. If he failed to do so, the Germans would regard the city as a defended fortress, with all that that implied.

Hitler’s bid for an easy and bloodless victory was rejected. The Polish commandant refused even to receive the ultimatum. He had spent every waking hour since September 9 preparing the capital for the German assault. The civilian population had been urged to join with the military in defending the city against the invaders ; all fortifications and defenses had been strengthened ; every suburban building had been reinforced by sandbags, concrete, and barbed wire, its basement linked by a honeycomb of tunnels to a network of resistance strongpoints ; deep antitank trenches cut across Warsaw’s main thoroughfares, and there were barricades formed of heaped-up streetcars, cobblestones, and rubble ; the parks and squares bristled with heavy artillery. Surrender was unthinkable.

As Blaskowitz was later to report : “What shocked even the most hardened soldier was how at the instigation of their military leaders a misguided population, completely ignorant of the effect of modern weapons, could contribute to the destruction of their own capital.”

Until then, Hitler had limited the bombardment of the capital to dive-bomber and artillery attacks on strategic targets. But whatever inhibitions he may have felt about the presence of a million civilians and nearly two hundred foreign diplomats were apparently about to break down under the demands of his timetable. At three o’clock on the afternoon of the sixteenth, Luftwaffe aircraft released over Warsaw several tons of leaflets giving the civilian population twelve hours to leave by two specified roads, and Hitler ordered a saturation bombardment for the next day.

Source: http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Hitler/1977/html_chapter/01.html
Archive: https://archive.vn/NZgDD

Only Military targets in Warsaw were to be hit:

On 13 September Milch accompanied a Luftwaffe dive-bomber attack. He took off with about 180 Stukas; Kesselring was relying on dive-bombers for the main attacks on Warsaw, to ensure that at this stage only the strictly military targets were hit.⁴ The Polish capital put up a wall of flak as the Ju 87s peeled off and dived on their targets, their ‘Udet sirens’ screaming in the slipstream. From his Do 17 Milch could see every bomb blast, and he reported the results of the attack to Göring afterward. With the possible exception of the saturation attack on the Polish capital at the end of the campaign, no strategic bombing was attempted during this phase; the Luftwaffe restricted itself to army support operations

David Irving, The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe: The Life of Field Marshal Erhard Milch (Focal Point Publications, 1973), Pp. 92 (See: http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Milch/Milch.pdf)

--------------------------------

THE bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam were no precedents for the RAF's saturation bombing campaign; both cities were attacked for military tactical reasons, as is well established in the records. Winston Churchill in his six-volume history The Second World War subsequently claimed that "thirty thousand civilians" were killed in the Rotterdam raid on May 14, 1940. The city officials told me the actual figure was around 900, mostly from fires caused by the blazing margarine factory.

Source: http://www.fpp.co.uk/Letters/History_07/Matthews_290707.html
Archive: https://archive.vn/2WMNT

And even then, the majority of damage done to Warsaw had nothing to do with Ariel Bombardment:

German bombing of towns since 1939 had in fact been confined to support of other military arms. Warsaw, for example, suffered far more damage from shelling than from air attack.

Peter Hitchens, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Pp. 185

Even after the Polish Campaign, while Hitler was constantly seeking to remedy peace in the west, he initially refused to manufacture more bombs. Only when the British and French rebuked him, did he allow more bombs to be made:

At first Hitler refused to allow the Luftwaffe to resume bomb production, but by 12 October 1939 he had to accept that both Britain and France had rejected his terms. He summoned Göring, Milch and Udet and announced, ‘You may now manufacture bombs again. The war is to continue!’⁹

Irving, Luftwaffe, p. 93, (See: http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Milch/Milch.pdf)

In a review criticizing Irving, Peter Hoffman is forced to admit that Hitler outlawed bombing civilian populations:

In fact, both Britain and Germany committed themselves at the beginning of the war to avoid attacks on civilian populations. After German places bombed open towns in Poland after Sept, 12, 1939, and, on Goring's order, carried out the "saturation bombardment" of Warsaw on Sept. 24 and 25, 1939, [...] Only after the German bombing of Rotterdam in May 14, 1940, did the British authorize attacks on certain targets in the Ruhr industrial district - but intentionally bombing civilian populations remained outlawed. In August 1940, Hitler still forbade attacks on population centers

Source: http://www.fpp.co.uk/reviews/PHoffmannonHG.html

Of course, there are many distortions and half-truths here. However, it is confirmed that Germany wanted to avoid bombing civilians:



As was mentioned earlier, the idea that the "saturation bombing" of Warsaw had no military purpose is ridiculous, and it's disingenuous for Hoffmann to phrase the situation in the way he did. But what's new? These people are accustomed to lying. He also repeats the myth, as refuted by Hitchens, that the British were "responding" to the bombing of Rotterdam.

Even if this were the case, and the British hadn't already bombed Germany prior to this, the excuse to bomb Germany after Rotterdam was based on the lie that Germany had killed 30,000 people in a civilian targeted air raid on Rotterdam. This was a lie perpetuated by Winston Churchill himself. There were around 900 casualties, and they were a result from fires that the Dutch failed to take action in putting out. The Germans had no intention to bomb Rotterdam if they surrendered which is what occurred so many of the squadrons pulled out and didn't drop their bombs at all.

The argument has no legs to stand on, it is nothing but a poor excuse to kick the can of guilt down the road to the "discredited" Nazis.

Hoffmann says that the bombing of civilians "remained outlawed", what he doesn't say is that in July of 1940 Winston Churchill already wanted to start terror bombing Germany:

Civilian deaths were intended by RAF commanders, who believed with good reason that this was what their political masters desired. They were not the unwanted, reluctantly accepted side effect of another policy, but a deliberate action. Many persist in believing that it was not our policy to kill civilians, and that they died accidentally as a result of attacks on military or industrial targets. This is flatly untrue. Not long after Dunkirk, the language of British leaders began to take on a rather fearsome tone. Winston Churchill speculated in a letter of 8 July 1940 to his friend and Minister of Aircraft Production, the press magnate Lord (Max) Beaverbrook, that an ‘absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland’ would help to bring Hitler down.

Peter Hitchens, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Pp. 178f.

The weasel words of disingenuous liars would rather omit this information. I wonder why?

I would like to quote quite a long portion of Hitchens, so you can really understand how viscous the Allies were. Keep in mind, this is before the fact that Winston Churchill wanted to bomb Germany with anthrax and poison gas:

The München Gladbach attack may have been in some way aimed at impeding or discouraging Germany’s unprovoked and lawless surprise attack on the Netherlands, then reaching its decisive stage. (München Gladbach was defined as a military-economic target.) Harris himself wrote in the American periodical Flying (‘Special Royal Air Force Issue’) for September 1942,

The first British bombs fell on the soil of the German mainland on the night of May 11, 1940, when a force of 18 Whitley bombers attacked railway communications behind the lines of the German advance across Flanders and the Low Countries. Light bombers of the Command, at that time Blenheims, also endeavoured to stem the onrush of the attack by desperate and costly sorties against immediately threatening enemy concentrations.20

But it was a unilateral change of policy.

The damage was slight and made no difference to the war. As Max Hastings has recounted in detail, at this stage of the war and for a long time afterwards, the RAF’s bombing accuracy was pitiful. It missed most of its targets hopelessly badly, and its inadequate bombing planes, generally poorly designed and using outdated tactics, were blasted from the sky by the Luftwaffe in terrible numbers during the early part of the combat.

Meanwhile, there were more ‘mandates’ for the RAF. The killing of German workers soon became an explicit policy. In June 1941 we find an Air Ministry draft directive saying that ‘Continuous and relentless bombing of these workers and their utility services, over a period of time, will inevitably lower their morale, kill a number of them and thus appreciably reduce their industrial output.’21

In April of the same year a policy review urged attacks on ‘working-class’ areas.22 In November that year a memorandum (almost certainly written by Harris) was asking if the time had not come to strike ‘against the people themselves’.23 In May, the Director of Air Intelligence welcomed an attack on ‘the livelihood, the homes, the cooking, heating, lighting and family life of […] the working class’.24 This was because they were the least mobile and most vulnerable to such an attack. Also, their housing was far more densely concentrated than that of the better-off, where explosives and incendiaries alike would do far less damage than they would in zones packed with large blocks of small, crowded flats.

In November 1941, Sir Richard Peirse, by then commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, told the Thirty Club (a private dining club) that his planes had, for nearly a year, been attacking ‘the people themselves’, intentionally.25

Sir Richard was extraordinarily candid both about the policy and about the Government’s pretence that it was not doing what it was doing. But he understood why the Government was not keen to state the truth in public:

I mention this because for a long time the Government for excellent reasons has preferred the world to think that we still held some scruples and attacked only what the humanitarians are pleased to call Military Targets. […] I can assure you, gentlemen, that we tolerate no scruples [my emphasis].26

Overy also shows that senior officials knew of the policy but preferred the truth of it not to be widely known in case ‘false and misleading deductions’ were made.27

A profoundly disturbing Air Staff memorandum explicitly desires that towns should be made ‘physically uninhabitable’ and the people in them must be ‘conscious of constant personal danger’. The aim was to produce ‘destruction’ and ‘the fear of death’.28

Harris himself wrote in April 1942, ‘We have got to kill a lot of Boche before we win this war.’29 To his credit, Harris never lied to himself or anyone else about what he was doing. He never hid from his purpose of killing Germans and wanted it acknowledged publicly. Being a hard and ruthless man himself, he must have suspected that his equally hard and ruthless political chief might one day seek to disavow the policy.

[...]

It took a jeering and dismissive tone, implicitly treating moral objections as foolish and weak. ‘Investigation seems to show that having one’s house demolished is most damaging to morale,’ it said, airily and in an unpleasant, facetious and sarcastic fashion.31 In a paradox that will often arise in this argument, it seemed to make no connection between this policy and the fact that so many British people had suffered this fate and had not found it at all amusing. It is still quite a common position taken in arguments on this subject (and this author has had many) to describe German terror raids on Britain with justifiable emotional fury, and then to defend similar and worse actions by our own forces as just punishment for these horrors. It is almost impossible to persuade those who advance such arguments to see that there is any hypocrisy or inconsistency in them. The emotional power of the war, as a modern moral gospel of simple good versus total evil, overcomes both fact and reason. It does so in the minds of people younger than I. Through my parents and teachers, I am far more directly engaged in the history of that war. To those born later, it is far away, and known only through books, films and documentaries. They never saw, as I did almost daily, the gap-toothed streets and lingering traces of air-raid precautions (signs for shelters, emergency fire hydrants, etc.) in the British cities of the 1950s. They did not see the air-raid shelter which was such a fascinating feature of the back garden of my grandfather’s Portsmouth house. For them ‘the war’ is wholly an idea, glittering with chivalry and virtue. This is why it is so hard to criticise, and why it remains so useful to those who wish to start new wars. It may take many decades to overcome it, which means it is all too urgent to start as soon as possible.

Peter Hitchens, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Pp. 186-189

Hoffmans claim that the British kept to their policy of avoiding the saturation bombing of Germany is clearly a lie. The British were happy to bomb German towns in 1940, and were eagerly talking about doing so in 1941 as we can see. They had no intention to maintain this policy whatsoever.

Indeed, as the Allied bombing of German cities increased over 1940 and grew still worse in 1941, it caused enormous damage to many cities. It was Hitler’s ‘wish’ that the population directly affected be relieved of the stress and strain caused by these raids as quickly as possible.

Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 2001), Pp. 211

Gellately calls the Allies terror bombing of German cities in 1942 "unprecedented":

The situation in west German cities grew worse in early 1942, when the emphasis of Allied bombing shifted to civilian targets. The campaign was designed to inflict maximum damage, especially by using incendiary bombs.
The first major city to be targeted was Lübeck at the end of March, with devastating effects. On the night of 30–1 May, the first 1,000-bomber raid struck Germany and left unprecedented death and destruction in its wake

Gellately, Backing Hitler, p. 212

If you want to talk about historic cities being bombed look no further than Winston Churchill who explicitly called for Rome to be bombed "to the utmost":

From PRO file CAB.120/599, a newly released file of Chiefs of Staff correspondence

The British aren't angelic moral agents that sought to defend historic cities. They didn't care what they had to do. That they pretended this wasn't the case in history books for decades is what's truly despicable.

It should be noted too that terror bombing of German cities was an utter failure for the British. I say this because there are people out there who genuinely believe that such tactics had an effect on defeating the National Socialists. This of course, they view as some morally righteous principle, no matter how many Germans they had to kill. In fact, the opposite was true, the Allied terror campaign only brought the German people further in support of Hitler:

The war initially had positive effects for Hitler’s dictatorship, and many people who vacillated until then, soon fell into line because of their patriotism, or were won over by the first victories. One historian concluded that ‘the war strengthened still more the basic acceptance of the regime, until shortly before the end, also as the tides of war changed and the Allied air attacks actually bombed the German “community of the people” into a real “community of fate”.’1

Even as the situation on the battlefront deteriorated, there was nothing close to a rebellion, and according to Peter Hoffmann’s and Joachim Fest’s recent studies of the German resistance, on the whole the general population did not favour resistance, but continued to support the government.2 Nazi opinion surveyors found no more than ‘defeatist’ statements in the rubble of cities like Berlin or Hamburg in late 1944 and early 1945, and they noted how support continued for the war effort. A common pose was to take a wait-and-see attitude.3 One report from eastern Germany in March 1945 mentioned that workers not only continued to trust Hitler, but some suggested he adopt Stalinist methods to ‘purge’ the civil service, army, and Nazi Party.4 In Hamburg in early April 1945, in spite of everything the city had endured, opinion surveys picked up confident remarks. There were no indications anywhere that a strike, much less surrender, was contemplated by anyone, and into March 1945 hope persisted for a ‘good end to the war’.5 Another report that month from Baden showed some lastminute attitudinal changes as enemy ground troops grew close, and the same happened in eastern Germany.6 In general, the social consensus persisted that made the dictatorship possible, even if more citizens gave only grudging support

Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 2001), Pp. 224

What were the justifications for the bombing war? Surely those who wish to make apologies for the Allies have some idea of why the Germans deserved to be incinerated? Well. No. The truth is that the Allies have no moral argument or even practical argument for their bombing attacks. Even if we were to accept that the Nazis participated in devastating air raids that resulted in many civilian casualties, can we even point to any document or quote from a German leader that explicitly sought out such destruction? Seemingly not. Yet we have an abundance, as already quoted, from the Allied side. Can we also compare the destruction of the Air raids? Yes. And what we will find, as I will show later, and have partially already, is that the Allied vastly out bombed the Germans and for no other reason than they wanted to do it. Because they enjoyed the destruction, even though the carnage brought them little in the way of strategic victories. It didn't help them win the war, and it if anything had a negative impact on the British:

retaliation for German barbarism simply does not pass as a justification, I know that many seek to defend area bombing as a practical necessity of war. But even at the time, notable military and scientific experts rightly warned that area bombing would not be as effective as claimed, as described by Charles Snow in Science and Government.

Peter Hitchens, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Pp. 203-204

The British had little to gain:

Even Arthur Harris conceded that German night defences were so effective that they might create conditions in which loss rates ‘could not in the end be sustained’. Overy writes, ‘Between November 1943 and March 1944, Bomber Command lost 1,128 aircraft for little evident strategic gain.’45 [...] it is interesting to note a discussion of possible retaliatory gas attacks, and of how they were contemplated by Winston Churchill, now the hero of modern liberal interventionists who regard the use of gas as a horror inviting immediate punitive war.46 But the gas bombs were not used. They would only have been used, I am sure, in retaliation against such attacks by Germany. But by then there would have been few scruples. In a very telling paragraph, Overy writes,

The RAF staff thought that incendiary and high-explosive raids were more strategically efficient [than gas or germ warfare], in that they destroyed property and equipment and not just people, but in any of these cases – blown apart, burnt alive or asphyxiated – deliberate damage to civilian populations was now taken for granted [my emphasis]. This paved the way for the possibility of using atomic weapons on German targets in 1945 if the war had dragged on late into the year.47

Peter Hitchens, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Pp. 197f.

Bombing cities was ineffective.

We know how effective – or ineffective – the bombing was because the two major bombing powers, the USA and Britain, both conducted surveys of the effects of bombing after the war.49 Captured Germans tended to agree that bombing of transport links and oil facilities had been crucial, and the bombing of cities comparatively unimportant, in hampering the Nazi war effort.50 It is hard to see why they should have lied about this.

The American survey itself said that city attacks cost only about 2.7 per cent of German economic potential. The whole combined offensive cost a total of 17 per cent of German economic potential by 1944, mostly due to US bombing of selected targets.51 The British report largely concurred, except that it was in some ways even more modest in its claims for area bombing’s effects, especially in the key year of 1944.52 Transport and oil remained the most important targets whoever was looking at the outcome. As Overy writes,

Given the uniformity of opinion on both the German and Allied sides, the one based on experience, the other on extensive research, it is surprising that the effects of bombing have occasioned so much debate ever since. The proximate causes – defeating the German air force and emasculating oil supply and transport – are unlikely to be undermined by further research.53

Peter Hitchens, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Pp. 198f.

The strategy of Allied Air Bombardment wasn't to destroy military targets as the apologists like to claim, in fact, there was no emphasis on military targets at all:

Lindemann advocated, quite specifically, the bombing of German working-class homes. ‘Middle-class houses have too much space around them and so are bound to waste bombs,’ as Snow explains the view. ‘Factories and “military objectives” had long since been forgotten, except in official bulletins, since they were much too difficult to find and hit.’60

Peter Hitchens, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Pp. 204

Lindemann by the way, was the man who helped formalize the plan for "strategic" bombing. As Hitchens states "Frederick Lindemann first circulates his ‘dehousing’ paper, urging deliberate bombing by RAF of civilian housing in cities." (Hitchens, p. xxi)

Here is a long section in which Hitchens describes the many ways the Allied policy of bombing was malicious, ineffective and baseless:

The military high command of the Allies also did not view the night bombing of Germany as being particularly important. Overy notes that the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, at which the USA and Britain hammered out their European strategy, did not really view the bomber offensive as central to victory. He writes, ‘Bombing survived as an option not because it was central to the strategic outlook of the western allies, but because it was secondary.’40

What was it for? The Americans could not understand its purpose. The RAF’s chief, Charles (later Lord) Portal was predicting that his force could kill 900,000 Germans in 18 months, seriously injure a million, destroy six million homes and ‘de-house’ 25 million people (so much for deaths being unintended collateral damage). Overy notes that American fliers were puzzled as to what the RAF’s actual strategic aim was in pursuing this policy.41

The bombing of Germany came too late to ‘save us from invasion’, and so cannot be justified on those grounds.

Arthur Harris admitted that his bomber offensive only started seriously in March 1943.42 This is important because so many people like to claim that the bombing ‘saved Britain from invasion’ or ‘won the war’ or was ‘the only way we could strike back’. Yet the invasion of Britain, never seriously prepared (see Chapter 7), had been cancelled in September 1940. Even if revived, it could never have taken place after the decisive Battle of Stalingrad ended in German defeat and humiliation in early February 1943. After this date, the victory of the USSR over Germany was more or less assured, and Germany certainly could not have contemplated opening up another front by a seaborne assault on the British Isles. The German commander at Stalingrad, Friedrich Paulus, and his armies had been marched off to prison camps before Harris’s offensive really began. As for air attack on cities being our ‘only weapon’ against Germany, we did not use it very much if so. For nearly three years after Dunkirk this ‘sole weapon’ had barely begun to be used. Our central role in the war was to prepare for the Second Front, for which we provided an indispensable base of operations, and to sustain the USSR. There is little doubt that the air war was chosen mainly as a substitute for a second front, for political and propaganda reasons – but not for military ones. Oddly enough, it still fulfils that purpose, allowing uncritical historians to reassure a puzzled people that Britain was in fact a major power in the war between 1940 and 1944.

The military justifications for the bombing were found afterwards and are not very convincing. A moral justification remains elusive. The easiest way to bypass this problem is to state, correctly but ultimately irrelevantly, that the Germans behaved far worse. As the years pass, a real justification becomes harder to find, yet the bombing is still strongly defended. A statue of Arthur Harris has been erected in London, which is highly contentious and has attracted protests. A memorial to Bomber Command, entirely justifiable as a commemoration of human bravery and loss but questionable as a vindication of area bombing, has been built near Hyde Park Corner. On its plinth the inscription quotes from Pericles, ‘Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it,’ which is certainly true. But evidence that the bombing of German civilians actually defended our freedom is hard to find.

The first argument for the bombing is that it had a powerful effect on the German war effort. This is not, in general, true. Claims are often made that ‘Operation Gomorrah’, the firestorm in Hamburg, could have destroyed German morale if it had been replicated in other major cities. Hitler’s favourite, Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s minister of armaments, is said to have held this opinion. But was he correct? The physical damage was indeed appalling and the violent destruction of human life almost beyond the limit of imagination. But in fact Hamburg recovered as a functioning city and port with remarkable speed.43

The attacks also had a very high cost to us, in terms of expensively trained young men killed and costly aircraft destroyed. In 1943, the RAF lost 4,026 aircraft, 2,823 of them in combat. The appalling figures for non-combat losses are easily explained. The death or capture of experienced crews meant more rapid training and many more flying accidents than would have befallen well-trained crews.

It is perfectly true that the Anglo-American bombing offensive diverted German fighters from the eastern front. But the cost in losses of aircraft and men was appallingly high.

Harris ludicrously overestimated the economic damage he was doing. He was livid when contemporary researchers said his attacks had only reduced German economic potential by 9 per cent in 1943.44 He was sure he had done far more damage. But after the war 9 per cent turned out to be an overestimate (see below). The human cost of the war to our own side was appalling. During 1943, Bomber Command lost 15,678 killed or captured, and the US 8th Air Force lost 9,497.

The idea that the bombing might create some sort of revolution against Hitler was often touted. But expert analyses pointed out that Nazi Germany offered no avenue for protest, and the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender (an unexamined policy which may well have prolonged the war for a year or more) completely ruled out the traditional way of ending wars – a more compliant government coming to office and suing for peace.

Peter Hitchens, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Pp. 194-196

Purely in terms of numbers of dead, the Allied bombings take the cake without question. Like I said earlier, at least the Germans had a reason to bomb cities when they did so, the British had none and relished in the destruction they wreaked upon Germany. There is no honour, pride or glory in such barbarism.

Grayling’s powerful work makes, in my view, an unanswerable (and unanswered) case against the bombing of German civilians. Its effects on innocent people were appalling. It cannot be excused as collateral damage. Its military impact does not begin to justify the horrors it brought about. Something like 600,000 people died under the bombing of British and American aircraft, many of them foreign slave labourers who were not in any way to blame for Hitler, who had no choice in where they lived and worked. This is a far greater total than the casualties inflicted on Britain by Germany during the 1940–1 Blitz, in which about 43,000 people died. Grayling deals with all the standard arguments of those who justify the bombing, pointing out that all of these arguments would be a better argument for what the RAF largely did not do – that is, accurate bombing of industrial, economic and military targets.

Peter Hitchens, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Pp. 202

How anyone can sit here and talk about German air raids will forever disgust me. WHO CARES!!?? I don't. I care very little, because the same people who pretend to care about such casualties in war couldn't care less about the Germans.

However, if you thought it couldn't get any worse, you'd be sorely mistaken. Not only did the Allies bomb Germany first, and more harshly - but they also attempted as matter of policy to PROVOKE Germany into bombing London so they could have an excuse to firebomb German cities:

Note that the German attack on Coventry, which is often cited as the first strategic bombing in the war between Germany and Britain, occurred six months later (on November 14, 1940). Note further that part of the British bombing strategy was apparently to provoke German attacks on England in order to stimulate support for total war against the Third Reich. As the official Air Ministry volume, The Royal Air Force, 1939-1945: The Fight at Odds (1953), stated:

If the Royal Air Force raided the Ruhr, destroying oil plants with its most accurately placed bombs and urban property with those that went astray, the outcry for retaliation against Britain might prove too strong for the German generals to resist. Indeed, Hitler himself would probably head the clamor. The attack on the Ruhr, in other words, was an informal invitation to the Luftwaffe to bomb London.

Sheldon Richman, Killing Noncombatants, Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 18 (1999), No. 1: See: https://codoh.com/library/document/killing-noncombatants/en/
Archive: https://archive.vn/145Ts

David Irving confirms this:

Though often brutal and insensitive, he lacked the ability to be ruthless where it mattered most. He refused to bomb London itself until Mr. Churchill forced the decision on him in late August 1940.

David Irving, Hitler's War and the War Path (Millennium Edition, Focal Point Publications, 2002), Pp. x

Hitler in fact felt remorse for what he had to do, although this didn't mean he was going to stop doing it. Hitler had an Iron Will, and would do whatever he needed to in order to protect Germany, even if it meant being forced to retaliate against the British who's friendship he desperately courted.

Despite the remarkable resilience of the British people under heavy air attacks, all of his advisers saw the continued bombing of British industry and dockyards – coupled with the submarine campaign – as the most likely way to bring Britain to her knees. Coventry and Birmingham were devastated by night attacks before worsening weather once again forced a halt to German raids. Hitler still lacked the ruthlessness to use the strategic bomber force to maximum effect. On the morning after the Luftwaffe’s first raid on Birmingham he told a Hungarian visitor that he was sorry about the fine cities and the people being destroyed in Britain; it was all the fault of incompetent British politicians. Himmler also explained to Party officials: ‘The Führer has no desire to destroy the British people or their empire. The British are a race related to our own and in their bones they are as unbowed as ever. This is displayed by the unheard-of toughness with which the British people has taken its beating from the Luftwaffe, month after month. . .’

Irving, Hitler's War (2002), p. 347-438

This post is already pretty lengthy. I will post more about this soon.

[TruthSeeker7]

Thanks everyone. Came across an article trying to discredit many of these authors, what is thought about this rubbish?

https://airminded.org/2012/09/26/on-goo ... r-bombing/

[Otium]

Thanks everyone. Came across an article trying to discredit many of these authors, what is thought about this rubbish?

https://airminded.org/2012/09/26/on-goo ... r-bombing/

This article is full of the same rubbish that I've already refuted.

The author of this article claims:

Both The People's War and Bombing Vindicated can be searched online, and I can't find any passages resembling the ones quoted above.

This is only partially true. For one thing, these quotes it mentions by Angus Calder and F.J.P. Veale I myself have already checked the veracity of, and I too found no evidence for the quote by Calder: https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=13362&p=97357&#p97357

However, the quote from Veale is 100% real:

'The inhabitants of Coventry, for example, continued to imagine that their sufferings were due to the innate villainy of Adolf Hitler without a suspicion that a decision, splendid or otherwise, of the British War Cabinet, was the decisive factor in the case.'

F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism: The Development of Total Warfare From Serajevo to Hiroshima (New York: The Devin-Adair Company. 1968), Pp. 169

See: https://archive.org/details/advancetobarbari00veal/page/168/mode/2up?q=coventry

You should read Churchill's War for many more details. What you need to understand, is that Churchill knew beforehand whether there was going to be a bombing raid by Germany, and he could've evacuated various cities to ensure the least civilian casualties as possible. Churchill didn't do this, because he wanted to provoke the ire of the world upon Germany and her killing of civilians in raids that resulted in casualties, not indiscriminate terror bombings.

The person who wrote the article attempted to mitigate the importance of Spaight, this cannot be done. He tries and fails to justify wat the British had done, as I've shown there was no justification for having bombed Germany.

The author of the article says:

The key point is that Spaight never says that Bomber Command is targeting German civilians as such. He does say that Britain started the 'strategic offensive', and that Germany probably wouldn't have started the Blitz if it hadn't, but then spends several chapters explaining how Britain only attacks military and industrial targets, and that civilian casualties are purely incidental. For example:

Much is heard in the German official reports of the damage caused in suburban and other residential districts by our raids. Nothing is ever said about the fact that the war-factories are often in the same districts [...] Areas covering 5,000 acres in all were devastated in that great raid [on Cologne on 30 May 1942]. Naturally they included a large number of private houses -- but they also included very many factories, and it was the destruction or damaging of 250 of these which justified the attack and made it worth while as an operation of war.

This doesn't exculpate the British in the Second World War. What this author does is accept the fact that Spaight was attempting to justify what he was doing, and then accept his justification as his own. Big deal. Spaight couldn't use any examples from the current war to justify himself or Britain's policy. Hitchens says:

The precedents from Spain and the 1914 war are correct. However, German bombing of towns since 1939 had in fact been confined to support of other military arms.

Peter Hitchens, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Pp. 185

So much for the author of the articles uncited contention that:

Conversely, part of the German aim in the Blitz was to terrorise and kill British civilians, and they were much more effective at it too.

When I cited Hitchens, I was also citing the many sources he uses to corroborate what he wrote. If you read my post carefully much of this article you linked could've been refuted already. Hitchens doesn't just use Spaight, he cited Arthur Harris, Churchill, and many others deeply involved in the bombing war against Germany as well as their reports. The blood thirsty comments they made can be read in this thread already.

Richard Overy is just one such author who puts the blame on the British for the bombing war, and why shouldn't he? Overy has written to date, the magnum opus on the bombing war in Europe. If you needed any authority to confirm what the revisionists have been saying for decades, then it would be Overy and his book that confirm it for you:

Much has been written about the British bombing offensive. The best factual survey is Richard Overy’s recent book The Bombing War, mentioned earlier in this chapter and on which I have drawn heavily. I am equally indebted to Anthony Grayling’s devastating account of the British bombing of Germany, Among the Dead Cities (2006), which gives the relentless details of Britain’s incessant and increasingly destructive targeting of German cities until there were almost none left to destroy; and to Sir Max Hastings’s Bomber Command (1979/2010), a refreshingly honest description of the employment of brave men by unimaginative, rigid and sometimes foolish commanders, often on futile and mistaken tasks.9 Also important is the discussion, in Lord Snow’s 1960 Godkin Lectures at Harvard (published as Science and Government in 1961), of the criticisms of the effectiveness of the bombing campaign, mainly levelled by Sir Henry Tizard, discussed later in this chapter.10

The story is a shocking one. Although the information is readily available to those who seek it, most British people prefer to believe that the RAF bombing of Germany was an absolute necessity, morally justified (flatly untrue) and decisive in the outcome of the war (only very partly true at best). Most believe that, where civilians died, this was as unavoidable collateral damage rather than because we had any intention of killing them. This belief is wholly false.

[...]

the deliberate bombing of cities in World War II was not a retaliation against Hunnish barbarism, but definitely begun by the RAF, on 11 May 1940, long before the Blitz.16

[...]

Something like 600,000 people died under the bombing of British and American aircraft, many of them foreign slave labourers who were not in any way to blame for Hitler, who had no choice in where they lived and worked. This is a far greater total than the casualties inflicted on Britain by Germany during the 1940–1 Blitz, in which about 43,000 people died.

Peter Hitchens, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Pp. 176, 184, 202

What is there to argue here? If the Germans were attempting to kill civilian in London, they were doing a very poor Job compared to the British and Americans. London wasn't flattened, and like I showed you in that video, the first bombing of London was done by mistake and Adolf Hitler expressly forbid there to be targeted bombing by civilians. If anyone wanted the civilians of London to be bombed, then it was Winston Churchill:

Charles De Gaulle was at Chequers. It was August 1940. Churchill was waiting for the German air attack, and, De Gaulle later recalled, he was finding the wait hard to bear. He raised both firsts to the sky. "So they won't come!" he said.

Are you in such a hurry," De Gaulle replied, "to see your towns smashed to bits?"

"You see," Churchill said, "the bombing of Oxford, Coventry, Canterbury, will cause such a wave of indignation in the United States that they'll come into the war!"

De Gaulle was doubtful. France's distress had not pulled America in. Ah, said Churchill, that's because France was collapsing. "Sooner or later the Americans will come, but on condition that we here don't flinch."

The attack on Coventry was three months away.

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2008), Pp. 221

Not only did Churchill wish to provoke the bombing of London, but he wanted to widen the war so that the Americans would get involved. This is why he never secured the peace with Germany that Hitler had been offering since September 1939.

The author of the article you cited quotes Angus Calder in justification for the British bombing of Mannheim in December 1940, because the British were only "responding to the Blitz". The author of the article falls hook line and sinker for the very propaganda tactic Churchill wanted to employ so that he could provoke Germany into bombing London, in order to portray any bombing Britain undertook as a "response" to the actions "initiated" by Germany. This is the exact same tactic Churchill used to blame the Germans for invading Norway:

when he knew full well that it was Britain who were attempting to violate Norwegian sovereignty in order to cut off the Iron supply to Germany. Hitler just beat them to it.

Here is a snippit from an article and an interview with Adolf Galland in which he relays a private meeting he had with Hitler, where Hitler expressly denied that the wanted to bomb Britain:



Hitler in fact, didn't want a war at all, from the same interview, and more from Galland:



Goebbels in his diary entry for September 1st 1939 confirms what Galland says, in regards to Goering and what the first man says in regards to Hitler:

Yesterday at noon the Führer issues the order to attack at about 5am. It seems the dye is cast now. Göring remains sceptical, the Führer doesn't believe the English will intervene.

The Goebbels Experiment (Documentary, 2005), 58:00-58:16

Full quote:

German: Coulondre und Henderson suchen Lipski zu bewegen, auf eigene Faust zum Führer zu gehen. Aber er ist stundenweise unauffindbar. Polen will also offenbar die Sache hinzie hen. Mittags gibt der Führer Befehl zum Angriff in der Nacht gegen 5th. Es scheint, daß damit die Würfel endgültig gefallen sind. Göring ist noch skeptisch. Der Führer glaubt noch nicht daran, daß England eingreifen wird.

English: Coulondre and Henderson try to get Lipski to go to the Führer on his own. But he's untraceable by the hour. So it looks like Poland is going to drag this thing out. At noon the Führer gives the order to attack at night around 5am. It seems that the die is finally cast. Goering is still skeptical. The Fuhrer does not yet believe that England will intervene.

Joseph Goebbels, Tagebücher 1924 -1945 (Piper München Zürich), Pp. 1322-1323

Hitler refused terror bombing on London:

Hitler rejected repeated requests by General Hans Jeschonneck, his chief of air staff, to authorise terror bombing. The most restrictive orders bound German crews. On September 14 the Führer again prohibited terror attacks on London's population.

[...]

Milch diary: note on Jeschonneck's conference with Hitler, Sep 14. In view of subsequent developments, it is worth quoting the resulting OKW directive: Air raids are to be continued against London with larger target areas including military targets and targets of vital importance to the city. Terror raids are expressly embargoed as an ultimate sanction.

David Irving, Churchill's War, Volume 1: The Struggle for Power (Focal Point Publications, 2015), Pp. 420, 642

Even the American Ambassador, Joseph Kennedy didn't believe the propaganda put out by the British:

The American ambassador remained unimpressed. First of all, he cabled secretly to Roosevelt, I don't believe that the bombing of the Germans is all indiscriminate. . . They are principally after railroad installations, docks and power plants and regardless of what anybody writes or says they are doing a terrible lot of damage.

Irving, Churchill's War: The Struggle for Power, p. 420

Churchill also knew that Hitler would only bomb London if he was provoked to do so. Irving also confirms that Churchill wanted to provoke the Americans into the war as well:

Hitler had made no attempt to bomb London, and the intercepted Luftwaffe signals suggested he would not do so unless provoked. But to Churchill there seemed only one certain path to victory, as he informed his old friend Field Marshal Smuts: Hitler should attack, ëand in so doing break his
air weapon.

[...]

he (Churchill) expressed vexation that Hitler had yet to bomb a single English town. By his conversations, noted Kennedy, I should judge that he believes that with the bombing of well-known places in England the United States will come in.

Irving, Churchill's War: The Struggle for Power, p. 317, 318

[TruthSeeker7]

Thank you all for the wealth of info, I still wish I could see the leaflet dropped by Germans in Warsaw warning and giving escape routes (referenced by Irving), that would really bring it home, I posted a seperate request for it but unfortunately it seems to have been removed by moderators.

[Lamprecht]

Thank you all for the wealth of info, I still wish I could see the leaflet dropped by Germans in Warsaw warning and giving escape routes (referenced by Irving), that would really bring it home, I posted a seperate request for it but unfortunately it seems to have been removed by moderators.

I believe you originally posted it in the Holocaust forum, but it was moved to this one. See: viewtopic.php?t=13623

[Otium]

I received a reply from David Irving about the Warsaw Leaflets:

Yes, from the German White Book, Weissbuch, which is very reliable,

David irving

This is a start. I've looked around for the German white book, and there are a few on archive.org but they're mostly concerned with the outbreak of the war. I cannot find any that date beyond September 3rd 1939. There are some from 1940, but the raid on Warsaw took place in September 1939.

[TruthSeeker7]

Well it is a start, after a quick search I found this. http://www.allworldwars.com/German%20White%20Book.html
I only had time to skim it but there are entries on September 3, 1939.

[Moderator]

Well it is a start, after a quick search I found this. http://www.allworldwars.com/German%20White%20Book.html
I only had time to skim it but there are entries on September 3, 1939.

TruthSeeker7, the guidelines ( viewtopic.php?f=4&t=358 ) that you agreed to specify that:

If you post a quote or link from or to a book, a news article, magazine story, film / movie, another website, etc., you must also comment on the quote or the link content. Tell the forum what you find wrong, compelling, unique, or important about the reference content. Flippant, overly brief comments are not acceptable. We want commentary and discussion.

You've done this sort of thing frequently, please cease.
M1

[TruthSeeker7]

Well it is a start, after a quick search I found this. http://www.allworldwars.com/German%20White%20Book.html
I only had time to skim it but there are entries on September 3, 1939.

TruthSeeker7, the guidelines ( viewtopic.php?f=4&t=358 ) that you agreed to specify that:

If you post a quote or link from or to a book, a news article, magazine story, film / movie, another website, etc., you must also comment on the quote or the link content. Tell the forum what you find wrong, compelling, unique, or important about the reference content. Flippant, overly brief comments are not acceptable. We want commentary and discussion.

You've done this sort of thing frequently, please cease.
M1

The link I posted includes an entry from "September 3, 1939" in the German White Book (as referenced by Irving), I skimmed said entries and could not find information on the Warsaw leaflets, although I may have missed something, or said leaflets were referenced in a different entry. If someone wouldn't mind double checking to see if they can find something I missed, it would appreciate it.

[Otium]

The link I posted includes an entry from "September 3, 1939" in the German White Book (as referenced by Irving), I skimmed said entries and could not find information on the Warsaw leaflets, although I may have missed something, or said leaflets were referenced in a different entry. If someone wouldn't mind double checking to see if they can find something I missed, it would appreciate it.

Like I said earlier. I've checked all the German white books I could find online, none of the relevant white books containing information on the leaflets are available online for us to search. The German white book you have presented to us, is a white book only concerning documents on the outbreak of the war, as the title of the webpage tells us:

100 Documents on the Origins of the War Selected from the Official German White Book

These 100 documents relating to the outbreak of the war have been posted before here: https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=12755 along with a longer 700 page version that contains documents from the Blue Book.

There are multiple German white books. The two others we have are:

German White Book No. 3 containing the infamous documents pertaining to American collusion in starting the Second World War: https://www.ihr.org/jhr/v04/v04p135_Weber.html although I unfortunately cannot find this one online in full.

And the German White Book No. 5 containing documents relating to "Allied Intrigue in the Low Countries": https://tinyurl.com/AlliedIntrigueintheLowCountrie

I had already pointed out that the books I looked at only went up to September 3rd.