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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

By an Elderly German saying Dresden was a war crime.

763 replies

Rjae · 13/02/2015 19:48

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.

OP posts:
fizzycolagurlie · 13/02/2015 21:28

Well if you understand all that, you were certainly being unreasonable to be outraged by the German. Talk about over reacting.

uglyswan · 13/02/2015 21:29

But again, OP, if war is simply a series of crimes against humanity, what useful definition can the term "war crime" even have?

TinklyLittleLaugh · 13/02/2015 21:29

To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, it is the victors who write the histories.

Of course the firebombing of Dresden was a war crime, the fact that the other side did equally bad or worse is irrelevant.

Petradreaming · 13/02/2015 21:33

War Crime. Completely and utterly.

Alisvolatpropiis · 13/02/2015 21:36

I agree with you, AndHarry. First rule of going to war (in today's world) - make sure it is legal to do so. Blair quite spectacularly circumvented that and unfortunately, in my opinion, will never face the consequences. Unless those arms dealers he is rumoured to do deals with do eventually get bored of him.

revealall · 13/02/2015 21:45

God I heard that "elderly gentleman" on Breakfast TV this morning. I agree that he knows more about then people discussing it 70 years on. Wasn't just bombing a city. Absolutely a war crime.
But unfortunately this is what happens when war drags on. And still it seems no ones learns from this. The good side become the bad side so so easily.

littlemonkeyface · 13/02/2015 21:47

Both Dresden and Coventry were war crimes. Full stop.

The atrocities carried out by the Germans (both government and civilians) were also despicable war crimes but do not justify Dresden.

Hovis2001 · 13/02/2015 21:50

The reason why it's important to identify specific incidents (and there may be very, very many) within the tragedy of war as "war crimes" is because it does confer a sense of responsibility. Saying that the whole war was a crime against humanity does not get us closer to understanding the individual decisions which led circumstances to that point, and does thus not enable human beings to try to prevent such atrocities happening in the future.

By saying - "that event was clearly more than self-defence, targeted the wrong people, and was thus a crime", we can get a sense of where responsibility lies and what bad / immoral decisions were made to lead things to that point.

I also think it is very important to appreciate that war crimes were committed on both sides. Yes, Hitler started the war and did unspeakably awful things. But the Allies also did awful things during the war. It is very important to see the war as much more complex than the blameless heroes on one side, and the evil Nazis on the other. Because, as this thread has made very clear, suffering beneath the decisions of leaders on both sides were ordinary, innocent, civilians.

Seriouslyffs · 13/02/2015 21:51

KateMosley
I've noticed that people get 'stuck' on history. I found the coverage of the commemoration of WW1 quite concerning as it coincided with a lot of current events that could have done with a lot more attention. Boku Haram and Syria, Ferguson were all happening at the time and I feel there was a certain compassion fatigue, maybe partly due to the very sentimental emoting reporting.

MehsMum · 13/02/2015 21:53

If the Japanese had received the message loud and clear, the leadership wasn't doing much about it... but possibly one reason that they couldn't sue for peace was because there was a faction which wanted to continue the war, right up to the very bitter end.

MehsMum · 13/02/2015 21:55

Sorry - post above relates to a post on the previous page.

FairPhyllis · 13/02/2015 21:55

It's easy to say that civilians shouldn't ever be targeted in war but it's not always that simple. If you look at the Allied attacks on Peenemuende for example, the primary aim of them was to kill all the civilian scientists who were the driving force behind the V missiles project. The aim was to wipe out Germany's R&D capability in technology that was killing thousands of people in southern England - to do that a very specific group of people, mostly civilians, had to be killed.

FuzzyWizard · 13/02/2015 21:55

They were given 3 days!

borisgudanov · 13/02/2015 21:56

It was a war crime involving large-scale civilian fatalities, injuries and hardship and it was also militarily stupid because it tasked large quantities of equipment and deployed considerable ordinance without doing anything to counter (what remained of) the Axis military threat. It was as I understand it carried out in revenge for the bombing of Coventry and if it had a sensible military aim that would have been to discourage future attacks of that sort. In that sense it was pointless because the Luftwaffe was by this point a spent force.

uglyswan · 13/02/2015 22:02

I agree, Hovis. To strip "war crime" of its meaning on the grounds that all war is a crime is to diminish our perception of agency on the part of the decision makers. And this makes it extremely easy to justify all sorts of horrific decisions made and carried out in wartime, as the recent reports on CIA torture show.

hijk · 13/02/2015 22:05

Dresden was an experiment on the possibility of suffocating an entire city. It was deliberately aimed at CIVILIANS IN BOMB SHELTERS. The idea was to surround them by a ring of fire which would draw all the oxygen out of the shelters and kill thousands of families.

There are 25 000 named victims, there were more buried underground who had no surviving relatives left to name them. The recovery operation went on for months, but was eventually abandoned.

It was nothing short of an act of terrorism, there was nothing accidental about the fire storm, this was no unfortunate collateral damage, or simply another incident of war.There was no military target, it was cold blooded slaughter, utterly barbaric.

Yes of course it was a war crime. Churchill thought so, the perpetrators thought so, the victims thought so, the allies thought so, Europeans at the time, on both sides of the war had no illusions about it.

This has nothing to do with hindsight. It was recognised as a war crime at the time, and still is today.

The reason it is being "singled out" - op, is because, thank God, there was never another incident like it.

TheCatAteMyTaxReturn · 13/02/2015 22:18

Any deliberate targeting of civilians is to my mind a war crime. SlaggyIsland

Virtually every soldier who fought in WW2 was a war criminal, then. The only front in WW2 where you could easily distinguish between civilians and combatants, was North Africa.

Had the Allies lost the war, Dresden would have been a war crime.

In the terms of the Nuremberg Tribunals, it was not. No Nazi was ever convicted (or even charged with) the 'war crime' of bombing civilians.

Let us not forget that by February 1945, the Germans [not just 'the Nazis'] had killed 400,000 occupants of one, single city.

Warsaw.

Welshwabbit · 13/02/2015 22:18

I know the thread has moved on but one thing I never realised about Hiroshima until I visited their A Bomb museum was that they were given no warning that the allies had a nuclear weapon and would use it if they didn't surrender. Apparently a decision was made to give no advance warning in case the technology didn't work. Maybe it would have made no difference but that shocked me.

TheCatAteMyTaxReturn · 13/02/2015 22:23

thank God, there was never another incident like it. hijk

there was, and it was 4 times worse than Dresden

But it was on the other side of the world. When the seventieth anniversary of Operation Meetinghouse comes round in March, will anyone care?

hijk · 13/02/2015 22:24

Hioshima was horrendous, but you can argue it was necessary. Even Japanese people normally accept that. My Japanese friends, however, are still a long way from forgiving Nagasaki, the argument being that Hiroshima would certainly have brought about surrender on its own, if the Japanese government had had the time to gather information about the damage done.

Lazaretto · 13/02/2015 22:24

To be honest I'm outraged that you could even consider it not to be a war crime. Where is your empathy and compassion?

Hovis2001 · 13/02/2015 22:26

TheCat

That seems rather different - if they couldn't tell the difference, then it wasn't deliberate targeting of civilians. An entire city, however, cannot be mistaken for a military target in the way that a soldier on the front vs a civilian on the front might be.

I believe the Warsaw Massacres are also seen as war crimes. However, that doesn't mean that Dresden wasn't.

Lazaretto · 13/02/2015 22:27

I'm sorry but you cannot say dropping a nuclear bomb was necessary.

hijk · 13/02/2015 22:27

The tokyo bombing was nothing to do with uk.

TheCatAteMyTaxReturn · 13/02/2015 22:33

Where is your empathy and compassion?

Not with German civilians during 1933-45, that's for sure.

Its not as though Dresden came out of the blue - in July 1943, Operation Gommorah killed 42,000 people, and was the template for all city attacks that followed.

Prior to that, which raid on Germany had killed the most people?

The Dambusters raid in May 1943, the first allied air raid to kill more than 1,000 people in one go.