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.

Thank you dreamingbohemian. This thread is nuts.

To all those who think the people of Dresden deserved to be burned to death as punishment for the Nazi war crimes and crimes against its own people, do you really think the majority of the population had a say in this? The Third Reich was not a democratic nation. Do you have any idea what happened to any anti-war movement, any resistance, whether individual or organised, to the terror of the Nazi state? Not just to anyone participating, to their friends, their families too. Really would suggest you take a step back and ask yourselves, "What, in all sincerity, what would I have done?"

hijk If you have any belief in the afterlife

I don't.

I'm not saying that those at Dresden deserved to die, or even should have been deliberately targeted. Those bombs could have been usefully dropped elsewhere.

However, the manner in which the Germans died at Hamburg, at Dresden, fire and asphyxiation - were cruelly apposite, and not something for British and Americans to feel in any way guilty about. Certainly not now.

Expecting me to have any sympathy for them as 'victims' is a grave insult, to me.

In many ways, the people of Germany had a very lucky escape, 1944-45.

The Japanese even more so. Two nuclear weapons are preferable to the seven planned.

'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.'

All German citizens benefited from the theft of agricultural produce from occupied land in the east and from German barbarity towards the civilian populations of the east. The German civilian population lived and worked in full knowledge that working among them were slaves taken from the east to work on farms and in factories. Not just Jews, but hundreds of thousands of Poles and Russians, men and women from young teens to old men in their 60s. Civilians in occupied areas were left to starve.

Thank you, Miss P and dreaming. Jesus. This thread is chilling.

80sMum, that is the most cack-assed comment I have ever seen on this site, and I have seen many.

I'm really disturbed by this thread.

If you admit, op, that two wrongs don't make a right, then you hardly need to be so outraged by Germans marking an anniversary.

And for what it's worth, I do think it was a war crime.

And he's not just an elderly gentleman, he's the President of Germany.
Have you read his speech? Or just taken a quote from the BBC website?

The whole point of his speech was really saying that Germans mustn't use the Dresden bombings as a way of minimizing or relativizing German guilt for the war. He even said that in light of atrocities committed by the Germans in the war, they couldn't have expected to escape unscathed.
Ironic really when on this thread there's plenty of justification given for the atrocities Britain has caused.

It's still OK to mourn relatives, innocent men, women and children you have lost though.

Yabu

TheCat

There is a difference between expecting people to feel guilt for something, and expecting them to feel sympathy about. Indeed, I think the idea of feeling guilty / apologising for acts carried out by one's predecessors is quite illogical - I don't think Germans of today should feel guilt for the Holocaust any more than Britons and Americans should feel guilt for Dresden.

But, sympathy? To sympathise is not to confess guilt, or even to condone everything people may have done. Sympathy is an acknowledgement that "that was a really shit and awful thing to happen and it wasn't deserved". And you can have sympathy for multiple shit happenings.

The cat, I hope you are not British. Dresden is a matter of deep shame and guilt for the UK, but it was 70 years ago. At the time, and in the 70 years since, Britain has felt and expressed remorse for that terrible act.

However, if there are any Brits on line now saying they are insulted by being expected to consider the people murdered in Dresden as victims, then they are truly a deep deep source of shame today. I very much hope you are not British, because you are shaming us all if you are.

Note also that NO part of the Dresden commemorations have in any way glorified or supported Germany's actions in the war.

Thanks, duplodon.

The whole reason the law of armed conflict evolved was that people recognised that war is probably always going to happen, but we should at least try to limit its effects. That means not killing POWs or using poison gas or slaughtering civilians for no reason. And it means no collective punishment -- you don't get to target civilians because of what their leaders did. This is an incredibly important advance, ethically and legally. And here we have people saying 'they started it', I mean, come on.

We are lucky to be able to take such a lofty moral stance when our parents aren't being sent to concentration, or our husbands called up to die for their country.

True. But my family are German Jews - some of them WERE killed in concentration camps - and I still consider the bombing of Dresden a war crime. The fact that 'the Nazis started it' doesn't stop it fulfilling the definition of war crime.

We should recognise our own guilt over Dresden. The Nazis were vile scum, but the fact remains that the RAF and USAF murdered 25000 Germans. The UK should be aware of Kriegsschuld (war guilt) in the same way Germany does.

mattheanxiety, you're using examples of what the Nazi's did to justify Dresden. But they are one of the most evil sadistic murderous regimes the world has even known. You can't justify things by saying 'well the other side did as bad, so we are justified in doing the same, because that's just a race to the bottom.

Even when our opponent is committing war crimes we should refuse to do it and be above reproach.

And 'If you can't take it don't dish it out' is a nonsense when it comes to civilians as I fail to see how infants and children included in that number could ever been seen as 'dishing it out' so they deserved to 'take it'.

And how can the thousands of young babies and children killed have had any awareness of nazi war crimes?

To sympathise is not to confess guilt, or even to condone everything people may have done.

I find it hard to sympathise with an abstract person, being sheltered and protected by armed men of the most disgusting regime and military in Europe at that time (even worse than the Red Army, but they were in many ways worse, particularly to women).

The German women and female children of 1945, I can feel sympathy for - but on the whole, I prefer to express my sympathy for living people, whose fate I may be able affect in some small way, rather than the hapless, helpless casualties of some long-burnt out and rebuilt city.

I keep trying to phrase this better!

I think it's very important not to get into a sort of discourse that reduces atrocities in war to the inevitable result of a totally unprecedented evil. Yes, Hitler was an extraordinarily evil man. But, lots of largely good people in war committed evil acts - sometimes, in the case of those who planned the attack on Dresden, very consciously. It's difficult to control against the factor of evil people doing evil things. But it is possible to control against good people making decisions that lead to evil. This is why, to me, it is so important to acknowledge that the Allies did commit war crimes, even if they did have good intentions. Otherwise future leaders go into wars convinced that their 'rightness' immunises them from ultimately committing evil.

Magnets, although we should regret actions such as Dresden I disagree strongly with you that the UK should feel 'war guilt' in anything like the way Germany does.

We should feel proud that we defeated such evil whilst being able to acknowledge our mistake in Dresden. We did not as a country nurture such an evil regime, and as such do not need the sense of guilt for the purpose of preventing it happening again.

I think to suggest that the UK should feel some sort of collective guilt over the WW2 (a war we did not want or provoke but we're forced into by Germany) is dangerous and actually quite offensive.

TheCat

Sympathy isn't a finite resource!

Of course one feels more intense sympathy for non-abstract people, as you say, or for people alive today. But, when I think about particular historical events then in that moment I feel sympathy for those involved.

I very much hope you are not British, because you are shaming us all if you are

Oh well, whatever, never mind. I can live with it.

I'm ashamed to say I'd never even heard of the firebombing of Tokyo.

We get this somewhat sanitised version of WW2 based on old black and white movies of DDay and the Battle of Britain and the plucky French resistance and somehow all the shocking stuff that happened in Poland and Russia and Japan doesn't come into the picture.

But we really need to be thinking about it or we will never move on, we will keep making the same mistakes. I wonder if the fact that Britain and America have not experienced the horrors of invasion and occupation is one of the factors that keeps us so bloody gung-ho.

math you benefit directly from unlawful and unethical practices that the US has been conducting in the world for decades (eg propping up repressive regimes for cheap oil, intervening in other countries unlawfully, drones, take your pick) Luckily for you, international law still considers you a civilian. The jihadists, not so much. Especially as, unlike the Germans back then, you get to vote in your government and have access to free global media so you know what's going on.

Yes, some German civilians benefitted from war crimes. That doesn't mean you can kill them.

Sympathy isn't a finite resource!

Sympathy is a finite resource. There is no such thing as an infinite resource.

There is not an infinite supply of sympathetic humans - the world as it stands is sufficient proof of that.

Hakluyt, you didn't hear about the 'lots of teenage resistance members' in Nazi Germany because there weren't 'lots'. The pitifully few are well known and they stand out because there were so few -- the White Rose group were the best known. The Edelweisspiraten and the Swing Groups otoh were irrelevant and insignificant.

Their recent resuscitation and glorification is part of a major attempt to rewrite the history of the Nazi period and to present Germans and Germany as the ultimate victims of WW2, that began with the toppling of the Berlin Wall and has been gaining momentum ever since. It is linked to the resurgence of the right in Germany, though not a cause, and not an effect either. The rise of the right represents a casting off of the sense of shame felt by Germans after re-education in the immediate postwar period.

Part of the mythical narrative of German victimhood involves depicting the Nazis as 'the regime' and the unfortunate majority of Germans as victims of 'the regime' alongside and even to a similar extent with all the millions slaughtered, in particular in the east. The ultimate loser in this PR war is the USSR, and its successor state Russia.

It is a grotesque twisting and misinterpretation of history. We are asked to forget the many photos of the vast crowds at the rallies in Nuremberg and the pathetically small numbers of uniformed men who refused orders. We are also asked to overlook the fact that Einsatzgruppe personnel were recruited from ordinary citizenry municipal police, etc not from the ranks of the hardened zealots of the SS.

It wasn't all repression from the state causing Germans to keep their heads down.

In 'The True Believer' (1951) American writer Eric Hoffer wrote:
'We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom." It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?'

hovis that's a really great point

I mean, do you think Hitler was sitting there in his office thinking -- look how evil I am, what evil things am I going to do today? No, he thought he was a genius, the saviour of his nation. All these lunatics do. So yes, you do need impartial laws and rules that limit behaviour in war, based on the effects and harm it causes. It can't be based on who's the 'good guy' because no one ever thinks they're the bad guy.