Dresden: An Undisputed Holocaust    
    Eddy Morrison reminds us of a real 'destruction by fire'    
       
       
 

On the 27th of last month, we were treated to the 60th Anniversary of the dubious 'liberation' of Auschwitz by the rampaging and half-drunk Red Army. This date in each year is the day we are forced by our Marxist-liberal government to acknowledge the fact that the Holocaust actually happened.

Much has been written on this subject, and nowadays many questions have been, and are being, asked about the true nature of the 'Holocaust'. Needless to say, in many countries, honest and open debate about the Holocaust is now suppressed due to Zionist-inspired anti-revisionist laws. The alleged 'facts' of the Holocaust are written in stone and must never be questioned – or talked about other than as solid and accepted historical fact.

It is not the purpose of this article to examine whether Britain needs a Holocaust Day. The purpose is to show that there were many other Holocausts in the Second World War (and beyond and before that too). These other Holocausts are mostly forgotten. Only the official 'Holocaust' is constantly pushed in our faces – and, I would claim, for essentially political reasons.

I could have written of many other Holocausts of which the facts are beyond question: the Hamburg firebombing; the atrocities in Cambodia under the Communist maniac Pol Pot; the 'Great Leap Forward' in China; the Katyn Forest Massacre (at first blamed on the Germans but later admitted to be the work of the Soviets) and many, many more – mostly now buried and forgotten. There is one such Holocaust which we in particular should remember: it was unforgivable and should never be forgotten – and it was one in which the blood was, at least partly, on Britain's hands. The Dresden Holocaust was committed not by the awful Nazis, nor even by brutal Reds but by the so-called democratic freedom-loving allies, Britain and the USA! So the next time you are faced with the accusation of 'Holocaust Denial', just mention the Dresden Holocaust.

An act of terrorism

Fifty-seven years ago, on the evening of February 13, 1945, an orgy of genocide and barbarism began against a defenceless German city, one of the greatest cultural centres of Europe. Within less than 14 hours, not only was this city reduced to flaming ruins but an estimated quarter of its inhabitants, possibly as many as a quarter of a million, had perished in what was one of the worst massacres of all time.

Toward the end of World War II, as Allied planes rained death and destruction over Germany, the old Saxon city of Dresden lay like an island of tranquillity amid an ocean of desolation. Famous mainly for its art and Baroque architecture and possessing no military value, Dresden had 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 defences. One squadron of planes had been stationed in Dresden for a while, but the Luftwaffe decided to move the aircraft to another area where it was thought they would be of more use. A gentleman's agreement seemed to prevail, designating Dresden an 'open city'.

On Shrove Tuesday, February 13, 1945, a flood of refugees fleeing the Red Army 60 miles away had swollen the city's population to well over a million. Each new refugee brought fearful accounts of Soviet atrocities. Little did those refugees retreating from the red terror imagine that they themselves were about to die in a horror worse than anything Stalin could devise.

Normally, a carnival atmosphere prevailed in Dresden on Shrove Tuesday. In 1945, however, the outlook was rather dismal. Houses everywhere overflowed with refugees, and thousands were forced to camp out in the streets shivering in the bitter cold.

However, the people felt relatively safe; and although the mood was grim, the circus 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 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 many of those same innocent children would die screaming in Churchill's firestorms. But of course, no one could know that then. The Soviets, to be sure, were known to be savages, but at least the British were and Americans were thought to be 'honourable'.

So when those first alarms signalled the start of 14 hours of hell, Dresden's people streamed dutifully into their shelters. But they did so without much enthusiasm, believing the alarms to be false, since their city had never been threatened 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 D. Roosevelt, had decided that the city of Dresden was to be obliterated by saturation bombing.

Polical motives

What where Churchill's motives? They appear to have been political rather than military. Historians unanimously agree that Dresden had no military value. What industry it did have produced only cigarettes and china. But the Yalta Conference was coming up, in which the Soviets and their Western allies would sit down like ghouls to carve up the shattered corpse of Europe. Churchill wanted a trump card – a devastating thunderclap of Anglo-American annihilation with which to impress Stalin.

That card was never played at Yalta, because bad weather delayed the originally scheduled raid. Yet Churchill insisted that the raid be carried out to "disrupt and confuse" the German civilian population behind the lines.

Dresden's citizens barely had time to reach their shelters. The first bomb fell at 10:09 p.m. The attack lasted 24 minutes, leaving the inner city a raging sea of fire. Precision saturation bombing had created the desired firestorm.

A firestorm is caused when hundreds of smaller fires join in one vast conflagration. Huge masses of air are sucked in to feed the inferno, causing an artificial tornado. Those persons unlucky enough to be caught in the rush of wind are hurled down entire streets into the flames. Those who seek refuge underground often suffocate, as oxygen is pulled from the air to feed the blaze, or they perish in a blast of white heat – heat intense enough to melt human flesh.

Women and children targeted

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 raid came at 1:22 a.m., with no warning. Twice as many bombers returned, with a massive load of incendiary bombs. The second wave was designed to spread the raging firestorm into the Grosser Garten.

It was a complete 'success'. Within a few minutes, a sheet of flame ripped across the grass, uprooting trees and littering the branches of others with everything from bicycles to human limbs. For days afterward, all these remains remained bizarrely strewn about as grim reminders of Allied sadism.

At the start of the second air assault, many were still huddled in tunnels and cellars, waiting for the fires of the first attack to die down. At 1:30 a.m. an ominous rumble reached the ears of the commander of a Labour 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.'

Melting human flesh

Others, hiding below ground, died. But they died painlessly. They simply glowed bright orange and blue in the darkness. 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 14th, the last raid swept over the city. This time it was the turn of the Americans. Their bombers pounded the rubble that had been Dresden for a steady 38 minutes. But this attack was not nearly as heavy as the first two. However, what distinguished this raid was the cold-blooded ruthlessness with which it was carried out. US Mustangs appeared low over the city, strafing anything that moved, including a column of rescue vehicles rushing to the city to evacuate survivors. One assault was aimed at the banks of the Elbe River, where refugees had huddled during the horrible night.

In the last year of the war, Dresden had become a hospital town. During the previous night's massacre, heroic nurses had dragged thousands of crippled patients to the Elbe. The low-flying Mustangs machine-gunned those helpless patients, as well as thousands of old men, women and children who had escaped the city.

When the last plane left the sky, Dresden was a scorched ruin, its blackened streets filled with corpses. The city was spared no horror. A flock of vultures escaped from the zoo and fattened on the carnage. Rats swarmed over the piles of corpses.

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 – and possibly even 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 our own city of Coventry. But the 380 killed in Coventry during the entire war cannot begin to compare with perhaps 1,000 times that number who were slaughtered in 14 hours at Dresden. Moreover, Coventry was a centre of the motor and munitions industries, a legitimate military target. Dresden, on the other hand, produced nothing in those categories.

As a comparison with the London Blitz – which I acknowledge was bad and showed the bravery of the London people, it should still be considered in the light of the destruction visited upon Dresden. In just one night, 16,000 acres of land were destroyed in the Dresden massacre, whereas London escaped with damage to only 600 acres during the entire war.

As one ironic note, Dresden's only conceivable military targets, its railroad yards, were 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 one of the most sordid of all time. Yet there are no movies made today condemning this fiendish slaughter; nor did any Allied airman – or Sir Winston – 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."

Churchill, who ordered the Dresden slaughter to appease Stalin, as we have seen, was knighted; and the rest is history. The cold-blooded sadism of the massacre, however, is brushed aside by Churchill's biographers, who still cannot bring themselves to tell how the desire of one madman to impress another one led to the mass-murder of possibly up to a half million people.

So to repeat, when we talk about Holocausts and war crimes let us not forget Dresden, when fellow white men bombed into annihilation hundreds of thousands of other white men, women and children. Will we ever see a Dresden Memorial Day in Britain? Somehow I doubt it!

* Although it will never be possible to obtain an exact count of the victims, a reasonable estimate can be adduced by taking the number of registered inhabitants of the city, doubling it by a factor of two-plus 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 atrocity during World War II, notably Hamburg, Darmstadt and Pforzheim, inter alia.

    Spearhead Online