Many people know a lot about the barbaric bombing of Dresden. But even more remains unexplored or misunderstood. The dates of the bombings are known, but for some reason no one pays attention to the bombing targets. The results of the bombings are known with an inexplicable spread in the official death toll - from 25 to 135 thousand (there are figures of 250 and 500 thousand), but even the pedantic Germans could not explain such strange arithmetic. It is also known that some buildings have not yet been restored. But for some reason it is not customary to say why the city was the target of the bombing. It’s not exactly a secret, all the documents were published in the press long ago, but it somehow turned out awkward. It seems that it was not the fascists, it seems that they were enlightened Europeans, but they wiped off the face of the earth a city with a civilian population, with refugees and the wounded.
In order to understand this tragic story and answer the questions posed, let us briefly recall how these bombings took place. For clarity, let's summarize the bombing data in a table.
| Target | Who conducted | Qty. aircraft |
Tonnage dropped |
|
| Railway stations | US Air Force | 30 | ||
| Railway stations | US Air Force | 133 | ||
| City blocks | British Air Force | 772 | ||
| Railway stations | US Air Force | 316 | ||
| Railway stations | US Air Force | 211 | ||
| Railway stations | US Air Force | 406 | ||
| Railway stations | US Air Force | 572 | ||
| 17.04.1945 | Industrial zones | US Air Force | 8 |
The table shows that Dresden attracted the attention of the Allies only at the end of 1944, when it was bombed for the first time by the US Air Force. On October 7, 1944, 30 “flying fortresses” - Boeing B-17s, which failed to drop bombs on the main target, bombed the secondary target - Dresden. A similar situation repeated itself on January 16, 1945, with the only difference being that there were a hundred more planes. Both times the Americans bombed with high altitude(6000 m), fearing enemy anti-aircraft fire. And both times it was ineffective, although anti-aircraft guns were removed from the city back in 1943, as was blackout.
The bombing in February was to begin with an air raid by the 8th air army US Air Force on the night of February 13, but poor weather conditions over Europe prevented the participation of American aircraft. In this regard, the first strike was carried out by British aircraft. However, RAF pilots participating in the raid noted excellent visibility and cloudless skies, which allowed them to accurately reach their target. It seems that the Americans, knowing the target, refused to bomb the city, but the British lied so that, against the backdrop of their bloodthirstiness, the “Yanks” would not end up with white gloves. At the same time, the Americans on the Western Front, unlike the British, did not burn with the “fire of revenge”, and accordingly did not have the motivation to exterminate German civilians. The Japanese were another matter - the shame of Pearl Harbor combined with the Japanese prisoner of war camps - aroused righteous rage among the Yankees. And even then among those who fought Pacific Theater military actions.
At 22:09 Central European Time, guidance aircraft dropped flare bombs on the Dresden stadium, marking the starting point of the bombing. Please note that the city center was highlighted, and not the military enterprises on the outskirts, not the railroad marshalling yards. The airstrike was aimed specifically at the city, at the civilian population. Five minutes later, the first wave of 244 bombers arrived, which, passing this point, fanned out along predetermined trajectories and dropped bombs after a certain time. Three hours later, a second attack took place with a train of 528 bombers on the already burning city, working firefighters and the fleeing population. RAF losses during these two raids on Dresden amounted to 6 aircraft, in addition, two aircraft crashed in France and one in England, which confirms the virtual absence of German air defense. In other similar raids, the Allies lost from 30 to 70 aircraft.
Both the first and second waves of bombers used the same tactics: first they dropped high-explosive bombs to rip roofs off houses and expose the wooden structures of buildings, thereby increasing the effectiveness of incendiary bombs, then dropped incendiary bombs, and again high-explosive bombs to make work difficult fire services. As a result of this, a fire tornado was formed.
On February 14 at 12:17, 316 American Boeing B-17 bombers dropped 782 tons of bombs, incl. almost 300 tons of incendiaries, targeting railway depots. On the same day, part of the bombers, heading towards Dresden, but lost their course, bombed Prague. On February 15, 211 American bombers dropped 466 tons of high explosive bombs. There is evidence that civilians fleeing the fire were attacked by American fighters. However, their reliability is questionable.
As rail traffic was quickly restored, the US Air Force carried out two more bombing raids. On March 2, 406 B-17 bombers dropped 940 tons of high explosive bombs and 141 tons of incendiary bombs. On April 17, 572 B-17 bombers dropped 1,526 tons of high explosive bombs and 165 tons of incendiary bombs. On the same day, they bombed the industrial zones of Dresden with 8 bombers. Obviously, these eight bombers were enough to destroy the city's military industry. During the raid on Dresden, American aviation irretrievably lost 8 B-17 bombers and 4 P-51 fighters.
The above indicates that the target of the bombing of British aircraft was precisely the city; neither railway communications nor factories operating for military purposes were subjected to air raids throughout the war. The Americans, on the other hand, “ironed” six times en masse railway, without achieving significant results, and in the end, destroyed several auxiliary military factories.
The total tonnage of bombs dropped on Dresden was less than during the massive bombing of other large German cities. However, weather conditions good for aviation, buildings with wooden structures, passages connecting the basements of adjacent houses, as well as the lack of air defense, contributed to the fact that the results of the bombing were catastrophic for the city.
The area of complete destruction in Dresden was four times larger than that in Nagasaki after the nuclear bombing by the Americans on August 9, 1945.
According to a Dresden police report compiled shortly after the raids, 12 thousand buildings in the city burned down. The report stated that "24 banks, 26 insurance company buildings, 31 retail stores, 6,470 stores, 640 warehouses, 256 trading floors, 31 hotels, 26 taverns, 63 administrative buildings, 3 theaters, 18 cinemas, 11 churches, 60 chapels, 50 cultural and historical buildings, 19 hospitals (including auxiliary and private clinics), 39 schools, 5 consulates, 1 zoological garden, 1 waterworks, 1 railway depot, 19 post offices, 4 tram depots, 19 ships and barges.” In addition, the destruction of military targets was reported: the command post at Taschenberg Palace, 19 military hospitals and many lesser military service buildings. Nearly 200 factories were damaged, of which 136 suffered serious damage (including several Zeiss optics plants), 28 suffered moderate damage, and 35 suffered minor damage.
US Air Force documents say: “... 23% of industrial buildings and 56% of non-industrial buildings (not including residential) were seriously damaged. From total number 78 thousand residential buildings are considered destroyed, 27.7 thousand are considered uninhabitable, but can be repaired, 64.5 thousand are considered to have received minor damage and can be repaired.” The American raid was assessed as follows: “as a result of the raids, heavy damage was inflicted on the city’s railway infrastructure, which completely paralyzed communications,” “railroad bridges across the Elbe River—vital for the transfer of troops—remained inaccessible for traffic for several weeks after the raid.”
For some reason, the Americans clearly embellished their “merits”: the marshalling railway stations were slightly damaged, one bridge across the Elbe was preserved, traffic through Dresden was partially restored on February 15, and three days later - completely. The military airfield located in the vicinity of the city was also not damaged. And where did 27.7 thousand destroyed buildings come from, if the Germans report 12 thousand - only God knows.
The scale of destruction and the number of victims is reflected in photographs and post-war testimonies of those who took part in clearing the ruins and burying bombing victims. We will not take into account the testimonies of accidental survivors, because due to circumstances they remembered only individual fragments of the tragedy.
According to eyewitnesses, the first wave of bombing caused thousands of fires, which flared up and merged into one huge one. Approximately 2 - 2.5 hours after the bombing, a firestorm swept through the city. Giant masses of air were sucked into the resulting funnel and created an artificial tornado with a temperature of 600º - 800º Celsius. The fire consumed the oxygen on the ground and in the basements, people suffocated in the thousands. Air currents tore people's clothes off, throwing their bodies into the raging flames and onto the melted asphalt. The force of the tornado was so great that carriages were blown off the railway tracks. And two days after the fire, fragments of furniture, remains of clothing, and papers were found 30-40 kilometers from the city.
The second wave of bombing caused a second tornado, which connected with the first. The temperature, judging by the various metal objects found melted, in some places reached 1500º Celsius. The bodies of people evaporated almost without a trace. People, uprooted trees, cars, and debris from destroyed buildings were thrown into the fire. Since after the first tornado people could no longer stay in hot houses and basements, the second one “covered” them in parks, squares and on the Elbe embankment, where they escaped the heat. This, in particular, explains the thousands of naked, burnt and suffocated people found after the bombing. This airstrike, twice as powerful as the previous one, caused major casualties, incomparable to the previous bombing, since it hit completely unprotected people.
On the way home, the navigators of the British bombers recorded the reflections of the fire flames at a distance of one hundred and forty kilometers. We saw flames from a fire in Dresden and 200 km from the city on the Soviet sector of the front.
Subsequent American raids in the already burned city did not cause large-scale fires or mass casualties comparable to the British attack. Everything that could burn was burned, there were no more living people.
Rescue services were able to begin work only two days later, when the red-hot ruins of the city began to cool down. Their functions were limited to clearing rubble and burying the dead. There were so many dead that it was not even possible to bury them properly. It was not possible to identify the dead: the vast majority of the bodies were severely damaged by the fire. The remains were loaded onto cars and taken out of town, where they were buried in mass graves dug using excavators. However, there were too many corpses, they did not have time to bury them, they began to decompose. To prevent an epidemic, giant bonfires were built in the city, on which corpses were burned. For several weeks the city center was shrouded in black smoke. Gasoline, which was in short supply in the Wehrmacht, was delivered in huge quantities by personal order of Goebbels. Flamethrowers were also used en masse. Piles of ashes and unburnt remains were dumped into the Elbe using bulldozers.
“There were corpses everywhere. From the heat they shriveled up to about one meter in length and fused with the asphalt. We just scraped them off with a shovel. The air was saturated with the vile smell of decaying and burnt flesh,” recalled one of the soldiers assigned to participate in rescue operations. The leaders of the rescue squads, which received the unofficial name of “death units,” demanded “more gas masks, alcohol and cigarettes” for their people. The human psyche has limits; working in such conditions without alcohol has become unrealistic.
They brought in prisoners of war (mostly British and Americans) and the civilian population that had survived on the outskirts to clear the city.
Estimates of the number of deaths differed tenfold - from 18 thousand to half a million. According to the official version, 25 thousand died. However, this figure raises fair doubts. The Germans themselves note in their report about 12 thousand completely destroyed buildings, of which few more than a thousand were uninhabited. Even if we take into account that there were 2-3 people in each residential building, it follows that more than 25 thousand people died. Photographs of destroyed buildings show us arrays of multi-story buildings, which means that there were significantly more dead than units of destroyed housing.
It is known that before the war about 650 thousand people lived in Dresden, but by February 1945 there were many refugees and several dozen hospitals there. According to various estimates, at the time of the bombing there were from 1,000 to 1,300 thousand people in the city. After the war, there were 369 thousand people in the city. Thus, the resulting difference in population between the beginning and end of the war cannot in any way be explained by the men who went to the front. Assuming that there were no more refugees than the number of men who went to the front, and also that some of the front-line soldiers did return home, the real death toll will be estimated at 300 thousand. What if there were still more refugees?
Since the bombing of Dresden immediately after its implementation fell into the category of a political action (more on this below), in different years, different countries, organizations, politicians, journalists and writers published various data on the number of deaths. In February 1945, Goebbels' department estimated losses close to 200 thousand people. On March 22, 1945, the municipal authorities of the city of Dresden issued an official report, according to which the number of deaths recorded by this date was 20,204, and the total number of deaths during the bombing was about 25 thousand people. In 1953, Major General of the Fire Service Hans Rumpf estimated civilian losses at 60-100 thousand. In 1963, David Irving's book The Destruction of Dresden estimated 135,000 dead. In 1964, US Air Force Lieutenant General Ira Eaker also estimated the death toll at 135,000. In 2000, according to a British court decision, 25-30 thousand people were declared dead. According to an analysis prepared by the historical department of the US Air Force, 25 thousand people died, according to official data from the historical department of the British Royal Air Force - over 50 thousand people. In the USSR, the estimated number of victims was 135 thousand people. In 2005, the BBC cited the number of victims at 130 thousand people, in 2007 - 35 thousand people. In 2006, Russian historian Boris Sokolov noted that the death toll from the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945 ranged from 25 thousand to 250 thousand people. In the same year, in the book of the Russian journalist A. Alyabyev, it was noted that the number of deaths, according to various sources, ranged from 60 to 245 thousand people. In 2010, a commission of 13 German historians commissioned by the city of Dresden estimated the death toll to be between 18,000 and 25,000. Other estimates of the number of victims, reaching up to 500 thousand people, were called by the commission exaggerated or based on dubious sources.
Thus, politics still dominates common sense, does not allow us to come to a real, at least approximate number of victims of the bombing. Although it must be emphasized once again that the figure can only be approximate. Because documents on registration of city residents, refugees and wounded in hospitals were burned during fires. It is impossible to determine the number of victims from the bodies of the dead buried or burned by the authorities, because an unknown number of people burned without a trace, many were buried forever in the rubble, which after the war were “smoothed over” by bulldozers and were not opened, thousands drowned in the Elbe, from thousands only charred bones remained , which were not counted.
After the end of the war, the ruins of churches, palaces and residential buildings were dismantled and taken out of the city, leaving only a site with marked boundaries of the streets and buildings that used to be here on the site of Dresden. The restoration of the city center took 40 years, the remaining parts were restored earlier. At the same time, a number of historical buildings of the city located on Neumarkt Square are being restored to this day.
What was the reason for these bombings? After all, Dresden was of no importance militarily. The city's military industry included 110 enterprises, mostly small ones. Among the large ones, two tobacco factories, a soap factory, a Siemens plant producing gas masks, and a Zeiss enterprise specializing in optics stood out. Moreover, they were all located on the outskirts of the city, while the historical, residential center was bombed. The excuse that Dresden had a major transport interchange does not apply. Why was it necessary to bomb the city instead of the marshalling yards? In addition, to block a transport hub, regular strikes at its entrances and exits were necessary. We see, in fact, a one-time action that did not stop the work of the railway.
After the massive resonance in the world caused by the bombing of Dresden, the Allies put forward a version that the bombing was a fulfillment of the request of the Soviet command, with the aim of preventing the transfer of troops from the Western Front to the Eastern Front. However, after the materials of the Yalta Conference were declassified, it became clear that they were talking about striking the railway junctions of Berlin and Leipzig. Dresden was not mentioned.
Even the memorandum, which was read to the British pilots before the bombing flight on February 13, did not reveal the true meaning of this military operation: "...The aim of the attack is to strike the enemy where he will feel it most, behind the partially collapsed front...and at the same time show the Russians, when they arrive in the city, what the Royal Air Force is capable of." There were no other explanations from the allies on this topic until today.
According to a number of historians, the bombing of Dresden and other German cities belonging to the Soviet zone of influence was not carried out to assist the Red Army, but pursued exclusively political goals: a demonstration of military power to intimidate the Soviet leadership. However, this formulation only partially characterizes the goal of the Allies; more precisely, it was more characteristic of the British than the Americans. The United States was unlikely to share this concern. And even then the threat was more imaginary by the generals than real, since the USSR had no plans to attack Britain, nor such a possibility, even theoretical, which was due to the lack of a fleet.
And yet, the allies had a common goal, political and economic, which was shared by both Great Britain and the United States: to leave complete destruction in the zone of Soviet occupation. After all, the costs of restoring the occupied territory should have fallen on the USSR, weakening it for many years in the future. And to take revenge for the bombing of Britain and to scare the USSR were accompanying goals, and not predominant.
Thus, the lives of Dresden residents and refugees became for Anglo-American strategists only a bargaining chip in their political game, which they still do not recognize.
The world's reaction to the bombing of Dresden was swift and primarily condemning London. Already on February 16, 1945, German diplomats distributed photographs of bombing victims, and a little later, photo albums with terrible illustrations. Having not received convincing evidence of the need for such a bombing of Dresden from the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, the world press accused the Allies of terror. This issue was also raised at meetings of the House of Commons.
Churchill, who had previously supported the bombing, distanced himself from it. On March 28, in a draft memorandum sent by telegram to General Hastings Ismay, he said: “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of the bombing of German cities, carried out under various pretexts for the sake of increasing terror, should be reconsidered. Otherwise, we will gain control of a completely ruined state. The destruction of Dresden remains a strong pretext against Allied bombing. I am of the opinion that henceforth military objectives should be determined more strictly in our own interests than in the interests of the enemy. The Foreign Secretary has informed me of this problem, and I believe that it is necessary to concentrate more carefully on military targets such as oil and communications directly outside the combat zone, rather than on outright acts of terror and wanton, albeit impressive, destruction."
There are differing opinions on whether bombing should be classified as a war crime. Naturally, the discussions are still being conducted only on a theoretical plane, although German nationalist politicians say that “ordinary residents of Dresden equate the bombing of German cities with the extermination of Jews.” Other, less radical politicians say that the question of classifying the bombing of Dresden only as a war crime does not make sense without considering together with the facts of the bombing of such cities as Würzburg, Hildesheim, Paderborn, Pforzheim, which had no military significance, carried out according to an identical scheme, and also almost completely destroyed. The bombing of these and many other cities followed the bombing of Dresden. Year after year, the bombing issues are getting louder and louder. Who knows, maybe over time the organizers of these bombings will have their own, some kind of posthumous, absentee Nuremberg trial.
Based on materials from the sites: http://waralbum.ru; https://ruposters.ru; http://rusvesna.su; http://lurkmore.to; https://ru.wikipedia.org; http://uznai-pravdu.com; http://smi2.mirtesen.ru; https://en.wikipedia.org; http://www.telegraph.co.uk; http://www.history.com; https://www.reddit.com; http://dawn666blacksun.angelfire.com; http://whale.to; http://www.youngmuslimdigest.com.
Carnage in Dresden: burning women, ruins, children wandering among corpses in search of parents - the first act of genocide of the future NATO (PHOTO)
14.02.2016 - 19:00
On the anniversary of the barbaric bombing of the German city of Dresden by the US and British Air Forces, reader of "Russian Spring" Luhansk resident Sergei Vasilevsky described in detail the nightmare of those days, relying on historical sources.
We learned a lot about NATO and their satellites (I try not to use the word “sixes”). You don't have to tell us anything.
What I would like to remember once again is that shelling and bombing of residential areas is not something new. This is the original method of waging war and introducing “values” into enemy territory.
What NATO is can be judged by what NATO has been doing since its founding. And that’s not all - NATO arose as a union of states that had their own history at the time of creation.
Therefore, in order to more fully understand the essence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, it is necessary to consider the history of the states that created the Organization. As the Gospel says, “a good tree does not bear bad fruit.” What were the “roots” of NATO?
The fact that is discussed in this article is the bombing of Dresden by the US and British air forces on February 13–14, 1945. Due to the small size of the newspaper article, only some data will be given; anyone can find more detailed information on their own.
SITUATION AT THE BEGINNING OF THE BOMBING:
From about mid-1944, the Allied Air Forces, unable to cope with the task of destroying Germany's military and transport potential, switched to massive bombing of the civilian population.
One of the illustrative episodes was the city of Essen in East Frisia. On September 30, 1944, due to bad weather, American bombers were unable to reach their target - a military plant. On the way back, the pilots saw the city below them and, in order not to return with a bomb load, decided to drop it on the city. The bombs hit the school, burying 120 children under the rubble - half the children in the city.
Compare the emblem on the plane with the emblem on the trail. picture.
As one German fighter pilot recalled: “...At that time there was a popular joke: who can be considered a coward? Answer: a resident of Berlin who volunteered for the front..."
By order of the British bomber commander-in-chief Arthur Harris, leaflets were dropped on German cities with the following content:
“Why are we doing this? Not out of a desire for revenge, although we have not forgotten Warsaw, Rotterdam, Belgrade (more on Belgrade - S.V.), London, Plymouth, Coventry.
We are bombing Germany, city by city, more and more, to make it impossible for you to continue the war.”
Roosevelt's phrase about the planned bombing of the civilian population of Germany: “...We must be cruel to the Germans, I mean the Germans as a nation, and not just the Nazis.
Either we must castrate the German people, or treat them in such a way that they do not produce offspring capable of continuing to behave as in the past...”
A Lancaster bomber drops bombs on civilians.
A phrase from the rationale for the Dresden operation: “...The main goal of such bombings is primarily directed against the morality of the ordinary population and serves psychological purposes. It is very important that the entire operation starts with this goal in mind...”
"CITY OF REFUGEES"
At the beginning of 1945, Dresden became a “city of refugees”, in which hospitals and evacuation centers were concentrated. At the time of the bombing, there were up to 600 thousand refugees in the city, fleeing the alleged “atrocities” of the Soviet Army.
Dresden was practically unprotected by anti-aircraft artillery and was covered by only one squadron of fighters (one cannot ignore the lack of aviation fuel).
On February 13, 1945, 245 Lancaster bombers took off from English airfields and carried out their first bombing. At midnight, another 550 bombers took off and carried out a second bombing raid.
During the two night raids on Dresden, 1,400 tons of high explosive bombs and 1,100 tons of incendiary bombs were dropped (2.5 kilotons - nuclear age terminology).
When all the fires merged into one, a firestorm began. The air drawn into the funnel created a giant tornado that lifted people into the air and threw them into the fire.
The fires that engulfed the city were so strong that the asphalt melted and flowed through the streets. People hiding underground were suffocating as the oxygen burned out in the fires. The heat reached such intensity that human flesh melted, and a stain remained from the person.
As the tornado gained strength, the heat increased sharply. Those who hid in shelters died relatively easily: they turned into ashes or melted, soaking the ground to a meter and a half.
On February 13-15, 1945, one of the most terrible crimes of the entire Second World War was committed. World War. Terrible, first of all, for their senseless cruelty. The whole city was literally burned out. Hiroshima and Nagasaki after that were just a natural continuation of barbarism, never recognized as a crime against humanity. This city turned out to be Dresden, Cultural Center Germany, which had no military production facilities and had only one offense - the Russians approached it. Only one Luftwaffe squadron was located for some time in this city of artists and artisans, but it was no longer left by 1945, when the end Nazi Germany was a foregone conclusion. The Royal Air Force of Great Britain and the US Air Force wanted to find out whether it would be possible to create a fiery wave... Residents of Dresden were chosen as victims of the experiment.
"Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany, is not much smaller than Manchester. It is the largest enemy center, which has not yet been bombed. In the middle of winter, when refugees are heading west, and troops need houses for billeting and rest, every roof counts. Target attack - to hit the enemy in the most sensitive place, behind the line of an already broken front, and to prevent the city from being used in the future; and at the same time to show the Russians, when they come to Dresden, what Bomber Command is capable of."
From an RAF memo for internal use, January 1945.
Thousands of buildings were destroyed in the city, tens of thousands of residents died. These raids have gained a strong reputation as "the largest experience of mass destruction by means of military equipment during the Second World War." The raid, which destroyed almost the entire old center of the architectural pearl of Europe, still remains one of the most controversial pages in the history of the Second World War. What was it: war crime against humanity or a natural act of retaliation against the Nazis? But then it would be more logical to bomb Berlin.
“We will bomb Germany, one city after another. We will bomb you harder and harder until you stop waging war. This is our goal. We will pursue her mercilessly. City after city: Lubeck, Rostock, Cologne, Emden, Bremen, Wilhelmshaven, Duisburg, Hamburg - and this list will only grow,” with these words the commander of the British Bomber Aviation, Arthur Harris, addressed the residents of Germany. This is exactly the text that was distributed on the pages of millions of leaflets scattered over Germany.
The words of Marshal Harris were inevitably translated into reality. Day after day, newspapers published statistical reports. Bingen - 96% destroyed. Dessau - 80% destroyed. Chemnitz - destroyed by 75%. Small and large, industrial and university, full of refugees or clogged with military industry - German cities, as promised by the British marshal, one after another turned into smoldering ruins. Stuttgart - destroyed by 65%. Magdeburg - 90% destroyed. Cologne - 65% destroyed. Hamburg - destroyed by 45%. By the beginning of 1945, the news that another German city had ceased to exist was already perceived as commonplace.
“This is the principle of torture: the victim is tortured until she does what is asked of her. The Germans were required to throw off the Nazis. The fact that the expected effect was not achieved and the uprising did not occur was explained only by the fact that such operations had never been carried out before. No one could imagine that the civilian population would choose bombing. It’s just that, despite the monstrous scale of destruction, the probability of dying under bombs until the very end of the war remained lower than the probability of dying at the hands of an executioner if a citizen showed dissatisfaction with the regime,” reflects Berlin historian Jörg Friedrich.
The carpet bombing of German cities was neither an accident nor the whim of individual pyromaniac fanatics from among the British or American military. The concept of bombing a civilian population, successfully used against Nazi Germany, was merely a development of the doctrine of British Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard, developed by him during the First World War.
According to Trenchard, during an industrial war, enemy residential areas should become natural targets, since the industrial worker is as much a participant in the hostilities as the soldier at the front.
This concept was in quite obvious contradiction with the international law in force at that time. Thus, articles 24-27 of the Hague Convention of 1907 directly prohibited the bombing and shelling of unprotected cities, the destruction of cultural property, as well as private property. In addition, the belligerent side was instructed, if possible, to warn the enemy about the start of shelling. However, the convention did not clearly state the ban on the destruction or terrorization of the civilian population; apparently, they simply did not think about this method of warfare.
An attempt to ban air warfare against civilians was made in 1922 in the draft Hague Declaration on the Rules of Air Warfare, but failed due to the reluctance of European countries to join the strict terms of the treaty. Nevertheless, already on September 1, 1939, US President Franklin Roosevelt appealed to the heads of state that entered the war with a call to prevent “shocking violations of humanity” in the form of “the deaths of defenseless men, women and children” and “never, under any circumstances, undertake bombing from the air of the civilian population of unprotected cities." The then British Prime Minister Arthur Neville Chamberlain also stated at the beginning of 1940 that “Her Majesty’s government will never attack civilians.”
Jörg Friedrich explains: “During the first years of the war, there was a fierce struggle among the Allied generals between supporters of targeted and carpet bombing. The first believed that it was necessary to strike at the most vulnerable points: factories, power plants, fuel depots. The latter believed that the damage from targeted strikes could be easily compensated for, and relied on the carpet destruction of cities and terrorizing the population.”
The concept of carpet bombing looked very profitable in light of the fact that it was precisely this kind of war that Britain had been preparing for during the entire pre-war decade. Lancaster bombers were designed specifically for attacking cities. Especially for the doctrine of total bombing, the most advanced production of incendiary bombs among the warring powers was created in Great Britain. Having established their production in 1936, by the beginning of the war the British Air Force had a stockpile of five million of these bombs. This arsenal had to be dropped on someone's head - and it is not surprising that already on February 14, 1942, the British Air Force received the so-called “Area Bombing Directive.”
The document, which gave then-Bomber Commander Arthur Harris unfettered authority to use bombers to suppress German cities, stated in part: "From now on, operations should be focused on suppressing the morale of the enemy civilian population - particularly industrial workers."
On February 15, RAF Commander Sir Charles Portal was even less ambiguous in a note to Harris: “I believe it is clear to you that that the targets should be residential areas, not shipyards or aircraft factories.” However, it was not worth convincing Harris of the benefits of carpet bombing. Back in the 1920s, while commanding British air forces in Pakistan and then Iraq, he ordered the firebombing of unruly villages. Now the bomb general, who received the nickname Butcher from his subordinates, had to test the aerial killing machine not on Arabs and Kurds, but on Europeans.
In fact, the only opponents of raids on cities in 1942-1943 were the Americans. Compared to British bombers, their planes were better armored, had more machine guns and could fly farther, so the American command believed that it could solve military problems without mass killing of civilians. “The views of the Americans changed seriously after the raid on the well-defended Darmstadt, as well as on the bearing factories in Schweinfurt and Regensburg,” says Jörg Friedrich. — You see, in Germany there were only two centers for the production of bearings. And the Americans, of course, thought that they could deprive the Germans of all their bearings with one blow and win the war. But these factories were so well protected that during a raid in the summer of 1943, the Americans lost a third of their vehicles. After that, they simply didn’t bomb anything for six months. The problem was not even that they could not produce new bombers, but that the pilots refused to fly. A general who loses more than twenty percent of his personnel in just one flight begins to experience problems with the morale of the pilots. This is how the area bombing school began to win.” The victory of the school of total bombing meant the rising of the star of Marshal Arthur Harris. A popular story among his subordinates was that one day a policeman stopped Harris's car while he was driving too fast and advised him to obey the speed limit: "Otherwise you might accidentally kill someone." “Young man, I kill hundreds of people every night,” Harris allegedly responded to the officer.
Obsessed with the idea of bombing Germany out of the war, Harris spent days and nights at the Air Ministry, ignoring his ulcer. During all the years of the war, he was only on vacation for two weeks. Even the monstrous losses of his own pilots - during the war years the losses of British bomber aviation amounted to 60% - could not force him to retreat from the idefix that gripped him.
“It is ridiculous to believe that the largest industrial power in Europe can be brought to its knees by such a ridiculous instrument as six or seven hundred bombers. But give me thirty thousand strategic bombers and the war will end tomorrow morning,” he told Prime Minister Winston Churchill, reporting the success of the next bombing. Harris did not receive thirty thousand bombers, and he had to develop a fundamentally new method of destroying cities - the “firestorm” technology.
“Bomb war theorists came to the conclusion that the enemy’s city itself is a weapon - a structure with a gigantic potential for self-destruction, you just need to put the weapon into action. We need to put the fuse to this barrel of gunpowder, says Jörg Friedrich. — German cities were extremely susceptible to fire. The houses were predominantly wooden, the attic floors were dry beams ready to catch fire. If you set fire to the attic in such a house and break out the windows, then the fire that breaks out in the attic will be fueled by oxygen entering the building through the broken windows - the house will turn into a huge fireplace. You see, every house in every city was potentially a fireplace—you just had to help it turn into a fireplace.”
The optimal technology for creating a “firestorm” looked like this. The first wave of bombers dropped so-called aerial mines on the city - a special type of high-explosive bombs, the main purpose of which was to create ideal conditions for saturating the city with incendiary bombs. The first aerial mines used by the British weighed 790 kilograms and carried 650 kilograms of explosives. The following modifications were much more powerful - already in 1943, the British used mines that carried 2.5 and even 4 tons of explosives. Huge cylinders three and a half meters long rained down on the city and exploded upon contact with the ground, tearing tiles off roofs and knocking out windows and doors within a radius of up to a kilometer. “Reared up” in this way, the city became defenseless against a hail of incendiary bombs that rained down on it immediately after being bombarded with aerial mines. When the city was sufficiently saturated with incendiary bombs (in some cases, up to 100 thousand incendiary bombs were dropped per square kilometer), tens of thousands of fires broke out in the city at the same time. The medieval urban development with its narrow streets helped the fire spread from one house to another. The movement of fire crews in conditions of a general fire was extremely difficult. Cities that had neither parks nor lakes, but only dense wooden buildings that had been dried out for centuries, did especially well. The simultaneous fire of hundreds of houses created a draft of unprecedented force over an area of several square kilometers. The entire city was turning into a furnace of unprecedented proportions, sucking in oxygen from the surrounding area. The resulting draft, directed towards the fire, caused a wind blowing at a speed of 200-250 kilometers per hour, a gigantic fire sucked oxygen out of bomb shelters, condemning to death even those people who were spared by the bombs.
Ironically, Harris picked up the concept of a “firestorm” from the Germans, Jörg Friedrich continues to say sadly. “In the autumn of 1940, the Germans bombed Coventry, a small medieval city. During the raid, they bombarded the city center with incendiary bombs. The calculation was that the fire would spread to the engine factories located on the outskirts. In addition, fire trucks should not have been able to drive through the burning city center. Harris saw the bombing as an extremely interesting innovation. He studied its results for several months in a row. No one had carried out such bombings before. Instead of bombarding the city with land mines and blowing it up, the Germans carried out only a preliminary bombardment with land mines, and delivered the main blow with incendiary bombs - and achieved fantastic success. Inspired by the new technique, Harris tried to carry out a completely similar raid on Lubeck - almost the same city as Coventry. A small medieval town,” says Friedrich.
It was Lübeck that was destined to become the first German city to experience the “firestorm” technology. On the night of Palm Sunday 1942, 150 tons of high-explosive bombs were rained down on Lübeck, cracking the tiled roofs of medieval gingerbread houses, after which 25 thousand incendiary bombs rained down on the city. Lübeck firefighters, who realized the scale of the disaster in time, tried to call for reinforcements from neighboring Kiel, but to no avail. By morning the city center was a smoking ashes. Harris was triumphant: the technology he had developed bore its first fruits.
The logic of the bomb war, like the logic of any terror, required a constant increase in the number of victims. If until the beginning of 1943 the bombing of cities did not kill more than 100-600 people, then by the summer of 1943 the operations began to radicalize sharply.
In May 1943, four thousand people died during the bombing of Wuppertal. Just two months later, during the bombing of Hamburg, the number of victims approached 40 thousand. The likelihood for city residents to die in a fiery nightmare increased at an alarming rate. If before people They preferred to hide from bombing in basements, but now, at the sound of an air raid raid, they increasingly fled to bunkers built to protect the population, but in few cities could bunkers accommodate more than 10% of the population. As a result, people fought to the death in front of the bomb shelters, and those killed by the bombs were added to those crushed by the crowd.
The fear of death by bombs reached its peak in April-May 1945, when the bombing reached its peak intensity. By this time, it was already obvious that Germany had lost the war and was on the verge of capitulation, but it was during these weeks that the most bombs fell on German cities, and the number of civilian deaths in these two months amounted to an unprecedented figure - 130 thousand people.
The most famous episode of the bomb tragedy of the spring of 1945 was the destruction of Dresden. At the time of the bombing on February 13, 1945, there were about 100 thousand refugees in the city with a population of 640 thousand people.
All other large cities in Germany were terribly bombed and burned. In Dresden, not a single glass had cracked before. Every day the sirens howled like hell, people went into the basements and listened to the radio there. But the planes were always sent to other places - Leipzig, Chemnitz, Plauen and all sorts of other points.
The steam heating in Dresden was still whistling merrily. Trams clanked. The lights came on and when the switches clicked. Restaurants and theaters were open. The zoo was open. The city mainly produced medicines, canned goods and cigarettes.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five.
"Most Americans have heard a lot about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but few know that more people died in Dresden than was destroyed in any of these cities. Dresden was an Allied "experiment". They wanted to see if it was possible to create a firestorm by dropping thousands of incendiary bombs into the city center. Dresden was a city of priceless cultural treasures that had been untouched until this point in the war. The bombing set the entire city on fire, creating hurricane-force winds that fanned the flames even further. The asphalt melted and floated through the streets like lava. When the air attack was over, it turned out that about 100 thousand people had died. To prevent the spread of disease, authorities burned the remains of tens of thousands of people in grotesque funeral pyres. Dresden had no military significance, and when it was bombed, the war was practically already won. The bombing only strengthened the opposition to Germany and cost more Allied lives. I sincerely ask myself, was the bombing of Dresden a war crime? Was this a crime against humanity? What were... the children guilty of who died in the most terrible of deaths - being burned alive."
David Duke, American historian.
The victims of the barbaric bombings were not only and not so much Wehrmacht soldiers, not SS troops, not NSDAP activists, but women and children. By the way, Dresden at that time was flooded with refugees from the eastern parts of Germany, which had already been captured by units of the Red Army. People who feared the “barbarism of the Russians” strove to the West, relying on the humanism of the remaining members of the anti-Hitler coalition. And they died under Allied bombs. If it was possible to calculate the number of Dresden residents killed during the bombing with relative accuracy, based on the records of house books and passport offices, then it was not at all possible to identify refugees and find out their names after the raids, which led to large discrepancies. International research group historians in 2006-2008, the latter carried out a “reconciliation of figures.” According to the data they published, as a result of the bombing on February 13-14, 1945, 25 thousand people died, of which about 8 thousand were refugees. More than 30 thousand more people received injuries and burns of varying severity.
According to Allied intelligence, by February 1945, 110 enterprises in Dresden served the needs of the Wehrmacht, thus being legitimate military targets that were subject to destruction. More than 50 thousand people worked for them. Among these targets are various enterprises for the production of components for the aircraft industry, a poison gas factory (Hemische Goye factory), the Lehmann anti-aircraft and field gun factory, the largest optical-mechanical enterprise in Germany, Zeiss Ikon, as well as enterprises that produced X-ray machines and electrical equipment (“ Koch and Sterzel"), gearboxes and electrical measuring instruments.
The operation to destroy Dresden was supposed to begin with an air raid by the US 8th Air Force on February 13, but poor weather conditions over Europe prevented the participation of American aircraft. In this regard, the first strike was carried out by British aircraft.
On the evening of February 13, 796 Lancaster aircraft and nine Haviland Mosquito aircraft bombed in two waves, dropping 1,478 tons of high-explosive bombs and 1,182 tons of incendiary bombs. The first attack was carried out by 5 Group RAF. The guidance planes marked the orientation point - the football stadium - with burning bombs. All bombers flew through this point, then fanned out along predetermined trajectories and dropped their bombs after a certain time. The first bombs fell on the city at 22.14 Central European Time. Three hours later a second attack took place, carried out by the 1st, 3rd, 5th and 8th RAF Groups. The weather had improved by then, and 529 Lancasters dropped 1,800 tons of bombs between 1.21 and 1.45. “The explosions came one after another. Smoke and flames filled our basement, the lanterns went out, and the wounded were screaming terribly. Overcome with fear, we began to make our way to the exit. Mom and older sister were dragging a large basket with twins. I held my younger sister with one hand, and grabbed my mother’s coat with the other... Our street was impossible to recognize. Everywhere you looked there was fire. The fourth floor where we lived no longer existed. The ruins of our house were burning with all their might. On the streets, refugees with carts, some other people, horses rushed past burning cars - and everyone was screaming. Everyone was afraid to die. I saw wounded women, children and old people who were trying to get out of the fire and rubble... We burst into some kind of basement, chock full of wounded and simply deathly frightened women and children. They moaned, cried, prayed. And then the second raid began,” recalls Lothar Metzger, who turned 12 on the day of the bombing of Dresden.
On February 14, from 12.17 to 12.30, 311 American Boeing B-17 bombers dropped 771 tons of bombs, targeting railway parks. On February 15, another 466 tons of American bombs fell on Dresden. But this was not the end. On March 2, 406 B-17 bombers dropped 940 tons of high explosive bombs and 141 tons of incendiary bombs. On April 17, 580 B-17 bombers dropped 1,554 tons of high explosive bombs and 165 tons of incendiary bombs.
“In the fiery squall, moans and cries for help were heard. Everything around turned into a complete hell. I see a woman - she is still before my eyes. There is a package in her hands. This is a child. She runs, falls, and the baby, describing an arc, disappears in the flames. Suddenly two people appear right in front of me. They scream, wave their arms, and suddenly, to my horror, I see how one after another these people fall to the ground (today I know that the unfortunate ones were victims of lack of oxygen). They pass out and turn to ash. Insane fear grips me, and I keep repeating: “I don’t want to burn alive!” I don't know how many other people got in my way. I know only one thing: I shouldn’t burn,” these are the memories of Dresden resident Margaret Freier. The heavy fire that raged in the rooms and courtyards caused glass to burst, copper to melt, and marble to turn into limestone chips. People in houses and a few bomb shelters, in basements died of suffocation and were burned alive. While sorting through the smoldering ruins even a few days after the raids, rescuers here and there came across “mummified” corpses that crumbled to dust when touched. The melted metal structures retained dents whose contours resembled human bodies.
Those who managed to escape from the multi-kilometer fire engulfed in flames strove for the Elbe, for the water, for the coastal meadows. “Sounds similar to the stomping of giants were heard above. These were multi-ton bombs exploding. The giants stomped and stomped... A fiery hurricane raged above. Dresden turned into a complete conflagration. The flames consumed all living things and, in general, everything that could burn... The sky was completely covered with black smoke. The angry sun looked like the head of a nail. Dresden was like the moon - only minerals. The stones became hot. There was death all around. There were what looked like short logs lying everywhere. These were people caught in a firestorm... It was assumed that the entire population of the city, without any exception, should be destroyed. Everyone who dared to stay alive spoiled the matter... The fighters emerged from the smoke to see if anything was moving below. The planes saw some people moving along the river bank. They sprayed them with machine guns... All this was planned so that the war would end as quickly as possible,” this is how Kurt Vonnegut describes the events of February 13-14, 1945 in “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
This documentary and largely autobiographical novel (Vonnegut, who fought in American army, was in a prisoner of war camp near Dresden, from where he was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945) was not published in its entirety in the USA for a long time, being censored.
According to a Dresden police report compiled shortly after the raids, 12 thousand buildings in the city burned down. The report stated that "24 banks, 26 insurance company buildings, 31 retail stores, 6,470 stores, 640 warehouses, 256 salesrooms, 31 hotels, 63 office buildings, three theaters, 18 cinemas, 11 churches, 60 chapels, 50 cultural and historical buildings, 19 hospitals, 39 schools, one railway depot, 19 ships and barges.” In addition, the destruction of military targets was reported: the command post at Taschenberg Palace, 19 military hospitals and many lesser military service buildings. Almost 200 factories were damaged, of which 136 suffered serious damage (including several Zeiss plants), 28 suffered moderate damage and 35 suffered minor damage.
US Air Force documents state: “23% industrial buildings and 56% non-industrial buildings (not including residential). Of the total number of residential buildings, 78 thousand are considered destroyed, 27.7 thousand are considered uninhabitable, but repairable... 80% of city buildings suffered varying degrees of destruction and 50% of residential buildings were destroyed or seriously damaged... "In As a result of the raids, heavy damage was caused to the city's railway infrastructure, which completely paralyzed communications; railway bridges across the Elbe, vital for the movement of troops, remained inaccessible for traffic for several weeks after the raid, official Allied reports state.
Old Market Square, through the centuries former place trade and mass celebrations, then it became a giant crematorium. There was no time and no one to bury and identify the dead, and the threat of an epidemic was high. Therefore, the remains were burned using flamethrowers. The city was covered with ash, like snow. “Rime” lay on the gentle banks, it floated along the waters of the luxurious Elbe. Every year, since 1946, on February 13, throughout East and Central Germany, people rang in memory of the victims of Dresden church bells. The chime lasted 20 minutes - exactly the same time as the first attack on the city lasted. This tradition soon spread to West Germany - the Allied occupation zone. In an attempt to reduce the undesirable moral effect of these actions, On February 11, 1953, the US State Department released a message that the bombing of Dresden was allegedly undertaken in response to persistent requests from the Soviet side during the Yalta Conference. (The Conference of the Allied Powers was held on February 4-11, 1945 - the second of three meetings of the leaders of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition, the USSR, the USA and Great Britain, dedicated to the establishment of the post-war world order. At it, a fundamental decision was made to divide Germany into occupation zones.) Assume Only a biased amateur can say that the action, which has no analogues in terms of power and quantity of equipment, requiring precise coordination and careful planning, was an “improvisation” born during the Yalta negotiations and implemented a few days later.
The decision to carpet bomb Dresden was made back in December 1944. (In general, coordinated Allied raids were planned in advance, with all the details discussed.) The USSR did not ask the Anglo-American allies to bomb Dresden. This is evidenced by the declassified minutes of the meetings of the Yalta Conference, demonstrated in documentary film"Dresden. Chronicle of a tragedy", filmed in 2005 - on the 60th anniversary of the bombing of the capital of Saxony by the Rossiya TV channel. In the minutes of the conference, Dresden is mentioned only once - and then in connection with the drawing of the dividing line between the Anglo-American and Soviet troops. And here What the Soviet command really asked for was to strike at the railway junctions of Berlin and Leipzig due to the fact that the Germans had already transferred about 20 divisions against the Red Army from the western front and were going to transfer about 30 more. It was this request that was presented to in writing Roosevelt and Churchill. At the conference in Yalta, the Soviet side asked to bomb railway junctions, and not residential areas. This operation was not even coordinated with the Soviet command, whose advanced units were located in close proximity to the city.
“It is characteristic that in the school textbooks of the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany the “Dresden theme” was presented differently. In West Germany, the fact of the destruction of the Saxon capital by Allied air raids is presented in the general context of the history of the Second World War and is interpreted as an inevitable consequence of the fight against National Socialism and was not, so to speak, allocated to a special page in the study of this period of the war...,” says expert of the Saxony Ministry of Culture and Science Dr. Norbert Haase.
There is no single monument in the historical center of Dresden, dedicated to events February 13-14, 1945. But many of the restored buildings have signs and other “ identification marks", telling about what happened. The restoration of the ensemble of old Dresden began shortly after the war with the active participation of Soviet specialists and partly with Soviet money
. “From the ruins rose the Dresden Opera, the Dresden Gallery - the Zwinger, the famous Bruhl Terrace, the Albertinum and dozens more architectural monuments. It can be said that The most important historical buildings on the banks of the Elbe and in the Old Town were rebuilt during the existence of the GDR. The restoration continues to this day,” says Norbert Haase.
According to various sources, from 20 to 350,000 people died in the bombing of Dresden. Isn’t there a very big difference between 20 and 350 thousand people? Almost an order of magnitude. Where did these numbers come from? Immediately after the bombing, German authorities announced that 350,000 citizens had died and, together with refugees, 500,000. The first commission on Dresden was carried out jointly by Soviet-American services, immediately in 1945. The conclusions of the joint commission (USSR allies) were an order of magnitude smaller - between 22,700 - 25,000 people were killed, and 6 thousand died subsequently. In GDR sources, the figure of 145,000 thousand subsequently surfaced (I don’t know where it surfaced, maybe someone can tell me, it was first voiced by Wilhelm Pieck, the second president of the GDR. It also migrated to the History of the Second World War published in the USSR and became generally recognized among us.)
Article in the newspaper Die Welt
http://www.welt.de/kultur/article726910/Wie_viele_Menschen_starben_im_Dresdner_Feuersturm.html
How many people died in the Dresden firestorm.
Now, 62 years after the Anglo-American bombing of Dresden on February 13 and 14, 1945, the Mayor of Dresden appointed a commission to determine the exact number of victims of this tragedy. On the next anniversary of the air raids, the interim conclusions of this commission were published. Eleven professors and members of the commission came to the conclusion that, with an accuracy of 20%, the number of deaths during the bombing could be around 25,000 people. Our report of the results prompted a flood of letters from readers. Most of them believed that, according to eyewitness accounts of survivors of the air war against German cities, the death toll in Dresden was much higher. The chairman of the commission is Rolf-Dieter Müller. Our correspondent Sven Felix Kehlerhoff talks to him.
Welt Online: - Professor Müller, many witnesses to the air war against German cities are reacting angrily to the interim results of your commission. According to them, a six-figure number of people died in Dresden.
Rolf-Dieter Müller: - We take the suggestion that there may have been hundreds of thousands of victims very seriously. Much of our research is designed to answer the question of whether evidence can be found to support this assumption. So far, there is still no proof of this thesis, but we are faced with an incredible number of forgeries of documents and statements from various witnesses that are clearly false. No one has ever seen or even hundreds of thousands of victims, much less taken them into account. There is only the spread of rumors and speculation.
Welt Online: - Eyewitnesses simply paint a different picture.
I understand the witnesses who experienced this as children terrible disaster and who still remember that horror and exaggerate this number in accordance with their childhood impressions, while others look at this soberly and deliberately exaggerate the number of victims. I have no sympathy whatsoever for those who shamelessly manipulate the deceased so that Dresden has the glory of the most terrible war crime of all time.
Welt Online: skeptics think that tens of thousands of people burned without a trace in the firestorm.
Mueller: Even in “ideal” crematorium conditions, people do not burn completely. Archaeologists are finding evidence of human life even after thousands of years in burned settlements. During extensive excavations in Dresden's Old Town over the past 15 years, more victims no air raids were found. The first result was the following study: The Freital Mining Academy examined bricks from the basements of the city center and the first result indicates that the temperatures at which human bodies turn to ash were far from being reached at the center of the firestorm. People were hiding in basements then. We know from numerous excavation reports that most of the victims did not die from the fire itself. They suffocated, which is what we see in today's fire disasters. In addition, photographs that were taken after the bombing of Dresden confirm that only isolated burnt corpses were visible on the streets.
Welt Online: Your commission is responsible for establishing a correlation between the tonnage of bombs dropped on the one hand and the number of victims on the other. Such calculations may be viewed as cynical by survivors and relatives of bombing victims.
Müller: We are result-oriented and must take into account what work the Allies did to destroy the center of Dresden, how many incendiary bombs were used, for example, and what destruction they caused in other cases comparable to this. We must not forget that other German cities were bombed much more heavily than Dresden and were destroyed even more than Dresden. I admire the love of the people of Dresden for their hometown, other cities cannot compare here. My city of Braunschweig also came under heavy bombing. My parents had a hard time coping with these losses.
Welt Online: A further criticized method is to study all possible registrations. Many witnesses object to this because in 1945, not every death was recorded.
Müller: that's certainly correct. Historically grown society does not allow anonymous disposal of the dead. Under the Nazi government, this only happened to victims of the policy of terror and extermination. But the people who were among the victims of the bombings did not disappear without a trace. But I was surprised by the labor costs for registering the dead and excavating the victims and their funerals then, at the beginning of 1945, in this disaster. With the exception of isolated cases, there were always relatives or neighbors who were involved in the search. If they remained without results, then their missing persons certificates turned into death certificates. We systematically develop these processes. Otherwise, experts say that in all of Germany between 1937 and 1945 there were 150,000 missing civilians. They can't all be killed in Dresden.
Welt Online: Particularly emotional sections of the discussion include the memories of many witnesses about low-flying bombers on February 14, 1945. Shooting from cannons and machine guns. How does your commission deal with this?
Müller: For the number of victims in Dresden, the issue of low-flying bombers does not play a big role. But the Dresden City Council still gave us the task of conducting a new study of the facts. Therefore, we have asked all witnesses who may testify in the case to record their observations and recollections. With this we complete an important partial project. Oral History involves detailed interviews with witnesses and documentation of their memories. In this way, we make our contribution to ensuring that hundreds of life stories are preserved for posterity.
Welt Online: are the methods sufficient? Oral History» to clarify the situation?
Müller: In relation to alleged low-altitude attacks, the evidence is contradictory. Therefore, we select particularly reliable and accurate evidence in order to search suspected areas with the help of the bomb squad. If these attacks took place, then this summer we will find the corresponding ammunition, bullets and shells from their airborne weapons. And although the flight documents do not indicate that such attacks took place, and the likelihood of these attacks is extremely low, we are still trying to verify the statements of witnesses.
Welt Online: How do you explain the huge interest around the bombing of Dresden even now, 62 years later?
Müller: one can understand that the shock from the unprincipled destruction of the center of Dresden with its famous monuments culture has not yet been overcome, and also the wounded pride of the inhabitants. But immediately after the bombings, Nazi propaganda extracted its last success from this: the world prestige of the cultural city was well used for propaganda against the Allies. Then the GDR and the countries of the Eastern bloc joined in. Today both right-wing and left-wing radicals propagate. Everyone needs sacrifices, but they don't deserve it.
PS
Of course, even 20,000 is a huge number of civilian victims, comparable to and exceeding, for example, the number of soldiers of Efremov’s 33rd Army who died near Vyazma in 1942.
What about Dresden??? Well, why is everyone running around with Dresden???
The Allies bombed EVERYTHING, all cities
Hamburg - 37,554 people died as a result of that grandiose Allied operation in late July - early August 1943. Out of every thousand people in the population, an average of 22.1 people died then. 25,965 people, or almost 70% of the dead, lived in the city center district of Grossbezirk Mitte. The ratio of victims in this area was 59.6 people per thousand of its inhabitants. In the Grossbezirk Mitte area the number dead women was 45% higher than the number of victims among men. And the number of people killed in residential buildings in Grossbezirk Mitte was even higher than the average for the central regions. Losses here amounted to 18,500 people, that is, more than half of the officially recorded total number of deaths.
For example, in the Hammerbrook area, the average loss was 361.5 people per thousand, that is, one in three died in the flames of fires. In the other two districts, these figures are 267.2 and 160 people for every thousand inhabitants, respectively.
The death toll from Allied bombing in Hamburg exceeds that of the entire state of Bavaria. But even this figure of 37,554 does not reflect the exact number of victims. After research over a number of years, it became clear that at least 17,372 more people should be added here.
What happened during large-scale air strikes using huge amount incendiary bombs was beyond all previous practice of city services and the population.
While firefighters and representatives civil defense They tried to fight the first fires and dig out the first victims from under the ruins, having every chance to save people, but a second powerful blow fell on the densely built-up residential areas of the eastern part of the city. Numerous fires arose, which soon grew into a sea of fire, flooding entire neighborhoods, destroying everything and everyone in its path.
The third and fourth waves of bombers completed their destructive work. The fire hit those areas of the city that were spared by previous bombings. At the same time, two neighboring small towns of Elmshorn and Wedel were bombed, where a stream of refugees from Hamburg flocked. These operations, carried out by the Royal Air Force under the cover of darkness, were clearly terror raids. During the daytime, US Air Force bombers attacked military and industrial targets in the dock area, primarily shipyards where warships and submarines. The Americans used mainly high-explosive bombs.
Bold attempts to fight the fire in the city itself, which in the early stages of the bombing were made by fire brigades with the help of civil defense forces and the population, were soon thwarted by more and more streams of incendiary bombs falling on the roofs, and then from the roofs. New fires immediately broke out everywhere. Finally, due to an acute shortage of water, work to extinguish the fire was completely paralyzed. Some idea of the intensity of the air raids can be given by the fact that 65 incendiary bombs, four containers of phosphorus and one high-explosive bomb were dropped on one of the areas measuring approximately 75 by 45 meters. The British dropped 155 incendiary bombs on one of the medium-sized factories. These figures reflect not only the extent of the disaster that the city had to endure. They give an approximate ratio between the weight of incendiary and high-explosive bombs dropped on Hamburg.
The city's water supply system received 847 direct hits from high-explosive bombs, and very soon the water supply was no longer able to meet even the basic needs of the population. This significantly complicated the work of city fire brigades. Firefighters received so many calls that they were simply unable to cope with them. The city authorities were counting on receiving outside help, but what could be done when fires simultaneously engulfed 16 thousand buildings, and city blocks heated to terrifying temperatures (more than 800 degrees Celsius), when not individual houses, but entire areas were engulfed in flames? The heat caused the flames to engulf more and more buildings, and this happened so quickly that hundreds of men, women and children trying to escape were burned alive right in the streets and squares.
In many places, the burning ruins emitted such heat that even after the flames themselves had been extinguished, several days passed before it was possible to simply try to get into these streets. In the areas of the fire, only 30 hours after the end of the raids it was possible to see at least something in natural light. Previously, dense clouds of black smoke mixed with dust completely obscured even the cloudless sky.
In the same way, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are good, but there was Tokyo, where they also used landmines and lighters to hit Yap huts made of paper and wood, and where the losses were greater than in X and N.
AND MOST IMPORTANTLY - the bombings of Murmansk and Stalingrad - where is the regret and feelings for the killed civilians???
The Germans simply received an answer - and yes, Guernica, conceived by Speerle, was the first - so “I will repay”
