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.

And yes, of course all Germans knew about the Holocaust long before 1945 - Haffner makes it quite clear what was going on or would be going on, and that was written in 1939 - but that is not at all the same as saying they all actively supported it. Those who opposed it were liable to end up in a concentration camp themselves, so it was a big step to take from knowing these things were going on and turning a blind eye, to actively taking steps to oppose the Holocaust. Many did support it - and some opposed it. The majority, I think, chose deliberately to ignore it, for their own sake.

I agree andango there was a sizeable minority who did not support Hitler and some of these actively helped against his regime.

The vast majority of Germans however, did get swept along on the tide of national socialism because it appealed to precisely the same sense of national pride we are seeing here. Nothing wrong with national pride, but in Germany in the 1930s the Germans were deeply resentful of the terms following ww1 and suffering the effects of the world depression.

Hitler offered a glorious future and a vision of restoration of Germany's true place in the world, not as a downtrodden nation.

Frankly I can completely understand this and I am sure this fuelled the rise of nazism. Kristallnacht showed most Germans would turn a blind eye to what was going on or actively participated against an easy target.

I am also sure that most of the people who supported Hitler would never have done so if they had known the ultimate outcome, but the fact they did so to me make them complicit in the atrocities that followed. That's pretty harsh I know, but I think it's a case of throwing their support behind the nazi party (even though they didn't know their true agenda) and sticking blindly with it. I'm sure many regretted their decision but by then it was too late.

Did this mean they deserved to die in Dresden? No, very few people 'deserve' to die but they were casualties of a war which had descended into the very depths of hell.

To me any German saying it was a war crime, particularly someone with clout, has an agenda to shift blame away from where it lies.

Throughout this post I have referred to Germans and not nazis or SS or Gestapo because that is refocusing responsibility away from the nation who voted for a madman. By the time they realised it was too late and they had helped set in motion catastrophic events.

andango. X posted and we even use the same 'blind eye' expression!

Think we agree on that then.

To me, it's irrelevant whether those who died in Dresden were ardent Nazis or unwilling Germans - they died in a war. We didn't put them on trial individually and shoot them (or gas them) one by one.

They died as a necessary part of winning that war. End of.

Yes, every death in war is tragic. But I don't see the deaths in Dresden as somehow more tragic than the deaths in the London blitz - why would they be? Being bombed is being bombed.

I simply couldn't agree all Germans were complicit - I think that is too simplistic as above, and I think it is irrelevant and unnecessary to pass moral judgement. Would we really have stood up against Hitler once in power? Can we honestly all say we would have been that clear-sighted and that brave? I don't know. As a Jew, that decision would have been made for me, as resistance and escape would have been my only option, but without that? I really don't know and hope never to need to find out.

I should add - I couldn't agree that all Germans were ACTIVELY complicit. Passively, yes, they may have gone along with it, but the capacity for self-deception and wilful blindness is great. That's not the same thing as deliberately making an active choice to support the Nazis, though. That's making an active choice to not think about what was happening. A subtle but important difference. The former is unforgiveable, criminal. The latter is weak but understandable. It's a very fine, but important line.

I do agree with your fundamental point, though, Rjae, that the only people who want to in effect suggest an equivalence between Nazi war crimes such as the Holocaust and the bombing of Dresden are the far right.

Dresden was not a war crime. It was a bombing, like many others. According to Dresden's own figures, both contemporary and recent, 25,000 people died. A large number, obviously, but compared to the scale of the War as a whole, not a significant event. What is sad is the numbers killed overall. These 25,000 are no sadder than the millions killed elsewhere in scenes of varying levels of brutality. It is offensive to all the others who died to suggest Dresden was in some way unique and its dead more important than others who died in bombing raids elsewhere, committed by either side.

I didn't say all were actively complicit, but unfortunately many were. I agree totally that the majority were passively going along with what was happening particularly as they were taken closer to war. The Germans were a very regimented people at the time which made them so dangerous. I've lived in Germany and was amazed at the strict adherence to rules and regulations though I'm not sure if it's changed in the last 10-15 years. They are massively efficient though so can understand how they rearmed so comprehensively.

I agree that for the purposes of assessing Dresden, the question of complicity is irrelevant. It wasn't a case of anyone being punished or of anyone deserving to die, and implicit in the question of complicity is that of deserving retribution.

Dresden was a case of identifying a target (in the case of Dresden, it was the only one of three or four specific targets that were bombed at that date as weather ruled out the other planned raids, on Leipzig and Berlin) and carrying out the attack, in the context of forcing unconditional surrender on an enemy known to be committed to fighting to the end and known to be sending teenage boys into battle to sacrifice themselves.

(This included the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend, consisting of youths born in 1926 and after, that saw action in Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, and Budapest.)

I do think it is a mistake to conceptualise 'German civilians' and 'Nazis' as two separate entities as that dichotomy implies Nazis were some sort of military group separate from civilian life, or separate in some other way from a majority. I think it is more realistic to use the term 'Nazi policies' or even 'Nazism' when discussing support, participation and complicity, and it's best not to use the term 'civilians' when referring to German voters or German public opinion.

I also think it's worth remembering that the Gestapo listened in on public opinion, and kept close tabs on the way the wind was blowing. Unofficial public opinion polling and monitoring support was a major element of what the Gestapo did. The Nazi leadership was aware of shifts in opinion and responded to some extent.

In order for the police state to operate successfully, the general public had to first accept the concept of German vs. 'other' and also the necessity to punish the enemies of the German state, maintain order, and ultimately create a better Germany. The public was very receptive to these ideas, which were well publicised throughout the 1930s. Concentration camps were well known. Harshness towards the 'enemies' of the German people was well accepted. Robert Gellately's Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany speaks of the moral brutalisation and social desensitisation of German society and illustrates that a huge amount of information on camps, on the various campaigns against 'others', and on the necessity of discrimination and ridding society of undesirable elements was broadcast and accepted throughout the 30s.

I think we all broadly agree, mathanxiety. Certainly, I remember seeing an exhibition on German anti-Semitism, in Berlin, about 25 years ago, and those images still stick in my mind. They were utterly horrific - and I'm not even talking about the Holocaust at all, just the iconography pre-dating it, that allowed the Holocaust to happen.

It's why I will never cease to attack anti-Semitic propaganda whenever I see it - because I know it's not just pictures/words. It matters.

Like this 'teacher' in today's news - fined all of a few hundred pounds for posting virulent anti-Semitism on facebook:

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2958711/Teacher-fined-posting-picture-Hitler-words-right-Facebook.html

Disgusting and shameful.

However, I can't stress enough that there were Germans who were anti-Nazi too - not all Germans were even passive supporters of the Nazis. I'm here to type this because of one family like that. We were able to return the favour in a small way - the man in question stood for political office after the war and was falsely accused of having been a Nazi. My grandfather was able to vouch for him being the opposite and he became mayor of his town.

Here is a picture of him. He has no descendants any more to remember him, but I remember him.

www.europeana.eu/portal/record/2022037/11088_8E66C007_0F5B_4BC5_ABDA_64B9EDD3FB4A.html

I found this: www.nottinghilleditions.com/books/on-the-natural-history-of-destruction/179

It looks quite interesting.

A review from Publishers' Weekly (on Amazon)of one of the essays in Sebald's book:
'In "Air War and Literature," Sebald criticizes the silence of postwar German literature on the starvation, mutilations and killings caused by Allied bombings. The essay provoked a major controversy when it appeared in Germany in 1999. Some commentators were dismayed that Sebald chose to revisit those difficult times and to attack, with his full ironic and sardonic powers, a number of revered figures in German literature. Sebald was dismayed that his comments provoked an outpouring of support from those who could talk only about German suffering and Jewish conspiracies. But only at the very end, almost as an afterthought, does Sebald place this suffering in historical context, as the consequence of German policies of total war and the Holocaust. "Air War and Literature" is an important but flawed effort by a writer who always demanded unflinching engagement with the past.'

I read this essay collection around the time it came out but did not know at the time about the supportive response from right wingers and anti-Semites or any controversy. However, I was struck (and was frustrated) while reading it that the context had been treated as an afterthought. Now, reading this review, I am scratching my head at Sebald's surprise that what he wrote would be warmly greeted by the right fringe.