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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

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:
SoupDragon · 13/02/2015 22:36

Of course it was a war crime. I didn't realise just what had been done to Dresden until I saw it on huge news today and I was horrified. I thought it had "just" been bombed. What happened was absolutely a war crime.

TheCatAteMyTaxReturn · 13/02/2015 22:38

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

It achieved the desired outcome.

Operation Downfall was thankfully cancelled.

Hovis2001 · 13/02/2015 22:39

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

So - they deserved it? Because they were German? They were ordinary people who by an accident of birth happened to belong to that nation. Isn't it possible to have empathy for victims of all war crimes? Or can war crimes only be committed against the peoples of "good" nations?

SoupDragon · 13/02/2015 22:39

Where is your empathy and compassion?

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

My empathy and compassion is with anyone caught up in war. Not those who instigated it or those who are relishing it but those who are caught up.

What makes a German civilian of that time different to a British one? Neither a had a say in what happened.

TheCatAteMyTaxReturn · 13/02/2015 22:46

So - they deserved it? Because they were German?

Because they were complicit.

Because the food that filled their bellies was snatched from the mouths of 6 million Jews, 25 million Russian and Ukrainians, half a million Serbs, etc, etc, etc

hijk · 13/02/2015 22:49

The cat, no they were no complicit, and no they didn't snatch food, and anyway, maybe have a look at why germans were starving in the first place.

Hovis2001 · 13/02/2015 22:51

TheCat

So - one of the reasons "we" "won" the war is because we were allied with the Russians. Does that make the British and the Americans complicit in the atrocities carried out by Stalin?

Hovis2001 · 13/02/2015 22:53

(It's also been fairly persuasively argued that much of the US military action in the Middle East over the past decades has centred on securing access to oil. Are US drivers 'complicit' in those wars every time they fill their cars up?)

grannytomine · 13/02/2015 22:55

I feel great sympathy for the young men who were called up to fight, some were volunteers but many had no choice and yet we seem to be saying it was OK to kill them as long as civilians were left alone. Weren't those young men just civilians who were forced to fight? I say this as the daughter, granddaughter and niece of men who were fighting.

Hakluyt · 13/02/2015 22:56

My ds has just finished being in a play about teenage resistance fighters in Nazi Germany. I hadn't heard about them- but the were lots. I suspect I hadn't heard about them because they were airbrushed out of history- the baddies must be all bad, and the goodies all good and not firebombing children in Dresden

TheCatAteMyTaxReturn · 13/02/2015 22:59

Hovis2001 - Yes, we were.

hijk and no they didn't snatch food

So, what exactly, sustained the Nazi war effort, and the German people between 1940 and 1945?

The answer is a single word. Genocide.

Gas chambers were used because malnutrition, disease and back-breaking slave labour weren't quick enough.

TheCatAteMyTaxReturn · 13/02/2015 23:07

Hakluyt I suspect I hadn't heard about them because they were airbrushed out of history

More likely because they were failures. Well-intentioned, often religiously inspired, and unbelieveably brave, suicidally so in the case of the July plotters.

But failures nonetheless.

The German people preferred Hitler to Sophie Scholl, almost right up to the end.

Examine, if you will, the concept of Endsieg

Jux · 13/02/2015 23:07

My dad flew bombers. I have no idea whether he was involved in the Dresden bombing or not. I do know that he was horrified and sickened by it, and that - whether he was directly involved or not - a light left him after it.

Call Churchill a war criminal, OK. Call Bomber Harris a war criminal, OK. To keep on wheeling out a survivor and pushing him to talk about all the gory details, then calling it a warcrime, as if the news readers are on some sort of personal crusade is yet another example of revolting events in journalism.

hijk · 13/02/2015 23:07

The cat, no parent or child ensconced in a bob shelter under dresden that night had reached out an arm hundreds of miles long and snatched any food from anybody.

These were civilians, just doing their best to get through.

If you have any belief in the afterlife, then I hope you know you will meet them one day, and when you do you will see that they were just normal people like you and me.

We have been at was with the taliban. You and I could equally be called "complicit"Just imagine where ever you are, the taliban create a huge firestorm right now, and you and your whole family suffocate.

There is nothing we can do for the victims of Dresden now, except honour their memory by making sure their fate is never forgotten, belittled or justified, ever.

DuelingFanjo · 13/02/2015 23:08

It wasn't Britains finest hour, was it. Yabu.

Hakluyt · 13/02/2015 23:09

Your dad flew bombers? You must be even older than I am!

Hovis2001 · 13/02/2015 23:12

grannytomine

Argh, that is a tricky one. Especially with conscription. I don't think the language of 'war crimes' is saying that it's ok that soldiers died. In an ideal world, war would never happen. But the idea of a war crime vs a war 'not-crime' is, as I understand it, whether or not within the context of a war, an action is necessary and proportional. From a military point of view, it is necessary to kill the other side's soldiers, to target their military outposts, etc. But it isn't necessary to target a city full of civilians, especially if, as in the case of Dresden, it doesn't contribute appreciably to the success or failure of the war. It all comes out of Just War Theory (in particular jus in bello, the rules to be followed in fighting a war), which arguably has its flaws but which has been around for so very long that it's fairly embedded in the way we make judgements about war.

I think the distinction to be made is that war, all war, is a travesty, and all deaths during the war are tragedies. But, because humans haven't got to the point of not having wars yet, it's important to understand why things happen in wars that make them even more awful than they needed to be, and to ascribe responsibility for them and to trace their causes. Deaths by war crimes are not worse than deaths in combat but understanding them as 'war crimes' may hopefully help to prevent further unecessary deaths until such point as the world gets the hang of not going to war.

Does that make any sense?

mathanxiety · 13/02/2015 23:14

YANBU.

My (Irish) dad served in the RAF and had a German sister in law, and had no qualms whatsoever about the bombing of Dresden, or Hamburg, or any other German civilian targets, having seen the destruction of British cities and having no doubt as to the fate of Ireland and the Irish if the Nazis had ever got that far. Just as attacks on civilian centres in Britain were intended to terrorise and reduce confidence in the British government and armed forces, the attack on Dresden had the aim of destroying confidence in the Nazi government and armed forces.

Operation Barbarossa was the granddaddy of all war crimes. How many Soviet civilians perished? How many Soviet POWs were starved or frozen to death, deliberately, while in German hands?

As to 'never another incident like it' -- there had already been plenty of incidents like it, including an aerial attack on Stalingrad, a city full of civilians, on 23 August 1942, followed by a systematic block by block destruction of the city by the 6th Army that went on for five days.

Warsaw was to be razed in 1944 as an example to any other cities. Between the ravages of war since 1939 and the deliberate plan of 1944, and after being looted, almost 90% of the city ended up systematically destroyed, in full knowledge that the armies in the east were doomed, and that better use could be made of forces tied up in the rampage of destruction. Over half a million of the remaining citizens were rounded up and sent to various horrible fates in different camps. This was after the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto had been wiped off the face of the earth. Paintings from hundreds of years before the 20th century had to be used to aid reconstruction.

'The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.'
—SS chief Heinrich Himmler, 17 October 1944

Even before the invasion of Poland, plans were hatched to turn Warsaw into a German provincial town of about 150,000 population.

The use of the Dirlewanger Brigade in the USSR and Poland, led by the sadistic psychopath Oskar Dirlewanger, ranks among the most heinous examples of terror inflicted on a civil population in history. His unit is held responsible for the massacre of at least 100,000 citizens of Warsaw alone during the closing stages of the war. The unit became so notorious in what is now Belarus that even some SS officers wanted to boot him out of the SS and away from their field of operations.

Kharkov, a city of almost 1 million, with its population swollen to over 1.5 million including refugees ahead of the German advance, finished the war with a population of 190,000.

Atrocities committed in and around Rostov were well documented.

The city of Leningrad, full of civilians was besieged from 8 September 1941 until 27 January 1944, two and a half years of horror that featured bombardment, disease and starvation.

And this and much, much more is on top of the Holocaust. The German war aims in the east included extermination of the civilian populations.

Too bad Dresden got bombed into smithereens. A little perspective is in order.
If you can't take it, don't dish it.

littlemonkeyface · 13/02/2015 23:15

Sadly I do think that the majority Germans were what you call complicit. Some because they were truly evil, some to gain from others' misfortune and the majority probably because they either didn't realise the true extent of the atrocities or, if they did, feared that they and their loved ones would be targeted themselves.

UncleT · 13/02/2015 23:19

YABU. You should probably realise that things aren't purely black and white, and you say yourself there was acknowledgement of overall blame for the war.

dreamingbohemian · 13/02/2015 23:23

This thread is making me crazy. OP have you heard of international law? The law of armed conflict? A quick google would tell you that the legality of going to war and the legality of what you do in war are completely separate issues, separate bodies of law. Incinerating a city full of civilians for no real military purpose is a war crime, full stop. It doesn't matter who does it.

If you want to explain why they committed a war crime, that's understandable, but that doesn't mean it's not a war crime.

And no, not all Germans were complicit in Nazi crimes. Do you have any idea how many Germans the Nazis killed before they even started their wars? But anyway, it doesn't matter. Even if everyone in Dresden had voted for Hitler -- under international law, if they were not directly involved in the waging of war, they were civilians and not supposed to be targeted.

If you want to argue with the laws of war, go ahead, plenty of people do. But at least know what they say first and find out why they evolved that way. It was actually to try to limit civilian deaths, something you say you care about.

80sMum · 13/02/2015 23:23

The bombing of Dresden meets all the criteria for a war crime as far as I'm concerned.

OP you've repeatedly said that "they (ie Germany) started it". You're wrong. I think you will find that it was Britain that declared war on Germany, not the other way around.

hijk · 13/02/2015 23:26

when I say there has never been another incident like it, I am referring to uk history. To my knowledge, the UK has never attempted to suffocate ALL the civilian inhabitants of a whole city since Dresden.

MissPenelopeLumawoo2 · 13/02/2015 23:26

Sadly I do think that the majority Germans were what you call complicit. Some because they were truly evil, some to gain from others' misfortune and the majority probably because they either didn't realise the true extent of the atrocities or, if they did, feared that they and their loved ones would be targeted themselves.

That is exactly it- people were scared to resist National Socialism. I don't think the German nation was unique in that. How would you act if your family was being threatened if you spoke up? The majority of people, of whatever nation, would keep their heads down to save their own skins. That is human nature, not German nature.

I did a dissertation on resistance to National Socialism. There was lots actually, but by the very nature of it , resistance groups had to operate underground, they could not afford to link up with other groups in case someone betrayed them .Almost all were found out in the end- the reason no one knows about them is because they were pretty much all killed and there are very few people around to tell their story. But I found from my research that it is totally untrue to say that Hitler had the support of the majority of the people.

Hovis2001 · 13/02/2015 23:29

The fact that other war crimes were committed by the Germans does not mean that Dresden was not a war crime against the Germans.

I think it's very important to acknowledge that the 'good' side on a war can commit war crimes as well as the 'bad' side. Otherwise, atrocities are just something that other, wholly evil people commit. Recognising that even people with good intentions can do terrible things in the context of war may just help us to understand how to protect against making the same bad decisions in the future.