Active discussions

Meet the Other Phone. Flexible and made to last.

Meet the Other Phone.
Flexible and made to last.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

Talk
AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

By an Elderly German saying Dresden was a war crime.

763 replies

Rjae · 13/02/2015 19:48

He said, yes, Germany started the war but the bombing of Dresden was a war crime.

AIBU to be outraged by this.

Exterminating Jews, gipsies, and prisoners of war was a war crime.
Invading half a dozen European countries and murdering it's citizens was a war crime.
Bombing Londoners and other british cities long before Dresden was a war crime
Starting the fucking war was a war crime.

Dresden was horrific of course, but not a war crime, unless you consider everything a war crime. It shouldn't have happened, but neither should the war. I'm sorry so many people were killed and a beautiful city destroyed. They were civilians but they supported Hitler wholeheartedly.

No doubt it didn't do much except kill civilians in the long wrong, but that still doesn't make it a war crime.

OP posts:
Hovis2001 · 14/02/2015 00:04

TheCat

Perhaps I should have said that sympathy isn't a resource, and therefore not something that you can "use up" on only one cause / issue. There may be unsympathetic people out there, but if you are a sympathetic person it shouldn't be a problem feeling sympathetic about multiple different issues.

What you seem to be really saying is that as far as you are concerned the people of Dresden don't deserve your sympathy, which is something I cannot agree with you on.

MagnetsOnItsTail · 14/02/2015 00:04

Moan, perhaps Kriegsschuld was the wrong term. What I meant to say was that (in terms of Dresden, not WW2 in its entirety) we need to acknowledge that what we did was excessive.

mathanxiety · 14/02/2015 00:07

I am not an American citizen and do not vote in US elections. Nevertheless, I have no sympathy for jihadists and I suspect they have no place in their version of a world order for me.

Every single person who draws breath on this earth does so on the back of others or thanks to one more chip taken from the environment.

War is a completely different proposition. A war of aggression whose aims were well known because of propaganda and because of events inside Germany that German people had witnessed with their own eyes and participated in with their own hands was enthusiastically supported by the German people. Not 'the Nazis' or 'the regime'.

Hovis2001 · 14/02/2015 00:08

bohemian

Thankyou! And it's not just about the lunatics who think they're doing good but are actually evil - it's also about the people genuinely trying to do 'good' committing (arguably avoidable) evils on the way. If the latter evils are swept under the carpet / not acknowledged then evils that could be prevented can be repeated.

As I think a pp (waaay back upthread) said, just war theory has its flaws (not least the assumption that any war can be just). But it does apply the same measures to people on every side, which really matters IMO. Two wrongs do not make a right.

TheCatAteMyTaxReturn · 14/02/2015 00:14

What you seem to be really saying is that as far as you are concerned the people of Dresden don't didn't deserve your sympathy

That is what I having been saying, yes.

Which is something I cannot agree with you on.

This seems to matter more to you, than it does to me.

uglyswan · 14/02/2015 00:16

Again, we are not discussing whether or to what extent the civilian population was complicit in the atrocities of the Nazi regime. We are discussing whether the targeted killing of civilians should be deemed a war crime. These discussions worry me, especially the use of terms like "abstract people" - not because of how we see historical events, but how we see the events of today? Was the phosphorus bombing of Fallujah a war crime? Are the drone strikes in Pakistan and other countries a war crime? Is the abduction and torture of civilians - over years -a war crime? Or are these all "abstract people" as well?

SabrinaMulhollandJjones1984 · 14/02/2015 00:18

I don't blame the Germans for commemorating it. However, I do have a huge problem with the way Dresden is (mis)used by Hitler apologists and holocaust deniers.

engeika · 14/02/2015 00:20

YABU - it was a war crime and we should learn from that. As soon as you start saying that it wasn't simply because "they started it" or "they did it too" you are lost. Accept what we did, understand why it was done but don't diminish the horror

BadLad · 14/02/2015 00:20

Lots of sympathy for Japan on this thread with not one mention of the pillaging, raping and torturing of civilians that went on in Nanking, which Japanese people and politicians mostly deny ever happened.

Their propaganda is more effective than I thought.

TheCatAteMyTaxReturn · 14/02/2015 00:23

Was the phosphorus bombing of Fallujah [or Gaza] a war crime? Yes

Are the drone strikes in Pakistan and other countries a war crime? Yes

Is the abduction and torture of civilians - over years -a war crime? Yes

Mainly because they are utterly counter-productive, unduly harsh, and not part of a declared war.

But the destruction of Dresden, Hamburg, Wurzburg, Nuremberg, Berlin, Bremen, Koln was none of those things.

dreamingbohemian · 14/02/2015 00:26

math -- but you live in the US. are you trying to say the US isn't at war with anyone? hasn't been committing any acts of aggression lately?

I don't know what participated with their own hands means. I know that people not directly involved in waging war are civilians and off limits. If you want to change the law of armed conflict so that any resident of a country at war who knows about the war, doesn't protest against it, and benefits from it in some indirect way can be indiscriminately slaughtered -- well, okay, but then I'd think about moving if I were you.

There is no major attempt to rewrite the history of WW2. Yes, you have fringe far-right groups, but if anything, Angela Merkel and others have been the most forceful in Europe in rejecting them completely, not pandering to them.

The Nazis killed hundreds of thousands of German citizens. The first concentration camps were built in Germany, for Germans. Of course you can differentiate between the regime and its victims within Germany. You can have a big debate about how many Germans supported the regime but again, it doesn't matter. If you bomb a city indiscriminately, for no military purpose, you will of course kill civilians and that's a war crime.

mathanxiety · 14/02/2015 00:26

Whether excessive or not, the bombing of Dresden was done, and we should own it. But no amount of handwringing about it will change the outcome, and there is no way German people should be presenting themselves as World War II's ultimate victims, all the more sad because they have been forgotten.

And there were laws about the conduct of war, that were flagrantly ignored by the Germans, hence the death in captivity of between 3.3 and 3.5 million Soviet POWs out of a total of approximately 5.7 million prisoners. In one 8 month stretch, June 1941 to January 1942 about 2.8 million Soviet POWs were killed. Soviet POWs were deliberately starved.

So were Soviet citizens, and Poles. Alex J. Kay: 'Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1940-1941' details the grim arithmetic of the Hunger Plan ('Der Hungerplan') in occupied Soviet territory if anyone is interested in further reading.

Hovis2001 · 14/02/2015 00:28

TheCat

The present tense was correct, actually. Your sympathy is being given or witheld in the present moment.

mathanxiety · 14/02/2015 00:29

I am saying none of those things. I am saying you live and you exploit someone, somewhere. It is a fact of modern life. It was a fact of life back in the days of legal slavery, and in the industrial revolution, and only very recently have governments taken it upon themselves to even try to mitigate the effects of economic systems on individuals.

However, the Nazis deliberately starved millions of people so that Germans can eat. There is a huge difference.

TheCatAteMyTaxReturn · 14/02/2015 00:29

Lots of sympathy for Japan on this thread with not one mention of the pillaging, raping and torturing of civilians that went on in Nanking and elsewhere

Good point badlad, The Chinese, along with the Soviets, endured by far the greatest suffering of any combatants in WW2

their casualties dwarf those of Germany and Japan, and British and American losses are miniscule by comparison.

Hovis2001 · 14/02/2015 00:30

Mainly because they are utterly counter-productive, unduly harsh, and not part of a declared war.

War crimes can occur within a declared war. Dresden was unduly harsh. And war crimes don't have to be "utterly counter-productive" - just of greatly disproportionate impact (number of civilians killed) compared to how far they move circumstances towards ending the war.

Hovis2001 · 14/02/2015 00:32

TheCat

Is your only grounds for Dresden not being a war crime because a) other, worse war crimes have happened, and b) the people of Dresden somehow deserved what they got?

Postchildrenpregranny · 14/02/2015 00:32

an eye for an eye windchime and the whole world will be blind

MoanCollins · 14/02/2015 00:34

mathanxiety, you criticize lack of resistance from the Germans civilians as though this means they deserved to be killed as a result.

That ignores the fact that the Nazi regime was massively skilled at supressing opposition and the absolutely horrendous fate that met those who did resist, beheading, concentration camps, torture, forced labour, gassing.

It was incredibly harm for resistance cells to even form as denouncing and informing were so common place, and even minor transgression could be punished - not just criticizing the Nazi's, but merely failing to respond strongly positively to them by joining the party could be punished by destruction of a career or financial ruin.

The German people were also victims of the Nazis in many ways.

uglyswan · 14/02/2015 00:35

No Cat, counter-productive is not the definition of a war crime. A crime is not defined by its outcome or by how useful it is. not part of a declared war I concur, but you might want to take that up with the US State Department et al. unduly harsh definitely constitutes a war crime. And I agree that all of my examples fit that bill. As does the targeted killing of 25.000 civilans in Dresden.

Hovis2001 · 14/02/2015 00:37

uglyswan

War crimes can take place within a declared war, though, right?

TheCatAteMyTaxReturn · 14/02/2015 00:41

Is your only grounds for Dresden not being a war crime

No, my grounds for Dresden not being a war crime is it wasn't when it occurred, any more than any other death caused by Allied military force generally, or the Combined Bomber Offensive in particular.

You can retrospectively apply any interpretation that it was, in any manner you please.

It means absolutely nothing to those killed, those who ordered it [Churchill/SHAEF] or those that carried it out [the Bomber crews of the RAF and USAAF], most of whom are also now dead.

uglyswan · 14/02/2015 00:42

Hovis, yes, of course, I phrased that clumsily. I interpreted not part of a declared war as meaning not directed at armed enemy combatants. Which is a designation the US State Department awards to pretty much anyone with a pulse.

UncleT · 14/02/2015 00:43

Amazed that the only argument here seems to be that the Germans did worse things and were generally in the wrong. I don't think anyone really disputes those points, so how the hell is it relevant to what constitutes a war crime in legal terms?

dreamingbohemian · 14/02/2015 00:43

And the US deliberately waged war and propped up dictators over decades so Americans could have cheap oil, win the Cold War and remain the dominant superpower. I'm not talking about some airy-fairy generalised exploitation, I'm talking about actual wars, actual military support for murderous regimes. The US is an actual combatant nation, not some passive recipient of the joys of globalisation.

And let's talk about those Soviet POWs. Let's remember that the Soviet Union was an erstwhile ally of Germany, enthusiastically carving up Poland and Eastern Europe. They killed hundreds of thousands of Poles themselves and deported up to 1 million. They stopped outside Warsaw and let the Nazis destroy it in 1944, they killed a whole generation of Polish leaders and intellectuals, all so they could control the country after the war. And of course there's the millions of Soviet citizens they killed before the war. So by your logic, don't those Soviet POWs kind of deserve it? Even more so because they were probably actually murdering Poles in Poland before they were captured.