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.

None of us in this generation can know the answer Sabrina. I turned nothing nasty at all, simply said straightaway ok I'm possibly wrong on the smaller issue but how about looking at the big one, which is what the old guy in the OP probably did. Anyhow, goodnight, not much more to say.

'Essentially the concept was to deliver a greater tonnage of bombs per unit time to deplete the manufacturing capacity of the enemy at a greater rate then the enemy could deplete yours. The greater the rate of enemy manufacturing depletion the smaller the number of enemy bombers could be manufactured and hence the lower the tonnage of bombs the enemy could deliver. The aim of this mathematical calculation is an exponential depletion of the enemy manufacturing capacity until it eventually approaches zero.

That is why Dresden occurred. There was no conspiracy to kill civilians. It was a pure mathematical calculation of total war and bomber command lost 50% of its planes and crews doing it. Germany was attempting to do the same in return. There was literally no choice and could only be one of two possible outcomes. Saturation area bombing was a strategically crucial war winning weapon far greater than allied land armies.'

Precisely, and great post, MoreBeta.

Dresden was retaliation for bombing coventry

I also agree it was a war crime

But that's my whole point - how is looking at Dresden in isolation useful? You have to look at it in the context of the war. Morebeta did get it right - it was purely tactical - area bombing designed to bring an end to the war. The war that had raged on for years, with unimaginable loss of life.

It wasn't tactical though.Other bombing was, but Dresden was something else entirely.

hijk - it was tactical - it wasn't an experiment. But I'd still welcome seeing any sources you have saying it was an 'experiment'.

As I have said, I met and spoke to people involved, on a peace conference, when I was a teenager. Anyway, fairly standard info in history text books.

TheCat:
'We were just as bad as they were!'
No. No, we weren't'

Yes indeed, TheCat, Holocaust denial and German and neo Nazi denial of war guilt that on many levels accompany the attempts to hold up Dresden as an emblem of German war victimhood cannot be dismissed here.

When we place an event such as the bombing of Dresden (an operation with a legitimate military objective that was in many respects similar to all the other bombing raids on cities during WW2 by all combatants) on a par with the hunting down and deliberate, industrial scale murder of 6 million Jews, are we somehow getting close to saying this was a 'military objective' too?

I am pretty familiar with history text books and have never once come across the sort of reference you claim, Hijk.

I have however seen plenty along those lines on neo Nazi websites.

Which text books? I've googled it again - can find no reference to this. Any reputable source for this would be online - come to think of it, any disreputable source of this would be online! Which makes me think it's nonsense.

hijk:
'Dresden wasn't ever going to stop the war
Dresden wasn't ever going to force the surrender of the Germans
Dresden wasn't ever going to save anyone in the death camps'

It didn't free all the people remaining in the death camps because the Soviets had already done that, or the Americans, and of those camp inmates who remained, most were being marched cruelly and pointlessly around the remains of the Third Reich and beaten and shot to death as they went.

And no, it didn't stop the war on its own, but taken with all the rest of the military action, yes it bloody well did stop the war, and every single element of what was done was necessary. This is how my dad in the RAF at the time saw RAF operations. It all added up and it did force the surrender of the Germans.

WW2 was every bit as much a war of attrition as WW1 was, only the attrition took the form of aerial bombardment by both sides of population centres, with the aim of knocking out the enemy capacity to wage war, instead of trench warfare.

I don't think we were so overwhelmed with ordnance and bomb-making supplies that we could afford to bomb only for revenge; there would have to have been a military objective, and revenge alone would not have been justification. While some people did have doubts about bombing Dresden, in the end, the decision whether to go for it or not would have come down to whether it was a good military objective and whether it was going to be worth the likely cost in aircraft, personnel and bombs. They couldn't have justified bombing just for revenge because of the material & financial cost (rather than the morals of it.)

However, I don't think it's entirely black and white - I am sure some of those making the decisions would have been considering that "serves them right, after what they did to Coventry/London/etc," as a bonus to it being a military target, so military target and revenge, rather than military target or revenge.

(Oh, reading history can make me cynical about human beings. Although when you also see what humans can survive, it gives hope, too.)

London Blitz on the night of May 10 1941. The longest night. Exact same tactics - bombing, incendiary devices. London was on fire that night.

Sept 1940 to May 1941 - yes I did google it - there were 71 bomb attacks on London. One million homes destroyed, 40,000 deaths. Does it being over a more protracted period of time make it ok, or less ghastly than Dresden?

We were still fighting the war 4 years later, when Dresden was planned.

It's also worth remembering that Germany had been bombarding Britain with V2 rockets attacks since late 1944.

Context.

Anyway, fairly standard info in history text books hijk

A short list of books in which your claim CANNOT be found.

'The Fire bombing of Germany, 1940-45' by Jorg Friedrich

'Bombing 1939-1945', by Karl Hecks

(both German authors)

'The Bombing War' by Richard Overy

'Among the Dead Cities' by AC Grayling
(perhaps the most anti-bombing book I've read - I agree with a lot of it)

'Dresden', by Frederick Taylor.

'The Bomber Command War Diaries: An Operational Reference Book, 1939-45' by Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt

'How the Allies Won' by Richard Overy

'Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War' by John Ellis.

My great problem with the Combined Bomber Offensive is not so much that 600000 Germans perished in it, it is that 55,000 British, Commonwealth, French, Czech and Polish aircrew died flying the missions, along with 28,000 US aircrew.

So many wasted lives on both sides, for not a great deal gained.

However, there were few other ways of inflicting catastrophic damage on the Nazi war machine.

The greatest benefit was stoking Hitler's desire for revenge. He could not bear to see the German volk suffering in the ways the Jews, Poles and the Bolsheviks were being made to suffer by the Wehrmacht and SS. The methods of revenge adopted, the V-weapons, weakened more conventional ways the Nazis could has resisted Allied force.

And that, is one of the most compelling reasons why the Nazis lost.

WW2, in general, was a war crime. My grandfather served in SE Asia and was then part of the occupation forces in Japan, going into Nagasaki only a week or so after the bombs had been dropped. What he saw horrified him (he took photos) and severely affected him for the rest of his life, resurfacing in the 1970s in the form of PTSD. This was because in the intervening twenty years he did a lot of research into who sent them, why and who encouraged the militarization of Japan in the first place. The truth scared the hell out of him.

It's complicated but there is a deadly combination of banking interests,an arms industry and even old aristocratic links which have vested interests in seeing these sorts of things continue indefinitely. These interests are supra-national and the only thing hampering them is the after-effects of their previous crimes (demographic decline etc). I don't think it's in most people's interests to argue "well the holocaust/gulags/killing fields were worse". They are all crimes!!

I would agree with the elderly German if I hadn't watched 'Night Will Fall' on tv a couple of weeks ago. Filmed when the first troops reached the concentration camps.

The horror is unimagineable.

The Germans deserve no sympathy, and the Poles, Romanys, Jews a lot. Has changed my views on jewish racism too, the treatment in the camps was evil.

If any German talked to me about war crimes committed against Germany I would hoot with laughter or self combist with indignation before telling them to get their heads out of their arses

"If any German talked to me about war crimes committed against Germany I would hoot with laughter or self combist with indignation before telling them to get their heads out of their arses"

Thereby displaying your ignorance to the world...

"the treatment in the camps was evil."
Have you only just discovered this?

Have you only just discovered this

Of course not but talk of the blanket bombing of Dresden or the anti jewish attacks being blamed on the Palestinian issues can make you wonder perhaps they have a point.

But watching that reminded me that they haven't.

I normally avoid war movies and debate on war or genocide. Depressing and happening as we speak somewhere or other in the world but the horror in the concentration camps was truly exceptional.

It didn't free all the people remaining in the death camps because the Soviets had already done that

I heard on a radio prog that the Russians maintained some camps until well after the war. Sorry can't find a link.

The Soviet gulags were going before and after the Third Reich, so I don't think they'd have had quite the same sense of horror about Nazi concentration camps as we did in the west.

I too saw 'night will fall' and was horrified that people could do this.

The difference between the concentration camps and Dresden is that murdering people in camps could not in any way be called justified whereas bombing a city with many factories supporting the war effort in an attempt to end the war sooner, however horrible, was.

One of the reasons the allies wanted to end the war quickly was that they knew the Germans had developed rocket technology (the V2 rocket) which didn't need an airforce to drop them, and were capable of causing massive damage. The allies knew of their development from 1943 and knew of the lethality of the rockets.

Eisenhower said this
"It seems likely that if the Germans had succeeded in perfecting and using these new weapons earlier than he did, our invasion of Europe would have proved exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible. I feel sure that if they had succeeded in using these weapons over a six-month period, and particularly if they had made the Portsmouth-Southampton area one of the principal targets, "Overlord" may have been written off."
Eisenhower.

Fortunately these rockets were not in mass production soon enough but who knows what would have happened if they'd had 6 more months to perfect and manufacture them....maybe in some of the factories in Dresden?