..the long road to rebuilding Germany after WWII..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elYwfX0CGic

The atrocities committed on the German citizens after the war was horrendous. Certainly no place for women. Young or old.

Mark Felton is one of my all-time favorite YouTube channels. Outstanding videos on less common 20th century military history subjects.

I have spoken to German nationals who grew up in post war Germany. They have some horrific stories.

quote:

atrocities committed on the German citizens after the war

Very good read:
10 Forgotten Atrocities Committed By The Allies In World War II
gregory myers 303 Comments

The saying goes that history is written by the victors, and that holds very true when it comes to World War II. It is often referred to as the good war, with the Allies depicted as the shining white knights who came to save the entire world from the evils of Hitler and the Japanese. However, while the history books tend to depict the Allies as almost saintly, the reality of the situation was often a lot more disturbing and a lot less flattering.

The Allies committed many atrocities during World War II and its aftermath that they would rather you forgot. While there is no questioning that the Axis were certainly worse, it is clear from the many atrocities committed by the Allies that war brings out the brutality in all of us.


10 The Massive Bombing Campaign Against Civilian Targets In Japan

Photo credit: US Military

Most people know of the moment in history when the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The famous argument for their use was that the Japanese were impossible to bring to surrender and that such a shocking display was the only thing that would prevent a land war that would last decades and cost millions of lives. However, well before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US had already been bombing Japanese civilian cities on a regular basis to demoralize the enemy and had caused quite a death toll.

In fact, General Curtis LeMay, who ordered the attacks, was of the mind that the Japanese might not actually surrender until they were pretty much all wiped out. It was for this reason that he decided the bombing campaigns of regular Japanese cities were not enough and that the US needed to go for one of their most major cities and do something drastic.

On March 9, 1945, he carried out his plan and ordered an air raid on Tokyo itself, but this was no normal bombing run. The bombers were dropping napalm cylinders and petroleum jelly to firebomb the entire city.[1] More than 40 square kilometers (15 mi2) of city was burned to ruin, with many melted people stacked on top of each other. It was a horrific sight, with at least 100,000 civilians killed. General LeMay even remarked once that the United States may have killed more people firebombing Tokyo than they did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined and admitted that he would have likely been charged with war crimes if his side had lost.
9 Russian Soldiers Raped Women After Liberating Poland From The Nazis

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Russia certainly doesn’t have the best reputation among the Allies today and was always the more dangerous part of the faction, but the country was basically essential to stopping Hitler. They not only slowed his advance but came roaring back, pushing across the territory Germany had taken and eventually straight on to Berlin itself. The Russian soldiers were exhausted and demoralized after so much fighting, and with society breaking down around them in many ways, they found it fairly easy to revert to primitive behaviors. While some of this only took the form of looting, the amount of rape that went on is incredibly disturbing. To make matters worse, Stalin actually approved of his soldiers raping enemies—he believed that it was a great way to psychologically destroy them.

There weren’t just revenge rapes against Germans in the major cities. The Red Army at the time was known for liberating camps in countries such as Poland and then raping all of the female victims.[2] After so much horrific fighting, many of these men were only thinking about their basic instincts and also felt that they should be able to take what they want, considering how much of a favor they were doing Europe by liberating it from the Nazis.


8 Operation Paperclip Was Probably Even Worse Than You Already Thought

Photo credit: NASA

Not everyone knows it by name, but everyone knows the basics of what Operation Paperclip was. During World War II, the United States and many others had been eying the Germans’ technology and all the various things they were working on and desired to gain the Nazis’ scientific secrets. When the war ended, they found that the Nazis were working on many things they hadn’t even imagined, such as nerve agents and a weaponized form of bubonic plague. Instead of trying to destroy all the research on such horrible things, the US decided they needed these scientists for themselves.[3]

The goal was to bring almost 90 German scientists into the United States, whitewash their past a bit, and get them to put their scientific knowledge to work for the US. Now, some may think this wasn’t really that bad, as they were just scientists and possibly following orders. However, these were not nice men. Some of them knew full well how the concentration camps worked and would personally handpick people to slave themselves to death on their projects—just to enjoy the cruelty of it. Others were, as we mentioned, working on chemical warfare and similarly terrible things, making it hard to simply accept the excuse of “following orders.”

Unfortunately, most of these men grew old and grey working for the US government and never saw any real consequences for their actions.
7 US Soldiers Started Collecting Japanese Skulls

Photo credit: Pinterest

The atrocities of the Japanese during World War II are very well-documented, and in the United States especially, their misdeeds are very well-known. Most people have heard of Japan’s Unit 731 as well as of actions like the Bataan Death March. The Japanese were known for incredibly brutal treatment of prisoners of war and in some cases were witnessed burying captured enemies alive.

However, war brings out the brutality in all of us, and as the campaign in the Pacific dragged on, US soldiers began to perform actions that many people today would find to be shocking and horrific. They started mutilating Japanese corpses and taking trophies, even going so far as to send them back home to civilians, who were actually thankful instead of disgusted. One of the most common things to take were ears because they were easy to cut off and haul away as a trophy, but skulls were the real coup de grace.

Unfortunately, neither process for obtaining the skull was anything short of barbaric. They would either have to boil the head to get the skin off or leave it out long enough for ants to eat all the flesh, leaving the skull underneath intact.[4] To be clear, the United States military leadership officially was against the practice and tried to discourage it, but the soldiers kept taking skulls anyway.


6 The Americans Sent Soviet Dissidents Back To Russia To Die

Photo credit: US Government

The world was so excited when World War II ended and just so glad to move on that many people completely forgot about some of the worst atrocities that happened directly after the war. At the famous Yalta Conference, one of the less famous things promised was repatriation of citizens trapped in another Allied country’s territory or kept as their prisoners. This seemed like a good idea at the time, and everyone was riding high on their emotions, but before long, it became clear just how brutal and awful such a generalized policy could be.

The United States had a couple million people they had to send back, and many really didn’t want to go back to Soviet Russia.[5] The Americans initially resorted to force, but this led to some suicides, so they started going for a sneakier approach, and the British followed suit. They actually started tricking people, telling them they were taking them somewhere else and then sending them back to the Soviet Union. Many of the people sent back were executed for desertion or other crimes, and others were sent to be worked to death at labor camps.
5 The US And The UK Used German POWs As Slaves Back Home

Photo credit: Nebraska State Historical Society

As World War II went on, the British started to end up with a bit of a problem: Storing all of the German prisoners of war and feeding them was becoming an incredible strain on the system. The United States, to help out their ally, agreed to take many German POWs themselves to ease the burden. However, this presented its own issue. The Americans had to find a safe place to put them, and they also were going to be dealing with an increasing burden to care for all these prisoners. And while the Allies did some atrocious things, actual concentration camps of the sort Germany and Japan used were completely out of the question. The Allies were also concerned with actually following the Geneva Conventions, which did not allow for captured soldiers to be used as slaves.

However, both countries quickly decided to go ahead and start using their captured Germans for mass labor, as they had a labor shortage from all their own men fighting the war and had to now take care of hundreds of thousands of prisoners.[6] To get around the fact that they couldn’t technically treat them as slaves, they paid the POWs an incredibly tiny wage. (In England, this amounted to a single shilling a day.) The laborers were often not fed all that well, either, although the governments would claim their own people were also doing without due to war rationing. While Allied POW camps weren’t the horror shows that Axis camps were, abuse still happened, and the Allies still used enemy soldiers as slaves in all but name.


4 Millions Of Ethnic Germans Were Deported To Germany After The War

Photo credit: Hoover Institution Archives

When the war ended, most people think that things quickly became sunshine and roses. However, the aftermath of World War II was incredibly ugly, and the victors didn’t always make decisions that kept the sanctity of human life in mind. In fact, there was a strong desire to get revenge on anyone involved. We all know that the Nuremberg trials brought justice to many Nazi war criminals, but the Allies didn’t save their anger for only the leadership and soldiers. After the war, they approved a plan to forcibly deport 12 to 14 million ethnic Germans back to the ruins of Germany from the various surrounding countries that they had been born in, including Poland.[7]

Most Western history books don’t talk about this because of how shameful it turned out to be. Rough estimates say that about 500,000 civilians died as part of the largest forced migration in known history. To make matters worse, many of these citizens were actually placed into the remains of concentration camps around Germany and were forced to do hard labor as “reparations in kind” for what Germany had done to other countries around them. If this wasn’t bad enough, the vast majority of the people being forced to migrate were women, elderly people, and males under 16 years of age who had been too young to fight in the war.

The sad truth is that the concentration camps didn’t cease operation when the war ended but went on for years afterward, imprisoning ethnic Germans who likely had no say or part in Germany’s initial decision to militarize. In their quest for justice, in this particular case, all the Allies did is get revenge on the wrong people—the innocent.
3 Stalin’s Scorched-Earth Policy

Photo credit: Franklin D. Roosevelt Library

Because the Allies won, when World War II atrocities are talked about, Western history books mostly mention the horrible things done by the Axis. Commonly mentioned is the scorched-earth policy put in place by Hitler. Essentially, if the enemy were going to take a territory, the Germans would burn down all crops, destroy all buildings, and ruin any railroad or other infrastructure to make it harder for the enemy to advance. Many of Hitler’s own commanders thought this was insane and got away many times with actively resisting it. Their argument was that they could always take the place back later, and they felt it would be easier to rebuild if everything wasn’t torn to pieces.

However, while most people only think of this as a Nazi thing, Stalin also put a scorched-earth policy in place.[8] And his was likely much more brutal than the Nazis’. Stalin had an iron grip on his military, so there would be no ignoring his orders, and he wanted it done proper. He had little care for how it would impact his own civilians or how hard it would be to feed them or move them to a safe place. Stalin had special demolition battalions whose sole job was to destroy infrastructure, crops, and entire towns that they had to leave behind to the Germans.

Stalin’s scorched-earth policy hit Ukraine especially hard, as it was fought over by Germans and Soviets, both using a similar strategy to prevent the other side from advancing. By the end of the war, a huge portion of Ukrainian infrastructure had been destroyed.
2 The Americans And The British Turned Away Many Jewish Refugees

Photo credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Whenever you mention any of the bad things the Allies did in the war, or anything that we put up with from Stalin, people will always argue that while it was bad, it was outweighed by the fact that we stopped the Holocaust from going any further. In fact, many people seem to be under the impression that the Holocaust was the main reason the United States and many other countries entered the war. The truth is that the United States officially entered the war after Japan attacked and had only been unofficially helping countries like France and England because they were allies.

While there was news filtering out of Germany about what was happening, most countries were more concerned about protecting their own borders than anything, and we didn’t know the full extent of the Holocaust until after Germany had been defeated. The world didn’t fully realize the problem, and Jewish people already had a history of being unwelcome in many parts of Europe and around the world, which made it easier for Hitler to massacre so many of them.

The United States in particular, while acting the hero today, turned away possibly as many as hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees over the course of the war, refusing to increase their quotas for those regions despite the horrific circumstances.[9] Unfortunately, the British weren’t much better. While they did take in some refugees, they actually made it harder for the Jewish people to use an agreement that allowed them to take refuge in what was then Palestine. Many Jews who couldn’t make it to Palestine or into the US ended up being taken in by other European countries. Many of these countries then fell to Germany, putting the Jewish refugees right back in the arms of Hitler. Most died in the Holocaust.
1 Canadian Troops Burned Down An Entire Town In Revenge

Photo credit: Library and Archives Canada

Today, Canadians are known for being some of the nicest people on the entire planet. They take in loads of refugees with much less red tape than most countries, and their main national fault is apologizing too much—something they keep apologizing for and thus perpetuating the cycle. However, as previously mentioned, war brings out the brutality in all of us, and Canada was no exception. Near the end of World War II, part of the Canada Corps were fighting off some of the last German resistance and ended up in a pitched battle near a town called Friesoythe—home to about 4,000 German civilians.

While they were advancing on Friesoythe to mop things up, the Canadians’ leader was killed in the midst of battle. An erroneous report went around that he was killed not by a German soldier but by a civilian sniper who had cowardly shot him in the back. The acting commander was so incensed that instead of taking the time to find out if it was true, he decided to take revenge on the entire town. Once the town was taken over and the population had fled, the Canada Corps set about burning it all to the ground.[10]

https://listverse.com/2017/09/...ies-in-world-war-ii/

^^^^
Interesting read. It was not until I read Vonnegut that I was aware of the firebombing of Dresden.
Japanese skulls were frequently sent back to the States. Some GIs even sent them to their girlfriends.

That was done by the Brits in reatailion for what the Nazis did to London. My dad flew over dresden the next day it comn=pletly

quote:

Originally posted by ZSMICHAEL:
^^^^
Interesting read. It was not until I read Vonnegut that I was aware of the firebombing of Dresden.
Japanese skulls were frequently sent back to the States. Some GIs even sent them to their girlfriends.

That was done by the Brits, in retailion for what the Nazis did to London. My dad flew over Dresden, on a B-7 mission, the next day it comnpletly obliterated. Fires continued for days, there wasn't a structure standing.

I guess the massive Allied bombing of these German cities wasn't enough revenge for the London blitz...

Berlin,Cologne,Dortmund,Düsseldorf,Essen,Frankfurt,Hamburg,Leipzig,Munich,Bremen,Duisburg,Hagen,
Hanover,Kassel,Kiel,Mainz,Magdeburg,Mannheim,Nuremberg,Stettin and Stuttgart.

"Bomber Harris" had to level most of Dresden as a show of force to the Soviets.

German POWs often teenagers were used to find and destroy the thousands of mines the Germans had placed on the Danish Coast. There was a movie made recently about that practice. Sadly, many of them died or lost limbs.

quote:

Originally posted by ZSMICHAEL:
German POWs often teenagers were used to find and destroy the thousands of mines the Germans had placed on the Danish Coast. There was a movie made recently about that practice. Sadly, many of them died or lost limbs.

Of course the Brits promoted this idea of using German POW.

A clip, and additional links, from the movie "Land of Mine"..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4Vc--byXKE

Here is something else I didn't know about post war Germany and the Nuremberg Trials.

There is a reason they call it "WAR...".

There is always an issue ascribing today's standards and morals to yesterdays actions.

The bombings of germany were necessary, taking them with boots on the ground would have extended the war exponentially.

As for Japan's bombings. Their industry was far different. Much of it was Cottage industry. Small shops in homes, spread out all over the nation. Large bombing campaigns were the most effective way to put that industry down.

quote:

The bombings of germany were necessary, taking them with boots on the ground would have extended the war exponentially.

Don't forget, the Soviet armies did well in bleeding the Germain military.

quote:

Originally posted by downtownv:
https://listverse.com/2017/09/...ies-in-world-war-ii/

Frankly, that writeup is on the level of History Channel "The Ten Greatest Nazi Flying Saucers"-type listings - rather hyperbolic, and lacking context. That's not to say there weren't any Allied atrocities in and post-WW II, both on an individual and systemic level, with clear differences between theaters; both sides generally stuck to the rules on the Western front in Europe, but fought brutally on an ideological basis on the Eastern front, and with mutual racial undertones in the Pacific. Violations still happened in the West, often in tit-for-tats, and obviously war tends to brutalize people. You cannot expect to subject civilized folks to prolonged periods of kill-or-be-killed without a deterioration of respect for civilized behavior, after all. That doesn't just go for soldiers; a wave of civilian violence swept Europe after liberation from German rule, with lots of personal scores and grudges being settled under cover of dealing with "collaborators" etc.

I do however have a particular issue with generally calling POWs being put to work "slaves", which puts it on one level with the German slave labor system. Rules for the treatment of prisoners permitted, and still permit, using enlisted ranks for non-military work. That precludes minesweeping like it was done by the French and Danes, and the US transferring some to European countries post-armistice against reservations of Patton et al was not exactly a stellar hour; the overall practice of keeping many for years post-war on the justification that there wasn't a peace treaty yet was really in contravention of the obligation to release them as soon as hostilities end.

But the US and UK specifically treated German POWs very well, as evidenced by the low death rates in captivity - way less than one percent, compared to over 30 in the USSR and Eastern Europe (in French captivity it was about 2.5 percent; Western POWs in German captivity about 3.5). And for the latter you have to keep in mind that Germany treated Soviet POWs on the level of KZ inmates, since the USSR was not a signatory to the 2nd Geneva Convention - two thirds died. On top of which the survivors were considered traitors by Stalin, and many imprisoned again upon return. Violations of the US and UK hardly even register as "atrocities" on that scale.

Dresden remains a point of debate as of the recent 75th anniversary of the bombing, not least due to domestic German politization. During the Cold War, East Germany seamlessly picked up on Nazi propaganda about Allied "air pirates" in a dichotomic view of WW II where the Western Allies were responsible for bombing German civilians, and the Soviets for liberating them from Nazi rule. Western left-wingers also seized upon it as a poster example of brutal Western air warfare to criticize other conflicts like Vietnam; right-wingers used it to relativate German war crimes. Overall West Germany avoided complaining about its new own allies though.

Post-unification, neo-Nazis pushed into the void of official hesistation to commemorate the civilian victims for fear of looking to belittle German guilt for the war. In turn to appropriation by the radical right there is a recent trend of chearleaderdom for the bombing among younger radical leftists that is of equally bad taste. Around the 70th anniversary "(Bomber Harris) Do it again!" was a fashionable phrase among them. After the 75th, the wreaths laid at the official memorial ceremony were set on fire overnight by unknown vandals who also left a grafitto saying "perpetrators are no victims". Overall however, a balance between remembering German guilt and the victims has emerged in recent years. Lengthy recent article on all this:

quote:

Dresden's Destruction

The Misappropriation of a Tragedy

For years, the right wing in Germany has been trying to instrumentalize the World War II destruction of Dresden. With the 75th anniversary of the bombing now here, many in the city are fed up with the debate.

By Susanne Beyer, Katja Iken, Dirk Kurbjuweit, Ann-Katrin Müller, Klaus Wiegrefe und Steffen Winter

12.02.2020, 17:38 Uhr

Rubble. Everywhere. And the remnants of bombed-out buildings, as far as the eye can see. Only the corner towers remain of the once-majestic cathedral known as the Frauenkirche. Smoke, both black and white, is rising from the destruction, with a few fires still burning here and there. There’s a destroyed streetcar and, if you look closely enough, you can see people wandering through the rubble, most with their shoulders slumped. A mother dragging her two sons behind her passes a bench on which a dead couple is slumped. Two swastika flags hang from a building.

The music is atmospheric and the sound of the wind can be heard. Night falls, before then once again giving way to daylight - a blood-red sun, as though mortally wounded.

The images are from an overpowering representation of Dresden following the bombing raids on the city that took place on Feb. 13-15, 1945. It is a trip back in time on 3,000 square meters of polyester, created by the artist Yadegar Asisi. The circular, dark panorama is 107 meters long, 27 meters high and can be seen in the old Dresden gasometer.

According to the artist, the panorama shows a city "at its nadir, at a moment of paralysis, the zero hour." Asisi assembled his depiction of destroyed Dresden using old photos and film clips after having sent out an appeal to the population to send him material.

The panorama was inaugurated five years ago, on the 70th anniversary of Dresden’s annihilation. It was, from today’s perspective, a different era.

The fight for the city's memory is not over yet.

Back then, it seemed as though the vast majority of Germans had found a way to remember the Nazi era and the vast carnage of World War II their ancestors had triggered. It looked like they had managed to internalize the pain of Germany’s guilt and to recognize that Dresden’s destruction was a consequence of that culpability. The logical conclusion born from that approach to the city’s World War II history was clear: Never again. No Nazis. No war.

Even then, though, the anniversary of the bombing of Dresden, was consistently misappropriated by right-wing extremists to portray the residents of Dresden as the victims of Anglo-American "terror,” just as the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, did in the final months of the war. After the initial waves of British bombers, the Americans then showed up on Feb. 14 and 15. Around the turn of the millennium, a right-wing group called for a march on behalf of the victims, a protest that became something of an annual tradition. Indeed, according to German domestic security officials, the demonstrations developed into "one of the most important right-wing extremist events in Germany." In 2009, there were 6,500 participants, making it one of the largest gatherings of Nazis in all of Europe.

But a self-assured Dresden populace pushed back and made sure that the whole story was told on the day of commemoration – namely that Dresden wasn’t quite as innocent as the right-wing extremists wanted to believe.

Historian Mike Schmeitzner points out that the city was a stronghold for National Socialism in the state of Saxony, with 20,000 political functionaries working in Dresden by 1935. Moreover, "racial hygiene” had already been introduced as an academic field in Dresden by 1920, says Schmeitzner.

Without the crimes of the Nazis, there would have been no bombs and Dresden would not have been destroyed. Which means that the two significant anniversaries in the first weeks of this year – the Jan. 27 anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the commemoration of the bombing of Dresden – are intimately linked.

As he did for the Auschwitz anniversary, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier is planning a speech to mark the Dresden commemoration. The challenge, just as it has been for presidents before him, will be that of finding the right tone – of recognizing the suffering of the victims while also acknowledging Germany’s guilt. No matter what, though, his speech will be just the next round in the ongoing battle for the historical interpretation of what happened in Dresden.

[...]

Thousands of civilians died in the hail of bombs, that is undeniable. And it also makes remembrance so challenging – legitimate pain combined with deep culpability. The result is an equally complex approach to mourning.

That complexity can be illustrated using two examples: That of a politician from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and that of a poet.

For AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla, 44, Feb. 13 is an important day. "I dont need to put it in my calendar. The appointment is inside me," he says, briefly pressing his right hand to his heart. Both his grandmother and father experienced the bombardment in person and spoke of it frequently, he says. Chrupalla says his family had fled to Dresden from Silesia, which is today part of Poland, and they spent the night of the bombardment cowering under a bridge. And they survived. His father was just five years old at the time, but still had memories of that night.

Chrupalla would like more to be done to remember the destruction of Dresden. "A special place of remembrance in Dresden is needed to commemorate the victims," he says. Thus far, there is merely a plaque in the ground. "I dont think thats enough, Chrupalla says, adding that he isnt planning on going to the event at which Steinmeier is speaking. He suspects the German president will use the ceremony to attack the AfD. "I would like to be allowed to speak so I could present our view of things."

Chrupalla says he's surprised that the number of victims has been adjusted downward in the past decades, with experts now believing that 25,000 people died in the bombings. He thinks that number is way off. "I believe there were around 100,000 victims," he says. The Red Cross wrote of 278,000 dead in 1948, he says. "My grandmother, my father and other witnesses told me that the streets were full before the attack and that there were mountains of corpses after that night," Chrupalla says. None of them believe the newer number of 25,000 dead, he says, which is why he has his doubts as well.

So the AfD has planned its own commemoration ceremony, complete with the laying of a wreath and an information stand organized by the party’s Dresden chapter to inform people "of the true occurrences of that day," as Chrupalla puts it.

[...]

But how many people actually died in the bombing raids? Arriving at a number in Dresden is just as difficult as agreeing on the proper form of commemoration. The numbers are subject to manipulation just as they have been from the very beginning.

On March 15, 1945, the SS in Dresden reported to Berlin that 18,375 victims had been counted up to that point and that the final number was likely to rise to 25,000. A short time later, though, the Propaganda Ministry released new numbers to back up the idea of a "monstrous terror attack on civilians, as the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter would have it. Correspondents from neutral countries were not allowed to visit Dresden, but just days after the air raids, fantastical numbers, likely from Goebbels' team, began making the rounds.

Citing trusted sources in Berlin, the Svenska Morgonbladet in Stockholm reported 100,000 deaths on Feb. 17, with the Svenska Dagbladet reporting eight days later that the number was "closer to 200,000 than 100,000", citing official "Third Reich" sources.

The success of the propaganda campaign was astounding, as historian Matthias Neutzner has determined. By summer 1945, a significant share of both the German and Western public believed that there had been "several hundred thousand victims." That would have meant that more people were killed in Dresden than in the detonation of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, where 80,000 lost their lives in the initial blast.

A falsified document was even in circulation, Daily Order No. 47 from the SS in Dresden, issued on March 22, 1945. It stated that there had been 202,040 victims, with the final total expected to rise to 250,000. Later, though, it was found that someone had added an extra zero to both numbers.

But the debate continued nonetheless. A number of theories were offered up to explain how so many people could have died in a city with a population of less than 600,000. Dresden was full of refugees from the east; the fire was so hot that many people were incinerated without a trace; in the chaos following the firestorm, huge numbers of bodies were secretly buried or interned in the ruins.

Dresden, though, was misappropriated by both the left and the right. Those seeking to criticize the U.S. for its reliance on air power, whether in Vietnam in the late 1960s or in Iraq in 2003, were more than happy to refer to Dresden as an example. The peace movement was likewise fond of citing the Dresden inferno in their Cold War protests against the nuclear arms race.

To others, meanwhile, Dresden seemed perfectly suited to counter Allied efforts at passing judgment on the crimes committed by Germany in postwar courtrooms. Others saw it as a way of relativizing German guilt for the Holocaust. The firestorm could be cited to show that the victors of World War II were no better than the losers. In 1964, the influential German weekly Die Zeit wrote that the attack on Dresden was "probably the largest mass murder in the history of humanity."

A Monument to the Future

DER SPIEGEL also jumped into the Dresden debate and in 1963, promoted the ideas of historical revisionist David Irving, who was later revealed to be a Holocaust denier. He called the bombing of Dresden a "senseless act of terror" and DER SPIEGEL also printed the inaccurate numbers he provided. Such absurd statistics found their way into the newsmagazine on several occasions, with the victim total of 200,000 still being printed as late as 2003. Other media outlets did the same.

By 2004, the mayor of Dresden, Ingolf Roßberg, had had enough of the debate over the victim numbers and the way the right-wing was increasingly using the uncertainty for its own purposes. He put together a commission of historians under the leadership of Rolf-Dieter Müller, with the groups final report being issued six years later. The academics had followed every possible lead in their effort to find the truth and had even tracked down the names of most of the victims. Their verdict: Up to 25,000 people had died in the Dresden air raids from Feb. 13-15, 1945. It is that number that the AfD politician Chrupalla contests.

It is a huge number, to be sure. Mourning is not dependent on statistics. Grief is grief. And yet: Is there an acceptable way to consider this number in light of German guilt?

[...]

https://www.spiegel.de/interna...8b-ba1c-5349832f75b9

quote:

Originally posted by DSgrouse:
There is always an issue ascribing today's standards and morals to yesterdays actions.

The bombings of germany were necessary, taking them with boots on the ground would have extended the war exponentially.

As for Japan's bombings. Their industry was far different. Much of it was Cottage industry. Small shops in homes, spread out all over the nation. Large bombing campaigns were the most effective way to put that industry down.

agree

war is hell

i am of the unpopular opinion the more brutal and effective it is -- the FASTER it will be over

interestingly --- a nation killing civilians in WW2 is a strategy

a soldier killing a civilian is a war crime

many ethical pitfalls in war


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

Reinforces the famous saying: Not everything true that happened is written down. And not everything written down is true.