War Crime by the RAF

[batffink]

I read yesterday that a group of German academics are calling for the WWII bombing of Dresden to be designated a war crime and that Air Marshall "Bomber" Harris was a war criminal for overseeing it.

These Teutonic examples of rectitude are obviously suffering from severe fucking amnesia. Have they never heard of Rotterdam, Warsaw, Coventry and London. Not to mention Lidice, Oradour sur Glane and all the other atrocities on civilians around Europe. What sort of perverted history do they teach now in German schools?

Do they remember the likes of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Belsen and Ravensbruck?

Fuck them the two faced bastards. If you sow the wind you'll reap the whirlwind.

[FuckingRotter]

No doubt Tony Blair and Arch Bishop John Setamu will be first in line to sign the inevitable retrospective apology. Fucking surrender monkeys.

[Sternenlied]

This is how perception gets distorted.

1) A "group of academics" (from where? based on what?)

leads to

2) What do they teach in school?

I live here, read two newspapers and watch the news at least twice a day - I have never heard of any such "demand".

Actually first resistance against area bombings of Dresden and other German cities arose in Great Britain herself during WW2 and the necessity of these bombings is still in dispute among historians from many countries (from the UK as well) - very much like the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There are even Jews living in Israel denying its very right of existence (of the state of Israel) ... there will always be people - just look at RB - who will make a point just because it is controversial while others might have valid arguments opposing the general majority.
In the USA there are still people who "support" the Confederation ...

I went to school in both countries and I can safely asure you - history class in the UK is much more radically "perverted" than it is in Germany.

While I can see why such a "suggestion" might anger people (would have enraged my parents as well; but they simply hated Germans in general) I must say I am rather surprised. From you I would have expected a more distinguished point of view.

[batffink]

And there we must agree to disagree my friend. The Japanese have also expunged all mention of the war from thier school curriculae. Very fucking convenient.

[HRH1948]

War is a crime against humanity, but a more accurate definition follows:

“War crimes are 'violations of the laws or customs of war'; including 'murder, the ill-treatment or deportation of civilian residents of an occupied territory to slave labor camps", "the murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war', the killing of hostages, 'the wanton destruction of cities, towns and villages, and any devastation not justified by military, or civilian necessity'."

Hitler's horrid indiscriminant bombing of civilian targets served no strategic value, save the advantage that it gave the British.

"The bombing of Dresden by the British Royal Air Force and United States Army Air Force between 13 February and 15 February 1945 remains one of the most controversial Allied actions of the Second World War. In four raids, 1,300 heavy bombers dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city, the Baroque capital of the German state of Saxony. The resulting firestorm destroyed 39 square kilometers (15 sq mi) of the city centre. Estimates of civilian casualties vary greatly, but recent publications place the figure between 24,000 and 40,000."

In my opinion, the firebombing of Dresden served no strategic value and was just as much a war crime as the bombing of London.

[pervipete]

While I feel that the bombing was justified, as Dresden was an important part of the Eastern front, and an important part of the Nazi war effort, for instance making lens for Luftwaffe bombsites, I am only going to point you in a very good book on the subject, namely Dresden by Frederick Taylor.

This is an excellent book, which sheds new light on the subject, such as the fact above.

[Flesh4Fantasy]

Modern American Literary Master, Kurt Vonnegut, lived through the fire bombing of Dresden as an American POW. His novel Slaughterhouse Five is a satirical denunciation of war in general and the destruction of one of Germany's cultural centers in particular. If you've not read it, perhaps you might look into it:
http://www.amazon.com/Slaughterhouse.../dp/0440180295

The debate on the strategic value of Dresden rises and falls through the decades. The fact that the vast majority of the casualties were civilian seems to be indisputable. Was there an element of 'payback' for the bombings of London calculated into the attack? Quite possibly. Was the overall goal to demoralize the Germans and seek to bring the war in the European theater to a swifter conclusion? Almost certainly.

Was Dresden a model for the US which justified Hiroshima and Nagasaki? A very chilling thought.

History is written by the victors. But in the years since 1945, Germany and Japan have become allies and economic partners of the US and Britain. Questions about Dresden have remained to haunt the victors as they struggle to make piece with a past which casts all parties in a bad light.

[pervipete]

Actually, ironically, most of the anti-Dresden propoganda uses figures based on those given out by Goebels within hours of the attack, and we all know that a) he was not going to tell the truth, and b) even today with all our modern methods casualty figures are never acurate that soon after the event, and go up and down over the course of the later days, weeks, months or even years.

The bombing of Dresden was a the request of the Stavka, the Soviet High Command (or more acurately Stalin), who saw it as an important transportation hub for German units and supplies on the way to the Eastern Front.

Which is ironic really, when you think that after the war, Dresden became part of East Germany, and was used by the USSR as anti-West propoganda...

Oh, BTW there is one reason why the area bombing by the allies, and yes the American airforce used this method as well, they were just a little more circumspect about it, are not war crimes.

While the casualty rates were high, the bombing was a means to an end, that was to knock Germany out of the war, either by destroy her ability to wage war, or by demoralising her population so much that, just like at the end of WWI, there would be an irrestible urging to end the war.

On the other hand, a lot of the Nazi, and I use Nazi to differentuate from ordinary citizens, their role is a whole different debate, was to murder whole populations, either via the known genocide of the gas chambers, the massacre of civilians on the pretext of fighting partisans, or just by starvation.

The whole point of the invasion of Russia was to take the farming land, and the produce for German comsumption, and it was freely admitted that it didn't matter if this did not leave enough food for the local population, starvation would help thin them out.

[somedude]

The great tragedy of World War II and frankly all wars is that the innocent pay for wars started by greedy, evil and power hungry leaders and often those leaders aren't of their own country. For Japanese and German civilians in the Second World War they paid a terrible price for the actions of wholy evil governments! The German and Japanese militaries both killed more civillians in other countries than either country lost do to allied action and the governments of both nations could have ended the suffering and dying of their own populations by surrendering earlier than they did. However the violence against civillians by both sides during the war is one of the darkest chapters in human history and maybe, just maybe we learned something from the whole evil mess...

[batffink]

This is how perception gets distorted.

1) A "group of academics" (from where? based on what?)

leads to

2) What do they teach in school?


Pretty straightforward I think.

Academics are teachers. So what are they teaching their pupils if this is what they espouse?

[FuckingRotter]

I really couldn't give a flying fuck for a bunch of academics or what they think Britain should do. What they should be doing is using their fucking brains if they're fucking academics to look at todays problems, not the problems caused by men who are now long dead.

But what really angers me is that there are elements in Britian who would acquiesce to this and just offer up an apology if it were in their power. Fuck it, Hitler and his cronies caused the deaths of millions, Germany and Japan had to be bombed in to surrender. There was no other way of doing it. Some might say that we didn't need to go to war with them, but back in the 30s those same types would have been saying that Hitler wasn't a threat. And now we'd be a race of slaves.

So fuck those people too. Because if they didn't let Hitler enslave us, they'd probably be letting Osama binliner enslave us instead.

Fuck 'em all.

[pervipete]

I do think it is important to reasess history every now and then, the aformentioned book is one example of that, as well as some of the latest works on the First World War, which seek the rebalance from the those that degenerate all the officers of the war, and have come up with some strange prejudices where that is concerned.

However, when they seek to have something completely reclassified, and names of people blackened officially, than maybe that is a step too far.

Somedude, I touched on this in my post, but there are some questions as to how innocent the larger German population were, how many of them actually took advantage of denouncements, ironically enough, including academics, to move theirselves up the ladder at the expense of someone else. And how much was actually known, condoned, or even just suspected by the population as a whole.

As well as the Dresden book, can I also recommend The Nazi's: A Warning From History by Laurence Rees as one of the modern books that ask this question, also the same authors Auschwitz: The Nazi's and The Final Solution and World War Two: Behind Closed Doors.

[dashrendar44]

Based on the OP, I can't understand your rage at this batffink. You seem upset about something the allies did being percieved as a war crime and you insist that Germans have no right to claim other groups committed any simply because they did too? That's rather twisted logic, considering if you were to apply our modern notions of war crime and apply them to every recorded military campaign in the past 3000 years, all sides of all conflicts could be defined as having committed them, whether the winners wrote the history or not. So what, some Canadians and British bombed people they shouldn't have, getting all upset about it and insisting that it wasn't a war crime won't change the lives lost there. If anything, labelling it as a war crime will allow people to look at what happened and learn from those actions. Everyone does bad things, and it's time for our side of the conflict to man up and accept some responsibility.

[Lil-Mac]

Bomber Harris is a hero to many, a villian to some, and an embarassment to a few. The fact is he was asked to do a very dirty job, the stratigic bombing of Germany. He was given this directive, which was a lawful order, by his national command authority. By most accounts he did this dirty job to the best of his ability. His reward, to be quietly swept under a rug after the war. While honors and accolades were being bestowed upon his peers, Bomber Harris, along with other senior officers of Bomber Command were put out to pasture.

As to the question of the Dresden Bombing being a war crime I can offer no judgement, I am not a legal authority. I can say this however with all honesty.... while war crimes were no doubt committed by the allies, they pale in comparrison to the crimes committed by the Axis powers. Both in terms of the shear number, and in their magnitude.

As callous as this may sound, if Bomber Harris went too far in the bombing of Dresden we must remember that Britian was in a war for her very survival. She alone out of all the nations of western Europe still stood against Germany. She alone withstood the full might of German Power during the Blitz, and barely survived. Unlike most people in Britian at the time, Bomber Harris would have been fully aware at how close the RAF came to total destruction during the Battle of Britian. While what happened at Dresden was a horrible, tragic thing.. it must be examined in the context of it's time, the 1940's, not the present day.

[batffink]

Originally Posted by Lil-Mac

Bomber Harris is a hero to many, a villian to some, and an embarassment to a few. The fact is he was asked to do a very dirty job, the stratigic bombing of Germany. He was given this directive, which was a lawful order, by his national command authority. By most accounts he did this dirty job to the best of his ability. His reward, to be quietly swept under a rug after the war. While honors and accolades were being bestowed upon his peers, Bomber Harris, along with other senior officers of Bomber Command were put out to pasture.

As to the question of the Dresden Bombing being a war crime I can offer no judgement, I am not a legal authority. I can say this however with all honesty.... while war crimes were no doubt committed by the allies, they pale in comparrison to the crimes committed by the Axis powers. Both in terms of the shear number, and in their magnitude.

As callous as this may sound, if Bomber Harris went too far in the bombing of Dresden we must remember that Britian was in a war for her very survival. She alone out of all the nations of western Europe still stood against Germany. She alone withstood the full might of German Power during the Blitz, and barely survived. Unlike most people in Britian at the time, Bomber Harris would have been fully aware at how close the RAF came to total destruction during the Battle of Britian. While what happened at Dresden was a horrible, tragic thing.. it must be examined in the context of it's time, the 1940's, not the present day.

More eloquently put than I could have done my friend.

No one is denying that war is a nasty, brutish business but the sheer hypocrisy of these modern Nazi apologists who live in ivory towers and try to play down their own country's guilt really give me the galloping shits.

Don't blame Bomber Harris for Dresden, he took his orders from the Cabinet and I still say that if the Nazis didn't want Dresden to be bombed, they shouldn't have started the fucking war. They set the precedent.

[dashrendar44]

FYI, Britain started the war by being the one to declare war on Germany in retaliation for attacks on Poland. If I remember right, Germany never declared war on anyone first in the European theatre, only met the challenges presented. Even their attack on Poland never had an official declaration of war behind it I believe, though feel free to provide documentation proving me wrong if that's the case.

[batffink]

With all due respect Dash, that is a very simplistic version of the facts.

Al Quaeda didn't declare war on the US before it trashed the twin towers,

Russia didn't declare war when it invaded East Germany in the 50's. China didn't declare war when it invaded Tibet etc etc etc ad infinitum.

You are just playing with words.

[Sternenlied]

Originally Posted by batffink

Academics are teachers. So what are they teaching their pupils if this is what they espouse?

I know were you intended to go with that. I was merely surprised by your own simplicity.
"Academics" isn't an absolute term, including every single academic living and working here. (In Germany most people don't even consider a teacher an "academic" but a teacher).
Most countries - even most universities themselves - have their academics with conflicting opinions and theories. I met a few psychologists for example who openly advertise the idea of homosexuality being a psychological condition that can be treated, reversed, "cured".

I went to Cathlic School for Girls, our history lessons about WW2 were pretty much concluded and explained by "All Germans were evil and every single one who died deserved to die" ... now what?

Is that true?
Is that history the way it should be taught?

Would it be fair, or appropriate for that matter, to condemn all academics for the opinion of some? To even take it one step further and include as well as condemn an entire educational system, too, based on some academics?

That was my point.

[pervipete]

Originally Posted by dashrendar44

FYI, Britain started the war by being the one to declare war on Germany in retaliation for attacks on Poland. If I remember right, Germany never declared war on anyone first in the European theatre, only met the challenges presented. Even their attack on Poland never had an official declaration of war behind it I believe, though feel free to provide documentation proving me wrong if that's the case.

Eh Dash, did ever attend any history lessons?

At Munich Hitler said that he only wanted those parts of Czechpslovakia that had a large German population, and then a little while later, he forced the Czech Prime Minster into signing a humliating surrender. How? Simple, he said that his troops were on the border anyway, this prompted Britain and France to sign an agreement with Poland to gaurentee her soveignty, which Hitler ignored, by faking attacks on German installations near the border, and then sending his troops in.

The declaration of war was in responce to his ignoring of calls to withdraw back to German borders.

BTW it can be safely assumed that when you invade a country, you are declaring war on them.

[FuckingRotter]

In 1944 my old man was part of a naval commando unit that captured, tortured and hung an group of SS soldiers that had murdered 64 women and children in a French village. They could have taken them prisoner but decided it would be easier to just torture them and kill them. How's that for manning up and taking some responsibility Dash?