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.

www.historylearningsite.co.uk/v2.htm

The Germans deserve no sympathy

that of course, diverts attention that many of the victims of Nazi tyranny, were German.

It refuses to accept that nearly all the victims of Allied bombing, and the reconquest of Europe, were victims of Nazi tyranny, not Allied 'terrorism' or 'war crimes'

It refuses to accept that a large minority of Jews murdered in the Vernichtunglagers, (extermination camp, different from concentration camp) were German.

Wehrkraftzersetzung - undermining the war effort, was used to terrify the minority of German who did NOT wholeheartedly support the Führer, into submission.

30000 were convicted by Nazi kangaroo courts, most sent to concentration camps, a large number executed on the basis of hearsay evidence.

The youngest victim executed was Helmuth Hübener, aged seventeen.

Fortunately these rockets were not in mass production soon enough Rjae

That they weren't was largely due to hijk's so-called 'war criminals'

Bomber Command

Peenemünde raid

I think the German dissenters deserve sympathy. They were also incredibly brave to speak out when much of the nation seemed very sheeplike.

I've lived in Germany and was impressed by their work effort and their conformity which kept transport running on time and the streets spotless.
They are very adept at following orders and not going against the tide. When I was there you were not allowed to cross the road unless the green man showed even if the road was empty. Very odd seeing people standing at a crossing with no traffic in sight!

I think that part of the national psyche made ordinary Germans more prone to a herd mentality. That and a national pride in their long and important history which was dealt a heavy blow after the First World War, contributed to following the nazi party.

I am certain though that if the population knew the horrors ahead being perpetrated in their name they would not have followed hitler. This is why we have to learn lessons and not allow right wing parties into government.

Exactly Cat. The allies knew of these rockets and I think it must have affected their decision to pour everything into defeating Germany, including Dresden.

unfortunately, the british bombing campaigns in general could have been far more effective than they were
luckily, the nazis were not that coordinated either, and didnt concentrate all their efforts into the war effort half as effectively as the allied forces
even more fortunately, they were not interested in 'jewish science' aka nuclear weaponry

sanfairyanne

our German physicists were better than their German physicists!

As true in the field of radar as nuclear physics.

well that was what i meant really. an awful lot of german scientists in general were jewish (1/4 of german physicists) and either fled or were killed. einstein left in 1933. the nazis were never as interested in developing nuclear weapons and also thought of particle physics as 'jewish science'. so altho there was some research, they hampered themselves really.

mind you, i am straying off the point of the thread

an awful lot of young, talented, brave british raf fliers died in bomber command during the war. they could have died for better things than bombing civilians. a more targeted approach, coordinated better, followed up with further raids, could have achieved much more. there is no harm in learning from the past.

an awful lot of young, talented, brave british raf fliers died in bomber command

not just British, either.

Andy Mynarski VC

[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Swales#Victoria_Cross Ted Swales VC]]

to name but two.

9,887 Canadians, 4,034 Australians, 1,674 New Zealanders, 974 Poles, plus other nationalities, came all that way, to risk their lives in a war that did not directly affect them, and never went home.

All so they could be branded 'war criminals' by the irredeemably smug.

that url didn't come out very well

Ted Swales VC

I'll try it again

yes, of course you are right TheCat.

it really isnt smug though to be concerned about the mass murder of civilians, of any nationality

dresden has always been controversial, even at the time, and even in britain

Dresden has always been controversial, even at the time, and even in Britain

It's become emblematic of Western War guilt, something that should not be a thing.

The Allies did some horrible, brutal things, futile things even, to their fellow human beings, in order to crush Nazi tyranny, and Japanese military imperialism.

It's natural to feel ashamed. But guilty? No.

It's always struck me as odd that the Dambusters are hailed as great heroes in popular culture, but the crews on the Dresden raid are dismissed as callous murderers.

Drowning a thousand Germans (and Soviet slave labourers) is heroic and not mass murder, yet incinerating 25000 Germans is utterly despicable?

The Germans deserve no sympathy

Dd's grandmother was in Dresden, she was a refugee fleeing from the Russians. She almost lost her life and was very, very lucky to escape alive.

She was a little girl from a rural community who had her world turned upside down by the war.

How anyone can deny that it was a war crime is beyond me.

Lumpy.

Please read the thread as there are many many complex issues surrounding Dresden, rather than a simplistic.......It's not right therefore it's a war crime.

War isn't black and white, goodies and baddies. If you want to make a statement back it up with a reasoned argument.

And I don't know who said Germans deserve no sympathy. Certainly not me. Of course they deserve sympathy and very few of them 'deserved' to die. The architects of the nazi regime do imo and I'm someone who doesn't support the death penalty.

That's what war is Lumpy You are describing any air rade.

How many thousands of Afghan children has Britain killed, maimed and orphaned in the last 15 years, and yet we are supposed to regard the muppets in our army as 'Heroes'

Princess that sentiment about Germans deserving no sympathy is breathtaking, trumped only by the poster nicknamed JudgeRinder who claims she would 'hoot with laughter' in the face of an elderly German, or else 'self combust with indignation'. It would be interesting to know what background these sorts of posters have, to lack all empathy. It's certainly striking that those few posters who have declared a whole or partly continental background seem much more tolerant of Germans, even though their family members, whose countries were invaded, lived in far more immediate terror than the British for the duration of the war. But perhaps I'm generalizing too much from a few really shocking comments. Or perhaps it's the younger generation thing not a nationality thing, this righteous indignation. I don't know but it's certainly very alien to me.

OP the far more important question for those who died in Dresden and those affected is precisely about right and wrong not about some crappy man made definition of 'war crime'. That's purely a legal construct and that's actually the simplistic thing - the moral one is far harder.

I heard on a radio prog that the Russians maintained some camps until well after the war.

No, the Soviets liberated the camps they discovered, including Auschwitz. If you mean that the Soviets continued any of the Nazi policies of extermination, you could not be more wrong. And of course the Soviet troops who liberated the camps were as horrified and outraged by what they discovered as any British or U.S. soldiers.

The USSR did use the sites of some former Nazi concentration camps in the post-war period as prisons, mainly for POWs, Nazis, and collaborators. Some may say there is a bit of grim justice in that.

Dresden violated acceptable rules of war, which is why, I feel, it was a war crime.

The USSR did maintain some camps until well after the war - and their puppet regimes in the GDR for example too. Their inmates were certainly not confined to Nazis and collaborators but were anyone who did not agree with the new Communist regime. The war continued well beyond 1945 in Easter Europe.

Some German POWs on the Eastern Front were not released until the mid 1950s.

In fact on that note - I had a friend in Dresden and her mother wrote two books. One was about her father who was not released from Soviet custody for years (and when he was he died very quickly) and the other about the use of one of the concentration camps near Berlin as a prison after the war. She self-published the books because nobody was interested - this was in the mid to late 90s.

muminhants was that Sachsenhausen?