By an Elderly German saying Dresden was a war crime.

[Rjae]

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.

It was an experiment in mass murder.

It wasn't. It was a repeat of tactics used at Koln, and Lubeck in 1942. And Hamburg in 1943.

We'd already bloodied our hands bombing civilians, burning them out of their homes, hundreds of thousands of times over, by February 1945. The Luftwaffe had done it to Rotterdam and London in 1940.

The Allies were better at it than the Nazis by then.

Between 1940 and 1943 it was not unusual for more aircrew to die attacking a city in Nazi Germany than were killed on the ground. Indeed it was the norm.

The Nazis were not defenceless, helpless victims, like most of their victims.

Of course Dresden was a war crime. And I say this as a national of a country (the Netherlands) which suffered brutal Nazi occupation. All sides committed war crimes during WWII - including the Japanese, who kept my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother in one of their foul detention camps and murdered my maternal grandfather on the Burma railway. All those things - and the Blitz - were war crimes. It speaks of a dubious attitude towards human morality to believe that Dresden was not a war crime, but the actions of the 'others' were.

As long as we're agreeing that all aerial bombing of civilians is a war crime, then yes, Dresden was a war crime.

As was the German bombing of Warsaw, Belgrade, London, Rotterdam, Birmingham, Coventry, the undefended Channel Islands, and all the other cities bombed by whichever side.

Thecat, it was a deliberate experiment, planned, executed and recorded, it was entirely aimed at the maximum number of deaths through suffocation, that is not the same as general bombing.

The "miners" who were sent body hunting in the weeks after were tallying the numbers who died without burn marks in their mouths, an attempt to judge how many had died from oxygen being sucked out of the city.

The bomb shelters were in cellars, the cellars had been drilled through to connect to each other. This was supposed to mean easier evacuation after a bombing raid, but it also meant you could suck the air out of enormous complexes of shelters simultaneously.

This was one of the attractions of attempting this feat in Dresden, the high number of shelters interconnecting made it possible to kill thousands underground by creating a ring of fire to draw oxygen away.

As an experiment it was a waste, no body knows how many dies, and what proportion were suffocated rather than dying of burns. it took so long to reach them in their cellars, that many of the bodies had decomposed before they had been tallied. In the end, the bodies stopped being "mined" because they couldn't give any further data.

Because it is a soldier's job to fight and if necessary die. That is not the job of a child, an elderly person, a refugee etc etc.

And if your teenage son was conscripted would that make it OK because he was a soldier? Or would he still be your son, still the same child you had raised. We aren't just talking about professional soldier, sailors or airmen, we are talking about young men, barely more than children, who had no option. I don't understand why people think that if someone puts on a uniform, perhaps being forced to put on that uniform, it makes it OK. It wasn't, even for many who survived their lives were ruined. I knew, as I am probably older than alot of you, men who drank themselves to death, men who lost limbs or were burned. It wasn't OK just because they had a uniform on.

Thecat, it was a deliberate experiment, planned, executed and recorded, it was entirely aimed at the maximum number of deaths through suffocation, that is not the same as general bombing.

Where are you getting this from?

For the people comparing Coventry and Dresden, 553 people died in Coventry, at least 35000 in Dresden.

Of course it is crass to quote numbers, but it was simply a different scale of operation.

I have met some of the people involved, when I was younger, and was also involved in a n exchange where the youth of badly bombed cities carried on visiting each other for many decades, well into the 80s, anyway, (maybe still now for all I know) and had access to veterens, archive material, etc. but also from general school A level history.

What I am not sure about is the claim that it was rushed forward, in case the war ended before there was an opportunity to carry the experiment out. I have heard and read this many times, but never through any reliable source.,

Certainly it is beyond dispute that the fire storm was deliberate, planned and designed to cause the maximum of civilian casualties, specifically those families in bomb shelters.

Dresden was not bombed to cause the maximum deaths.

Dresden was bombed at the request of Stalin because it was an important railway hub, and destroying it stopped the Germans moving troops to block the Russian advance.

But mass civilian deaths were of course inevitable, and it really made little difference to the inevitable end of the war.

There are many reasons Dresden was chosen for this fire storm experiment, but the design of the fire storm was to kill the maximum numbers of civilians in shelters.

yabu

i only revently learnt around the German firebombing attacks at the end of WW2.

funny what history teaches us hey, or rather misses out!

we obliberated two cities , I think they were more damaged in a day that London during the whole of WW2

two wrongs dont make a right (obvs)

Dresden was bombed at the request of Stalin

That has never been verified in contemporary records, and appears to stem from a much later claim by a British interpreter at the Yalta conference.

I consider it a war crime. I'd say the same about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As others have pointed out, the designation of war crime does not depend on any notion of "But they started it, but what they did was worse." As true as it is that the war began with German aggression and the horrific war crimes perpetrated by Nazi Germany were much worse than the bombing of Dresden, that does not in any way excuse the latter.

Neither side exactly covered itself in glory in WWII (though again, there are certainly distinctions to be made in terms of scale and degree). It was a long and brutal war. Thank God the Allies were victorious. But it does us no good whatsoever to believe that every action taken by the Allies was right or justifiable.

I have never read anything to say that it was 'a deliberate experiment to see how many people would suffocate in a firestorm".

There were several documented meetings between Churchill and his advisors where military targets in Germany were discussed - Berlin, Chemnitz, Leipzig and Dresden were discussed. It's certainly true that it was planned as a demonstration of might to the Russian Army who was advancing with frightening speed, and it's certainly true that a firestorm was planned.

None of this is admirable in the slightest, but an "experiment"? That they wanted done quickly before the war ended? Sounds like made up propaganda to me.

I thought Dresden was pretty widely accepted as a war crime. I'm surprised you've never heard this before, OP. I saw the interview you're speaking of, incidentally, and thought he made a very compelling story.

I also thought the interviewer was a patronizing twat to say that the guy was 95, and still had a very firm handshake.

I'm not really sure about the bit about bringing it forward to get it done before the war ended. I have heard that accusation repeatedly. Maybe, but I simply don't know.

www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/dresden-ww2-bombing-raids-killed-5159536

Agree with what said in the article. Carpet bombing of civilians was begun by the germans and eventually continued by the allies. Bombing cities was a weapon of war. It was horrendous for the people living there. Dresden was a legitimate target as it had a large number of industrial targets according to the Mirror article.

War kills people. It's a sad fact that people like hjck can't seem to appreciate and then try to patronise me by saying I don't understand, when in fact such a simplistic and short sighted view shows that you have no understanding of the complexities involved.

No one would attempt to say every action taken by the allies was right but whether justifiable is more debatable. If Churchill hadn't been so ruthless we would have lost the war. We were almost on our knees when the Americans joined it. We were a tiny, poorly armed country taking on the might of a huge war machine that was Germany. That level of ruthlessness would be hard to stomach today (as the apologists for our actions demonstrate) but if Churchill had been more like chamberlain we would all be speaking German now.

The Russians raped and murdered their way across Germany, but we don't talk about that because they were on our side.

Yes we do, Fringe, especially post Beevor's brilliant BERLIN.

Actually, it was the entry of the USSR into the war in June 1941 that really changed the course of events. US involvement was significant as well, of course, but the Allies certainly couldn't have won the war without the USSR.

hijk, I think it's revisionist propaganda, I really do. The Allies were trying to win to win the war, not experimenting on far-flung enemy cities.

It goes without saying that, even without believing it was a planned experiment into how many would die of suffocation, the Dresden bombings can still be condemned as an atrocity, at least, or a war crime.

I'm of the opinion that all bombing of civilians is a war crime- although this is a moral stance, not a legal one.

Rjae, obviously war kills. Obviously murder kills. Obviously murder can and does happen in wartime as well as in peace time. I'm not trying to patronise you, just to inform you, as you seem not to know anything about Dresden.

You didn't start a thread saying you have thought about it and disagree that Dresden was a war crime.

You started a thread saying you were outraged at the suggestion that Dresden was a war crime.

The implication being that you have never heard of Dresden before, because the bombing of Dresden is rarely mentioned without the phrase "war crime" associated with it. A few people may argue that it wasn't, but most agree that it was, and all agree that it could at least be considered a war crime. There is nothing outrageous, complicated, or controversial about the view that it was a war crime. it has been considered so since the day it was done.

I am very surprised that someone has reached adulthood without this basic level of education, so I am simply explaining it to you.

There was precious little sympathy for the Germans in London, in 1944-5 for obvious reasons.

The British were genuinely defenceless at that time, there being no reliable way of intercepting a V2.

My grandmother worked at a factory in London making control panels for Halifax bombers.

My father worked for a company that made fire-fighting equipment, and was volunteer fireman in 1940. His brother flew aeroplanes against the U-boats, and was posted missing. In April 1945 He has no known grave.

My mother was a target for V1s and V2s

It is a matter of relief to me that the RAF bomber force could dump on one German city in one night, that the Germans could in six months with missiles. And then the Americans could do the same during the day. And then the next night, the RAF again.

The V2 rocket is one of those rare weapons, where more of the slaves who made them were killed, than the enemies they were fired at.

Still think I'm being unreasonable, thinking Dresden was not a war crime?

yes Cat, I do, I think you are being more than unreasonable. I think you are being inhuman.

While this is somewhat off topic, and I do apologise for this, I'm a student studying primary education specialising in teaching History. I was shown yesterday that Mr Gove removed the teaching of World War 2 from the National Curriculum.
I'd say that was a bit of an insult to all those millions who died, that I can't teach children about the biggest event in 20th Century history, during a history lesson.
AIBU to be quite mad about this? My lecturer says we may teach it in a cross-curricular way but not in the context of 'History'.

They're not teaching WW2? They're out of their minds? Both my DSS loved that topic. Unlike so many topics they could really make a personal connection, from asking elderly relatives about it to seeing how their local environment was impacted. Most of all it made them proud of their country. I'd have thought Mr Gove would have wanted that. As a history graduate I have to say he knows sweet fuck all about history.