The Dresden Holocaust – ‘A Single Column Of Flame’
Rense.com
On the evening of February 13, 1945, an orgy of genocide and barbarism began 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, possibly as many as a half a million, had perished in what was the worst single event massacre of all time.
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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 desolation. Famous as a cultural center 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 defenses. One squadron of planes 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.”
February 13/14 1945: Holocaust over Dresden, known as the Florence of the North. Dresden was a hospital city for wounded soldiers. Not one military unit, not one anti-aircraft battery was deployed in the city. Together with the 600.000 refugees from Breslau, Dresden was filled with nearly 1.2 million people. Churchill had asked for “suggestions how to blaze 600.000 refugees”. He wasn’t interested how to target military installations 60 miles outside of Dresden. More than 700.000 phosphorus bombs were dropped on 1.2 million people. One bomb for every 2 people. The temperature in the centre of the city reached 1600 o centigrade. More than 260.000 bodies and residues of bodies were counted. But those who perished in the centre of the city can’t be traced. Approximately 500.000 children, women, the elderly, wounded soldiers and the animals of the zoo were slaughtered in one night.
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 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 warning spirits. Half-sad smiles greeted the laughing girls, but spirits were lifted.
No one realized that in less than 24 hours those same innocent children would die screaming in Churchill’s firestorms. But, of course, no one could know that then. The Russians, to be sure, were savages, but at least the Americans and British were “honorable.”
So, when those first alarms signaled 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 Delano Roosevelt–had decided that the city of Dresden was to be obliterated by saturation bombing.
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, however, 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.
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, they 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 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.”
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 14, the last raid swept over the city. American 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. U.S. 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.”
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February 12, 2012 - Posted by aletho | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | Dresden, Germany, Winston Churchill, World War II
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Violent death is never pretty… Not even when it’s your enemy’s death… But let’s not forget:
Who initiated WWII?!…
Who initiated the bombing of cities?!…
Who introduced the concept of “total war”?!…
Who wouldn’t capitulate even when the end (roughly a year later and with great human suffering in the mean time) was clear to everybody?!…
The answers to the above questions is really a single answer: NAZI Germany…
Yes, Dresden wasn’t a pretty sight… Neither were Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry and many others… Curtesy of NAZI Germany by way of the Luftwaffe…
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Yet all of your questions only yield canned deceptions if one were to answer with the lines that you presume.
Patrick Buchanan explains that WWII was a war of choice for the allies. The German demand for Danzig was very supportable, the citizenry having voted to be returned to German sovereignty. It was the allies that convinced the Poles to be intransigent.
The initiation of bombing of cities is also a question that is in contention.
What can one say about “introducing the concept of total war”, have you no knowledge of the history of the British empire?
Anyone with the least familiarity with WWII history would agree that Hitler never wanted war with the UK, France or the US. That leaves the responsibility plainly on those that chose to have war.
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The Germans kept on demanding… First there was the Ruhr Valley, then there was the Sudetenland, then Danzig… You can feed the alligator but what do you do when the feed runs out?!… As for the population of Danzig, the fact that a minority of the total population wants something isn’t much of an argument in a democracy… They can try to convince the majority but otherwise they’re stuck… As for the Poles, you clearly don’t know them… They didn’t need any convincing regarding their sovereignty…
As for the initiation of bombing of cities, it is NOT a question that is in contention… Warsaw and Rotterdam are proof of that… Even the earlier German bombing campaigns in Spain could be offered as proof…
It was Germany that made WWII the “Total War” that it became… Hitler actually boasted about it… As for the British Empire, I know that they, for example, bombed Iraqi villages from the air but that’s not really the same thing as what happened in Warsaw or Rotterdam…
As for Hitler not wanting war with the US, nothing would have happened had he not declared war on the US following the Pearl Harbor attack… Yet he did declare war on the US… That is historical fact…
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Hans,
The aerial bombing of civilian towns was first used by the British empire in both Iraq and Africa. There is simply no debate on this question.
There are competing claims regarding which side is responsible for bringing this tactic into WWII.
As to which party is responsible for the fact that negotiation did not resolve the issue of Polish rule over German communities, I suggest that you read Buchanan’s book. 70% of the population of Danzig voted to leave Poland.
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Dear Hans,
It is so sad to see that Jewish brainwashing and guilt foisted on the world for over a hundred years still seems to hold sway over you and others who are not aware of real historical facts.
Before you comment on a subject that you clearly know nothing about, please read some real history, and understand who really planned and started WWII, benefited from it, and still benefits from it.
The internet poses a great threat to those who control the material world, which is why there is censorship (yes, even today in Germany and elsewhere) and a ban on truth telling just about everywhere, except private blogs. Nevertheless, there are some who are capable of critical thinking and who know that the propaganda about WWII (and all the other wars) is simply BS.
You could start by reading “The Bad War” by Mike King, which is a simple, well documented book which does not require higher education to understand.
I am making this comment in the hope that you are sincere in your delusion, and not just a troll spreading hasbara.
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Germany is still under US military occupation with over 50,000 US military personal.
President George H.W. Bush stated that “‘the US was a European power and that we are there to stay!'”
I think that was the purpose for getting into WWII, to attack the USSR, and armed NAZI Germany in the process, wanting a war of attrition, and got one, costing the mass murder of perhaps 30,000,000 people.
Dresden and Heroshima and Nagasaka are basically the same thing, and most likely planned psychological warfare atrocities to unconditional surrender and eternal occupation, which is still the case in Japan, and Korea for that matter!
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The Anglo/American empire has terrorized the world with aerial bombardment and WMDs for almost a century now, since the enforcement of tax collection in Iraq through the bombing of delinquents.
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