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<PRE>THE HOFFMAN WIRE
Dedicated to Freedom of the Press, Investigative Reporting and Revisionist History
Michael A. Hoffman II, Editor
<A HREF=" http://www.hoffman-info.com/news.html
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Feb. 13, 2002
Holocaust and Terrorism in Dresden
Note: Fifty-seven years ago, on the evening of February 13, 1945, an
orgy of genocide and barbarism was initiated against a defenseless
German city, one of the greatest cultural centers of northern Europe.
Within less than 14 hours, not only was it reduced to flaming ruins,
but an estimated one-third of its inhabitants had perished in what was
one of most egregious crimes of mass murder in the annals of modern
warfare.
As Americans bemoan the loss of some 3,000 at Silverstein's World
Trade Center and Wolfowitz's Pentagon, few recall the terrorism
conducted against German civilians during World War II, culminating in
the extermination of over 100,000. The following account, taken from the
NS Bulletin (PO Box 270486, Milwaukee WI 53227) details a genune
holocaust (Gr: "death by fire"), by the "noble Allies" against the first
nation to be demonized as part of an "axis of evil."
The terror methods used in Dresden in 1945 by the RAF and USA were later
perfected by Ariel Sharon in Beirut in 1982 and by NATO in Belgrade and
the US in Iraq and now Afghanistan; comprising yet another chapter in
that vast compendium, "Why They Hate Us."
TOWARD the end of World War II, as Allied planes rained death
and destruction over the civilian centers of Germany, the old Saxon city
of Dresden lay like an island of tranquility amid the inferno. Renowned
as a cultural center and possessing no military value, Dresden had thus
far been spared the terror that descended from the skies over the rest
of the country.
In fact, little had been done to provide the ancient city of artists
and craftsmen with anti-aircraft defenses. One squadron of fighters had
been stationed in Dresden for awhile, but the Luftwaffe decided to move
the aircraft to another area where they would be of use. A gentlemen's
agreement seemed to prevail, designating Dresden an "open city."
On Shrove Tuesday (the day before the beginning of Lent), February 13,
1945, a flood of refugees fleeing the Red Army to the east, had
swollen the city's population to well
over one million. Each new refugee brought fearful accounts of Soviet
atrocities. Little did those refugees retreating from the Red terror
imagine that they were about to die in a horror worse than anything even
Stalin had devised.
A carnival atmosphere usually prevailed in Dresden on Shrove
Tuesday. In 1945, however, the outlook was rather dismal.
Houses everywhere overflowed with refugees, and thousands of people were
forced to camp out in the streets, shivering in the bitter winter cold.
The people felt relatively safe, however; and although the mood
was grim, music played to a full house that night as thousands came to
forget for a moment the horrors of war. Bands of little girls paraded
about in pre-Lenten carnival dress in an effort to bolster waning
spirits. Half-sad smiles greeted the laughing girls, but spirits were
lifted.
No one realized that in less than 24 hours those same innocent
chilren would die screaming in agony in Churchill and Roosevelt's
firestorm. The Russians, to be sure, had behaved like savages, but at
least the Americans and British were "honorable."
When the first air raid sirens signaled the start of 14 hours of hell,
Dresden's people streamed dutifully into their bomb shelters. But they
did so without much enthusiasm, believing the alarms to be false, since
their city had never been attacked from the air. Many would never come
out alive, for that "great democratic statesman," Winston Churchill��in
collusion with that other "great democratic statesman," Franklin Delano
Roosevelt��had decided that the people of Dresden was to be exterminated
by fire- bombing.
Historians generally agree that Dresden had no military value. What
industry it did have produced only cigarettes and exquisite china.
Dresden's citizens barely had time to reach their shelters.
The first phosporous bombs fell at 10:09 p.m. That attack lasted 24
minutes, leaving the inner city a raging sea of fire. "Precision
saturation bombing" had created the desired inferno.
A firestorm is caused when hundreds of smaller fires join in one
vast conflagration. Huge masses of air are sucked inward, fueling the
fire, causing a man-made hurricane. German civilians caught in the rush
of wind were hurled down entire
streets into the flames. Those who sought refuge underground
suffocated as oxygen was pulled from the air to feed the
blaze, or they perished in a blast of white heat��intense
enough to melt their flesh.
One eyewitness who survived told of seeing "young women
carrying babies running up and down the streets, their dresses
and hair on fire, screaming until they fell down, or the collapsing
buildings fell on top of them."
There was a three-hour pause between the first and second raids. The
lull had been calculated to lure civilians from their shelters into the
open again. To escape the flames, tens of thousands of civilians had
crowded into the Grosser Garten, a magnificent park nearly one and a
half miles square.
The second Allied terror attack came at 1:22 a.m. Twice as
many bombers returned with a massive load of incendiary
bombs. The second wave was designed to spread the raging
firestorm throughout the city, leaving no safe haven.
It was a complete "success." Within a few minutes a sheet
of flame ripped across the remainder of the city, uprooting trees and
littering the branches of others with everything from bicycles to human
limbs. For days afterward, they remained bizarrely strewn about as
horrific reminders of Allied terrorism.
At the start of the second bombing, thousands of civilians were still
huddled in tunnels and cellars, waiting for the fires of the first
attack to subside. At 1:30 a.m. an ominous rumble reached the ears of
the commander of a Labor Service convoy sent into the city on a rescue
mission. He described it this way:
"The detonation shook the cellar walls. The sound of the
explosions mingled with a new, stranger sound which seemed
to come closer and closer, the sound of a thundering waterfall;
it was the sound of the mighty tornado howling in the inner city."
Others hiding below ground died. As the heat intensified, they either
disintegrated into cinders or melted into a thick liquid��often three
or four feet deep in spots.
Shortly after 10:30 on the morning of February 14, the last
raid swept over the city. American bombers mercilessly pounded the
remnant of Dresden for a steady 38 minutes.
However, what distinuished this U.S. raid was the cold-blooded
ruthlessness with which it was carried out. American Mustang fighters
appeared low over the city, strafing anything that moved,
including firemen and a column of rescue vehicles rushing to the city to
evacuate survivors. One assault was aimed at the banks
of the Elbe River, where thouands of survivors had huddled during the
night.
During the previous night's massacre, heroic nurses had dragged
thousands of crippled patients to the Elbe. The low-flying American
Mustangs machine-gunned those helpless patients, as well as thousands
of elderly men, and women and children who had escaped the flames.
When the last U.S. plane left the sky, Dresden was a scorched cinder,
its blackened streets crammed with tens of thousands of corpses. The
German people were spared no horror.
A Swiss citizen described his visit to Dresden two weeks after
the raid: "I could see torn-off arms and legs, mutilated torsos
and heads which had been wrenched from their bodies and
rolled away. In places the corpses were still lying so densely
that I had to clear a path through them in order not to tread
on arms and legs."
The death toll was staggering. The full extent of the Dresden
Holocaust can be more readily grasped if one considers that well over
250,000��possibly as many as a half a million��persons died within a
14-hour period, whereas estimates of those who died at Hiroshima range
from 90,000 to 140,000.*
Allied apologists for the massacre have often "twinned" Dresden
with the English city of Coventry. But the 380 killed in Coventry
during the entire war cannot begin to compare with over 1,000
times that number who were slaughtered in 14 hours at Dresden.
Moreover, Coventry was a munitions center. Dresden, on the other hand,
produced only china, and cups and saucers can hardly be considered
military hardware!
It is interesting to further compare the respective damage to
London and Dresden, especially when we recall all the Hollywood schmaltz
about the "London blitz." In ONE NIGHT, 1,6000 acres of land were
torched in the Dresden massacre. London escaped with damage to only
600 acres during the ENTIRE WAR.
In one ironic note, Dresden's only conceivable military target��
its railroad yards��was ignored by Allied bombers. They were
too busy concentrating on helpless old men, women and children.
If ever there was a war crime, then certainly the Dresden Holocaust
ranks as the most sordid one of all time. Yet there are no movies made
today condemning this fiendish slaugher; nor did any American or British
airman��or Sir Winston or his minion, Sir Arthur"Bomber" Harris��sit in
the dock at Nuremberg. In fact, the Dresden airmen were actually
awarded medals for their role in this mass murder. But, of course, they
could not have been tried, because there were "only following orders."
This is not to say that the mountains of corpses left in Dresden
were ignored by the Nuremberg Tribunal. In one final irony,
the prosecution presented photographs of the Dresden dead as
"evidence" of alleged German atrocities against Jewish
concentration-camp inmates!
NEVER SHALL WE FORGET THE VICTIMS
OF THIS UNSPEAKABLE CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY
Endnote:
*Although it will never be possible to obtain an exact count
of the victims, a reasonable estimate can adduced by taking
the number of registered inhabitants of the city, doubling it
by a factor of 2+ to account for undocumented refugees
in the city at the time, and then extrapolating the number
of dead from analogous instances in other German cities
subjected to saturation bombing and aerial atrocitiy during
World War II, notably Hamburg, Darmstadt and Pforzheim,
inter alia.
---------------------------------
<PRE>Hoffman is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press
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