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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 | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Germany halts ACTA approval

RT – February 10, 2012

Germany has delayed its approval of the ACTA treaty after the Justice Ministry voiced its concerns about the legislation. It is the third EU country after Poland and the Czech Republic to challenge the controversial treaty.

­The Justice Ministry said that the European Parliament should vote on ACTA before it is considered by the state’s parliament.

Three of Germany’s parties, the Pirate Party, the Left Party and the Greens, have also spoken out against ACTA.

German protesters are expected to stage demonstrations in over 60 towns across the country on Saturday.

Earlier Poland and the Czech Republic had refused to approve the agreement. Both countries saw major protests in the streets. Critics of ACTA accuse its authors of hammering out the agreement in secret and say the deal will limit online freedom of speech.

On January 26, the controversial ACTA treaty was signed by the 22 of 27 European Union member states, and the EU itself. It now has to be ratified by the European Parliament and is scheduled to be debated in June.

ACTA is an international agreement aimed at protecting intellectual property. It shares similarities with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the US, which was shelved by lawmakers after a partial blackout by Wikipedia and Google in protest.

The ACTA treaty was negotiated by industrialized countries struggling for ways to fight intellectual property theft. The US, most of the EU, Australia, Canada, Japan and several other countries have signed the treaty.

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February 10, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Anti-war activists in Munich protest major security confab

Press TV – February 5, 2012
German policemen block demonstrators trying to approach Munich’s Bayerischer Hof Hotel, where the 48th Munich Security Conference is held.

Hundreds of anti-war activists have taken to the streets in the southern German city of Munich to protest against an annual, high-profile security conference.

Some 800 demonstrators marched on Saturday toward the Bayerischer Hof Hotel in Munich where the 48th Munich Security Conference is being held.

The three-day event brings together foreign and defense ministers and military experts from around the world.

The activists said that they were demonstrating against global arms deals, calling for a genuine global peace. The anti-war protesters also condemned the conference for ‘only paving the way for future conflicts.’

The event gathers the world’s major weapons producers who seek to invent wars and move profit backwards and forwards with certain countries, they said.

The 48th Munich Security Conference, focusing on Europe’s debt crisis and strategies for global security, was held with security provisions that were not as tight as the previous years, with police presence at a 3,100-strong low.

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February 5, 2012 Posted by | Militarism, Solidarity and Activism | , , | Leave a comment

German people in unprecedented rebellion against government

1,000 injured in nuclear protests, police at breaking point

By Jane Burgermeister – November 8, 2010

Like the Roman legions vanquished in the Teutoburger Wald in Lower Saxony in 9 AD, the 17,000 police officers that marched into the woods around the nuclear storage facility in Gorleben in northern Germany on Sunday morning looked invincible. Police personnel from France, Croatia and Poland had joined in the biggest security operation ever mounted against protestors against a train carrying nuclear waste to a depot in an isolated part of  Lower Saxony’s countryside. Helicopters, water canons and police vehicles, including an armoured surveillance truck, accompanied an endless column of anti-riot police mounted on horses and also marching down the railway tracks into the dense woods. Tens of thousands of anti riot police clattered along the tracks, their helmets and visors gleaming in the morning sun, and wearing body armour, leg guards and carrying batons.

But by Sunday night, those same police officers were begging the protestors for a respite.

Trapped in black, icy  woods without supplies or reinforcements able to reach them because of blockades by a mobile fleet of farmer’s tractors, the exhausted and hungry police officers requested negotiations with the protestors. A water cannon truck was blocked by tractors, and yet the police still had to clear 5,000 people lying on the railway track at Harlingen in pitch darkness. The largest ever police operation had descended into chaos and confusion in the autumn woods of Lower Saxony, defeated by the courage and determination of peaceful protestors who marched for miles through woods to find places to lie down on the tracks and to scoop out gravel to delay the progress of the “the train from hell.”

The police union head Reiner Wendt gave vent to the general frustration when he issued a press statement via the DPA news agency last night saying the police had reached exhaustion point and needed a break. Behind the scenes, a battle seemed to be raging between the police chiefs, tucked up in their warm headquarters urging more action, and the exhausted officers on the ground.

The police on the ground won out. The Castor train – called a “Chernobyl on wheels” because it has been carrying 133 tonnes of highly radioactive waste to an unsafe depot – was stopped in the middle of the countryside and NATO barbed wire was placed around it. Lit by floodlights and guarded by a handful of police, the most dangerous train on the planet was forced to a halt after a 63 hour journey across France and Germany.

The defeat of the legions at Teutoburg marked the end of the attempt by the Roman empire to conquer Germania magna. And the failure of the biggest ever police operation two thousand years later in the woods of Lower Saxony to tame women, elderly people and school children protesting the government’s nuclear policy, could well also go down as a turning point.

The Berlin government can no longer rely on the discredited mainstream media to control the way people see issues. Too many people recognise it to be a tool of propaganda. The government now needs to resort to brute force to bludgeon through decisions that enrich corporations and banks and impoverish everyone else. But the police forces  at its disposal are simply not sufficient given the scale of the protests now gripping Germany. Only 1,500 police reinforcements could be mustered on Morning from the entire territory to deal with road blockades by thousands of protestors aiming to delay the transport of the nuclear waste on the final leg of its journey.

The police officers were exhausted after shifts of 24 hours or more, often without any food or just a cappuccino and snack bar, and they had nothing to look forward to but more of the same drudgery after a night spent four to a room in a Youth Hostel.

http://newsticker.sueddeutsche.de/list/id/1065325

A leading figure in a German police police union Bernard Witthaut today even lashed out at the government for trying to drive through unpopular policies using the police.

“Whether in Stuttgart or in Wendland today my colleagues are simply not getting out of their anti riot gear because of the wrong decisions by the government,” he said.

Many police officers also expressed sympathy with the protestors’ aims.

The question now is: how long can the use of police to bludgeon protestors continue when the protests are reaching this scale? How long can Germany be governed by a semi authoritarian regime using brute force when the force at its disposal is so small? The German army cannot be deployed on this kind of mission without sparking even more outrage. A false flag terrorist operation will hardly wash when the people are so fed up with the government lies and the media lies. EU soldiers will find it hard to deal with the Germans. The German and EU secret police cannot infiltrate all of the protestor’s organizations when there are simply so many.

The German people as a whole are on the march.

“Citizens in rebellion,” shouted a TAZ headline.

“Civil war in Wendtand,” fumed Bild.

NGO chief Kersin Rudek spoke for many when she said:

“We have lost faith in the government until they prove that their politics is for the people and not for the corporations.”

She talked about the “anger” among people at the “arrogance of the political class.”

As in the Stuttgart 21 railway protests, it was people from all walks of life,  a genuine grass roots movement, that arrived in Wendland to protest the decision by the CDU/CSU/FDP government to ignore a legally binding deadline to phase out nuclear power. Against the wishes of the majority, Bilderberg Chancellor Angela Merkel announced this autumn that 17 reactors would continue for another 12 years at gigantic cost to the tax payer in subsidies.

The tax payers of Lower Saxony even have to foot the bill of  50 million euro for the police operation to protect the nuclear waste – and not the electricity companies making a fortune from the extravagant energy source while the government keeps investments in ground-breaking new renewable energy technologies such as the third generation solar cells at a negligible amount.

As in Stutggart, the police used savage force against peaceful demonstrators reinforcing the impression of a government out of control and refusing to respect the basic democratic right of people to hold protests without being beaten to a pulp. Videos of the Castor transport on Sunday show police beating people with their truncheons, punching them and throwing them to the ground. Police also used tear gas, pepper spray and water canon.

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,727706,00.html

One clip shows a police officer using his fist to punch a man lying on the railway track in the head.

About a 1,000 people were injured, it is reported. 950 people are reported to have suffered eye injuries due to pepper spray and tear gas, according to a spokesperson of “Castor schottern”. Another sixteen protestors suffered broken bones. There were 29 severe head wounds. Two people had to be taken to hospital.

http://www.ftd.de/politik/deutschland/:live-ticker-zum-atomprotest-castor-gegner-beklagen-1000-verletzte/50192073.html

One person had to be taken by helicopter after suffering multiple bone fractures after being trampled by a police horse.

But as in Stuttgart, the people did not give up in spite of the risk of savage beatings at the hands of the police. They insisted on their civic right enshrined in the constitution to hold peaceful political protests.

More than 50,000 people from all parts of the country and all walks of life attended a rally on a field close to Dannenberg. Thousands then marched through the autumn woods, splitting into small groups to descend into the valley, break through police lines to chain themselves to the rails or remove gravel from the  tracks to delay the train.

According to Spiegel, 7,000 people alone took part in the road and railway blockades.

An armoured police car was set on fire by masked men but it is not clear if this was an agent pravocateur acting to discredit the protestors. A video shows a man able to walk up to the armoured car and set it alight unhindered.

The overwhelming number of protestors were peaceful.

In spite of the sub zero temperatures and ground frost, up to 5000 protestors  lay down on the railway tracks at Harlingen late in the evening and refused to move. Supplies of hot tea, food and blankets were brought to them by mobile kitchens. Fires were lit to help stay warm.

The police worked from midnight until 7 am to clear protestors blocking the track, dragging many to an open air “prison concentration camp” where people were forced to sleep in fields surrounded by police trucks.

This morning, the protestors have regrouped today and thousands are reported to be preparing to block the transport by road of the nuclear waste from Dannenberg to Gorleben.

http://www.bild.de/BILD/politik/2010/11/08/castor-transport-nach-gorleben/behaelter-werden-umgeladen-jetzt-droht-strassen-terror.html

The organisers of the protest kept journalists and the public informed using live tickers, press releases and at Infopoints so that the whole country could follow the events outside the mainstream media. Radio Wendland is also broadcasting updates on the incredibly heroic resistance of so many people. At great personal risk, tens of thousands of people gave an example of courageous and peaceful non-violent resistance that will surely go down in history.

If this is the resistance for Castor and Stuttgart 21, just imagine what will happen when Germans finally grasp the scale of the banking scam being carried out by their “elite.”

The CDU/CSU/FDP government has already hit record lows in the polls and after Sunday’s savage police operation against peaceful protestors, support for them is sure to plummet further.

The feudal lords without a feudal army to push through their agenda of robbery are facing the end of the road now that their media propaganda apparatus based on the Springer and Bertelsmann empire is falling apart and their strategy of divide and rule through a false left/right political paradigm is no longer working.

A new freedom and power was born in the woods of Wendland. And it belonged to the people who have had enough of the arrogant authoritarian political class.

See also:

German police battle nuclear train protesters

November 9, 2010 Posted by | Environmentalism, Nuclear Power, Solidarity and Activism | | Leave a comment

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