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.

Thecat, now you are just rambling. What the german government is irrelevant. The Uk committed a war crime. it was inexcusable. We have covered this ground over many pages already. Your attitude to thousands of innocent children being suffocated or burnt to death is nothing short of barbaric.

SugarPlumTree Thank you for clarifying that TheCat

No problem - even I draw the line a blaming every German for the crimes of Nazism.

What the german government is irrelevant

What is irrelevant?

No it isn't The war was clearly lost for the Germans. Most of their cities were already in ruins by Feb 1945. Berlin was devastated even before the Red Army started shelling it in April 1945.

Why was the Thunderclap plan even considered necessary by the Allies/SHAEF?

So why didn't the Nazi regime surrender, and spare its people a Dresden a week? A Dresden a week. For three months!

Those children should be important to everyone. Children are innocent. You don't put a value on them based on some other persons actions.
So, if Germany did not value them by not surrendering then they had no value? Bloody unbelievable, cat Your values on human life would have impressed Hitler himself.

The UK committed a war crime.

hijk 796 Bombers came from the RAF, which was multinational.
431 Bombers came from the USAAF

So why is the UK solely to blame?

Children are innocent

including the ones in the Volkssturm, the SS-Hitlerjugend?

I quote - "Many of the recruits were so young that they were supplied with sweets instead of the standard tobacco and alcohol ration."

All murders of non-combatants during war are war crimes.

Just a point or two from a few pages back:
the British did not invent the concentration camp. Used them, sure, in the Boer War (and very shameful it was too), but the Brits were by no means the first to come up with the idea: they were used in Poland in the C18th, in the US in the 1830s...

As somebody else pointed out, the British do not appear to have invented total war either: the concept dates back to the Taiping Rebellion and the American Civil War.

I'm never sure why people are so keen to pin the invention of these things on the British. As a nation, we have quite enough to be ashamed of without making extra stuff up.

Was Dresden a war crime? Probably. Was it bloody horrible? Definitely. War is bloody horrible. A dying soldier feels the same pain as a dying civilian. In World War II, most soldiers were conscripts and didn't have much say about it.

And Badlad, if you are still around, you might be interested to know that Japanese nationalists are trying to ban the Angelie Jolie film about an American POW of the Japanese because, apparently, it's not true that the Japanese Army did those nasty things. I'm not even sure that the film mentions the ultimate nasty thing that was planned for all the POWs: killing them rather than letting the Allies find them. The orders had been sent out and were just waiting to be activated. There had already been death marches, to keep POWs out of Allied hands on Borneo. It was in this context that the atom bombs were dropped.

TheCat you are BLAMING child conscripts?? Wow.

hijk, I think the German Government, who are far from irrelevant here, since we were at war with them - were quite busy planning their next few crimes against humanity, tbh. I think they'd already done for a couple of million children in euthanasia programs, the death camps, ghettos and by firing squad by 1945 - and not as 'collateral damage' either, as in the horrific case of Dresden - but as a deliberate act of murder.

The emphasis on that quote should be on recruits

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/vi/4/49/19450420_Hitler_65bd_awards_HJ_Iron_Cross.jpg

Who mentioned conscripts?

I didn't

And why, knowing that area bombing of cities was the norm, did Germany have 27,000 POWs held in Dresden?
Could it be that the POWs were there to serve as human shields?

The POWs were used to clear bodies and rubble afterwards.

The city of Breslau was designated a fortress by Hitler, to be defended to the death. It was besieged by formations of the 1st Ukrainian Front from January to May 1945. No civilians were permitted to evacuate the city ahead of the Soviets, who were known to be advancing with the city in their sights -- hence the designation as a 'festung'. The garrison (including many Hitler Youth shipped in to face almost certain death) finally forced the civilians out into the bitter cold in January 1945.

German national and local leadership refused to countenance the evacuation of civilians from cities and regions in the path of the Red Army because they were convinced that the only viable alternative to the Third Reich was death there could be no purpose in surviving a Soviet victory. Civilians trying to flee in East Prussia were subject to shooting by the German military authorities right up to January 1945. Civilians fled on foot and in wagons because cars and other mechanised vehicles had been confiscated for military use. Retreating Wehrmacht and SS units mingled with columns of refugees making them sitting ducks for Soviet aerial attack.

The suffering of German civilians was recorded and used as propaganda by Goebbels with the aim of encouraging fanatical resistance to the advancing Allies.

• The idea that Dresden was bombed at the request of Stalin was invented by American Gen George Marshall, when American public opinion seemed to turn against the operation. It was a lie designed to get the western Allies off the hook.

'The Russians raped and murdered their way across Germany, but we don't talk about that because they were on our side.'
Not only do we talk about it, it is almost the only rape most people are aware of from WW2. It has become emblematic of Soviet nastiness. The Japanese 'comfort women' are not unknown but the Germans' conduct seems to have flown under the radar. Google 'eastern front' or any eastern city's name plus 1945 and rape by the Red Army will come up, on sites such as germanvictims and many others.

Yet the Nazis raped their way across Poland and Russia, set up brothels for the purpose of serving the armed forces, and systematically forced thousands of women into sex slavery. The only crime a German could be charged with as far as sexual relations with 'subhumans' went was 'defilement of the German race'.

The effects of previous firestorms were well known -- from the experience of British cities and from Hamburg.

Dresden was not an experiment.

you are BLAMING child conscripts?? Wow.

The point I was trying to make, was the Germans [not just the Nazis] were so desperate to keep fighting, they were prepared to recruit children, whom they had been inculcating with their values for TWELVE YEARS, to fight for them.

The youngest winner of the highest Nazi award for bravery, the Ritterkreuz , was Gefreiter Christian Lohrey, who was awarded it aged seventeen - on 11 March 1945.

You'd have to ask yourself why the Germans were giving bravery medals to teenagers in 1945, rather than surrendering?

It was horrific. Utterly, utterly horrific.
How can you say the bombing of London was a war crime but the bombing of Dresden wasn't?

Yabu. Very.

I think the argument is pretty well proven that IANBU from the far superior logic and reasoning given by people on here, I hope including myself. Hyjk is determined to have tunnel vision and keep repeating the mantra 'it's a war crime' despite giving no cogent reasons for their argument.

And for the record, of course I have heard of Dresden and have learned long ago of the terrible events there. My outrage was a German citizen saying in the same breath, we started the war (which killed millions) but I'll sling a bit of mud at the people who defeated us as part of a revisionist campaign which will deflect attention from the horrors we perpetrated on Europe. Before much longer we will be apologising for winning the war, as we end up apologising for so many things that occurred before we were born.

I also acknowledged in the OP my revulsion for the event
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

A lot of people have come on to say 'it's not a war crime' but have not hung around when they clearly have no reasoned argument to support their claim. They have resorted to childish taunts to wind the likes of Cat up.

Dresden must be seen in context. Something some people who really don't know anything about the war seem unable to comprehend.

As for taking it out of the curriculum. That's appalling as debates such as this will be denied to children and I think it is right for children to understand war is not all black and white.

Rjae you're being totally unreasonable. I haven't read the whole thread (but will later) but the fact that this man was elderly and had been directly affected is a fairly key point. It seems offensive somehow for a generation not affected to judge someone like him. But beyond that, of course it was a crime, for the reasons others have stated.

It's interesting to read even in the first few pages comments about the older generation and their views. This silence about war experiences was almost universal - it's a survivor thing. My paternal grandfather was shot in the back of the head for resistance activities - the day after the war ended ironically - and thrown into a mass grave with a hundred or so other people. His brother was arrested earlier, again for running a wing of the resistance, in Krakow, and died on a death march. My father never spoke of the war, ever, until asked years later, and my elder siblings each had a German godmother who was a dear friend of my parents until the end. He simply held no animosity and definitely regarded Dresden as an abhorrence. I think the voice of that generation, people directly affected, is the one to be heard, not the armchair brigade.

And can I just point out that starting the fucking war wasn't actually a war crime. So if you're going to argue the toss on the old man's use of language, perhaps you should take a look at your own?

Rjae, my grandmother was the only one in her family to survive dachau.

She considered Dresden to be a war crime.

You claim to have heard of it before, and know all about it, yet seem to know nothing whatsoever. I don't have tunnel vision. I was brought up by holocaust survivors. I have lived in Germany. I am seeing Dresden in the context of all of that.

It was a war crime. it doesn't matter how many times you say it wasn't, or how much information you ignore, or refuse to read , or refuse to acknowledge.

From the tone of the OP, I do find it difficult to believe you had ever heard of Dresden before, or why would you be outraged to hear it being described as a war crime? No one who has ever heard of it would be surprised to hear it described as a war crime.

You don't seem to have any idea of what it was, what happened there or why, although many people here have tried to explain it to you.

It was an act of terrorism, it was murder, there are no two ways about it. no one in their right mind could ever consider it acceptable or justified.

Maybe you don't think so really, maybe you are just too proud to admit you were wrong, and you didn't understand.

Molio, yes starting the war in was a war crime. Illegal occupation is a war crime. But other people committing war crimes doesn't justify another side doing it.

Wow. Your very arrogant assumption that there have been better arguments to prove your point is bizarre, particularly as it is a resounding YABU by the majority, with good reason.

Dresden was very much a war crime. Tit for tat is what 5 year olds do. Just because one side does it doesn't mean we reduce ourselves to that level, even in the most difficult of circumstances. It doesn't take away from the awfulness of anything else that happened during the war, but the Germans have as much right to remember and commemorate the event as we do the Battle for Britain. Many other cities were flattened in the UK too - my home town was decimated and many more died than in Coventry, along with many evacuated children that had been sent there as the government thought it was a safe place for them to be. War is not pretty on any side but we are just as liable to making fuckups as the next country.

And one of the main reasons we are apologists and seek to commemorate such events, acknowledging our role, is to prevent them from happening again. 'Lest We Forget'? There is a disturbing lack of understanding on this thread around the importance of history. Must be why we humans keep finding ourselves repeating the same mistakes. But carry on with you morally superior logic why don't you

Rjae They have resorted to childish taunts to wind the likes of Cat up.

Thanks OP - I can take it...I tried to not make ad hominem attacks on those calling me inhuman, or those who tried make out I thought the people of Dresden had it coming, or somehow the children who were incinerated were more important than the adults or the seventy young men killed bombing Dresden. It would have so easy.

War is hell. Whoever you are. The best thing you can do is win, and not blame yourself for the things done in your name.

I think I tried to keep calm.

Battle of Britain*

No childish taunt, Cat, your posts ARE utterly inhuman. On a par with the drivel we get from ISIS. Both equally psychopathic.

Germany did commit war crimes by annexing Austria/Czechoslavakia and bombing/invasion of Poland.

All documented by the Hague Convention and cited in the Nuremburg trials as Crimes against Peace (as well as a direct violation of the treaty of Versaille.)

So, yes, Germany starting the fucking war was a war crime.