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.

Was it the Oxford Union that had David Irving? Tossers.

David Irving's daughter carries a copy of Anne Frank's diary in her bag to prove that she is not like her father.

a person, not a people.

Molio - my parents (still alive) escaped from Nazi Germany and are not troubled by the tiniest bit of guilt about dead Germans. My father looks back on his childhood at a German school and reflects perfectly cheerfully on the fact that the 'Good Nazis' in his class all died fighting for the Fatherland, as they had desired.

Germans made certain choices. Everyone suffered because of those choices and yes, that included some innocent Germans, too.

Some of us are old enough to have grown up in the age of Mutual Assured Destruction, a terrifying prospect. MAD is also an example of the futility and the hypocrisy of 'pieces of paper' with noble sentiments about civilians and bombing.

States that signed the UN-related conventions in the postwar period were actively developing nuclear weapons, some with the help of Nazis who had directly contributed to the suffering of thousands of slaves forced to work on weapon development, and who had developed weapons that were used to inflict civilian casualties in Britain.

So your assumption, Molio, that all of us on this thread are 'so cocooned' is simply not true. I would not be alive today had the Germans succeeded and have grown up feeling no hatred towards Germans but no false sympathy either. They were grown ups. They made decisions and took actions that had repercussions. Hard on those who were children or were outvoted but no harder for Germans than for Jews or Poles or Russians or the British in the Blitz or anyone else. At least the Germans could reasonably regarded as having had some agency on the situation they later found themselves in.

And just to add, I am only alive because of the actions of a 'good German' who risked his own life to save my father and grandfather. So I would be the last person to claim 'all Germans had it coming' or anything so idiotic. But the man who risked his life to save mine would have been poorly rewarded if his sacrifice had been in vain and the Germans had been allowed to win anyway. Decent Germans needed to be free of the Nazis as much as the rest of the world did, and yes, unfortunately that sometimes meant that innocent Germans - as well as say, innocent RAF pilots - died.

andango my assumption is based fairly securely on the fact of the likely age of contributors. Neither you nor I had any direct experience of the war. The fact that you wouldn't be alive today had your parents not fled Germany doesn't give you that experience in any way whatsoever. Of course the second generation are cocooned. We saw nothing. We may have breathed in the sadness of others - though you say not, andango, as you say your dad was 'cheerful'. I wish my dad (now dead) had been so - but we ourselves experienced nothing and it seems improper to try to pretend that we did. So some respect for that experience on whichever side seems to me to be in order.

Unlike your father, Molio, both my parents talk quite openly about their experiences and always have done. They are still alive and we discuss it regularly. So whilst I didn't experience it myself, obviously, nor do I feel cocooned from what happened.

The difference between us is that my parents have managed to deal with it on a personal level - that is not accidental, it is a result of a never-ending analysis of the events that took place. They flinch at nothing and read everything on the topic, watch every film, every play, go to every exhibition. They have been back to Germany many times.

They are not at all bitter - what happened, happened and my father (my mother was younger so remembers it less well) is overjoyed every single day of his life to have escaped and to be living in Britain, a free man. From his perspective, to dwell on it is proper, but to be destroyed by it would be to hand Hitler a posthumous victory.

His cheerfulness is his own personal victory and prayer of thanks. Gratitude is his central emotion. It won't bring back those who died, of course not. But it is gratefulness that not more died and the Nazis were defeated.

I respect those that suffered in all atrocities in the war - the thing I'm uncomfortable with is people saying that Dresden made the allies "worse than nazis" - which was said on Breakfast TV on Friday. I simply cannot agree with that. Which I believe was the OP's general point.

Though I'm being unfair to you, Molio, in that your grandparents died in horrendous circumstances, whereas my immediate grandparents all survived. My parents lost many relatives but not, thank God, their very immediate family. To return from your father's experience to a cheerful state would have been hard indeed. I'm just trying to point out that there is more than one way of approaching tragedy.

Sabrina - they said THAT?

They're mad then. Bonkers.

What an offensive, idiotic thing to say, only a few weeks after the commemorations for Auschwitz.

Yes it was said - by a chap in his 90's, a British POW who survived Dresden, and spoke of his experience. It was clearly horrific, and haunts him still, understandably- and I do allow him his opinion, having lived through, for the reasons molio has spoken of. But, but, it upsets me. We did not enforce a holocaust on almost the whole of Europe, with the murder of millions of innocents simply because of who they were, or what they believed.

And unfortunately, there are members of the far right, all too ready to grasp onto this very decent blokes story with both hands in the name of nazi-apology.

Echoing what andango said - they said that. Wow. Incredible.

In fact my father had a fabulous sense of humour andango, a point highlighted in his obituary, and his mother survived, only his father died, and he did talk a little about things, over the years, when prompted and when we weren't just little kids who hadn't a clue But I see now in hindsight a constant and underlying sadness, that's all I meant. The overwhelming leit motif was gratitude and a sense of good fortune. But I do think that none of us here actually saw or felt, that's all, and worth remembering before we get into polemics with those who did.

*allow him his opinion sounds wrong - conceited. I mean 'understand it' I suppose - in that he lived through a horrific experience.

But, you know, babies in gas chambers.

Cross post with Sabrina. Which supports my instinct that we need to separate the arguments of those who were there from those who weren't, for several good reasons.

I don't think any of us are getting in polemics with those who did, are we? I'm not, Sabrina's not.

Of course I have sympathy for those who lived through dreadful events. But just as we don't allow victims to decide criminal law, I don't think their heightened emotions means that should outweigh the wide judgement of history on events that were part of a much bigger picture than that individual's experience. I'm sure everyone involved in war finds it traumatic. But it makes the term 'war crime' a bit meaningless if we widen to include every battle, every attack in which people were killed.

I'm inclined to think he was just thinking about the civilian bombings - not the whole war, and that it was a remark based purely on the horrors that he saw that night. Because you just couldn't think that the bombing of Dresden was worse than the 'Nazis" - with everything the Nazis did, could you?

But, make no mistake, Hitler would have wreaked that amount of damage on British cities if he could - and they really tried to in 1941 and 1944. Bad weather stopped the worst firebomb attack on London - if the weather had been clement that night in May 41, so that the Luftwaffe could make their second wave of attacks, we could well have had casulaties reaching the number in Dresden.

andango the point I made a few posts up was that I thought that's what the OP was about, polemics with an elderly German individual who'd lived through the war, and I hadn't got who he was.

People in their 90s grew up in a world where Jews were called Yids and Kikes and all sorts of other derogatory names, where there was widely assumed to be a world conspiracy involving Jewish financiers impoverishing ordinary people, and where casual anti-Semitism was the norm, and not just in Germany.

To understand how an elderly veteran could state that the bombing of Dresden made Britain as bad as the Nazis, I think it's important to look at the general attitude to Jews that existed, and to acknowledge the general callousness felt towards Jews in the future Allied states, even though events such as Kristallnacht, and the Nazi anti-Jewish legislation were reported in the press. Anti-Semitism was a deeply ingrained and widespread prejudice and meant it was possible for many to overlook or minimise the Holocaust and instead focus on British and German losses in the war.

The fact that gays and Roma and other groups were also targeted by the Nazis was rarely mentioned until very recently, and hardly ever in the immediate postwar period, another reflection on the prejudice of those times imo.

Anti-Communism in popular culture had the same effect on people's perception of Soviet losses.

They were civilians but they supported Hitler wholeheartedly.

I think you should read this book (based on a true story). It gives a picture of how difficult it was to stand up against Hitler, and what happened when people who did were found out.
www.waterstones.com/book/alone-in-berlin/hans-fallada/michael-hofmann/9780141189383

"They were civilians but they supported Hitler wholeheartedly."

And you know this how?

This book (which is a novel and not a historical study) and others like it tend to give the erroneous impression that 'the Nazis' were some sort of 'regime' made up of 'other people'.

Whereas photos like this make it clear that the Nazis were actually quite numerous. And I realise my late aunt is a scientific sample of exactly one, but it was her opinion that until defeat came, she would have welcomed German victory in the war, and would not have given much thought, and didn't at the time, to the methods used to achieve that end, or the racist goals of her government.

Yes, the Gestapo was an oppressive police force, but it didn't spring up in a police-culture vacuum. German people in many German states had lived with police forces used to keep tabs on dissent since 1851, and the Gestapo inherited the mantle of the Prussian police.

Daniel Goldhagen 'Hitler's Willing Executioners' illustrates that men who made up units of the Einsatzkommandos were not 'hardcore Nazis' or even SS but ordinary citizens.

Recently written novels 'based on true stories' are not reliable sources of factual information.

To understand why and how the Nazis came to power, you need to read Sebastian Haffner's Defying Hitler - a quite astonishing book by a German born in 1907, I think, who lived through the era and wrote the book in 1939, after fleeing Germany for England in disgust at Nazi policies (he came from an upper-class German family, not a Jewish one). It is searingly honest and the best book on the topic I've ever read. My parents have read it too and agree it is brilliant - and they will pick holes in anything that misrepresents what actually happened.

It is clear that many of the nastier, more psychopathic Germans did absolutely support Hitler - but many, the majority, did not but went along with events out of fear. Plus the wider repercussions of the First World War from the German perspective and the resulting inflation had a huge effect on ordinary Germans - these events changed everyone's lives hugely and allowed the unthinkable to become thinkable. Haffner suggests the generation that grew up in WWI reacted to Germany's loss in one of two ways - either they became obsessed with reviving Germany's fortunes and status by military means, as did Hitler and many Germans, or they turned against war altogether and realised its futility, as he did. But he understood how strong the pull of war and military prowess was to many Germans who had grown up with war as the central feature of their young lives.

And from my father's experience, it would be ludicrous to suggest all German civilians supported the Nazis. He received many individual acts of kindness and indeed owes his life to one family's selfless bravery. Even the teacher who denied him top place in the class because Jewish boys could not be allowed to be seen to come top, privately apologised. Out of his class, probably only about 6 boys were ardent Nazis. Most were not.

So whilst I agree, mathanxiety, that Nazis were numerous and not a tiny minority, I think it is too simplistic to say that all Germans actively supported them either. Just as we accept things done by the Tories in our name without necessarily actively opposing them or taking steps against them, and maybe agreeing with other policies, so most Germans might feel patriotic towards recapturing the honour of the Fatherland whilst privately not being quite sure about or actively disapproving of some of the Nazis' policies. Certainly, anti-Semitism was much more widespread than now and seen as socially acceptable but there is a big jump from that position to implying that all Germans were anti-Semites or willingly took part in the Holocaust. Events under the Nazis put ordinary Germans in an impossible position, as Haffner points out, where they actually had to face evil in a quite concrete way rather the abstracts we usually discuss. Haffner had no capacity for self-delusion at all, which is his astonishing moral strength - but that makes him exceptional, not typical, and is why he had to leave Germany.

Most Germans were able to self-deceive more easily. To ignore the realities that didn't fit in with their self-image as good people. That doesn't make them bad people, exactly, though, either - these were desperate times and it was a way to survive, psychologically. Your aunt was able, in calmer times, to undo the deception.

I honestly don't know how I would react in a similar situation - that's why my focus has always been to avoid ever getting into that kind of situation again, by being vigilant and ensuring we stop any movement towards this kind of state long before we get there.