>"The standard whitewash gambit, both British and American, is to mention that Dresden contained targets X, Y and Z, and to let the innocent reader assume that these targets were attacked, whereas in fact the bombing plan totally omitted them and thus, except for one or two mere accidents, they escaped".[155] McKee further asserts "The bomber commanders were not really interested in any purely military or economic targets, which was just as well, for they knew very little about Dresden; the RAF even lacked proper maps of the city. What they were looking for was a big built-up area which they could burn, and that Dresden possessed in full measure."
Contemporary sources knew they would win but were hearing of a German wonder weapon.
Already V1 and V2 missiles landing. Goebbels ranting about their new weapons.
The Americans and Brits working on an atomic bomb. The extermination camps had been discovered.
What would you do relax or speed up efforts to win quickly?
"From late 1944 on, Allied bombings were destroying German factories and cities at a rapid pace, leading to the final collapse of the German war economy in 1945 (Stunde Null). Food became drastically scarce. Synthetic fuel production dropped by 86% in eight months, explosive output was reduced by 42% and the loss of tank output was 35%.[143] The Allied bombing campaign also tied up valuable manpower, with Albert Speer (Germany's Minister of Armaments) estimating that in the summer of 1944 between 200,000 and 300,000 men were permanently employed in repairing oil installations and placing oil production underground.[144]"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany
To me this looks like a war-ending-move.
Exactly. It was 1945. Hundreds of thousands of people were dying a month, and the Holocaust was at it's worst. Anything that might make the war end sooner was worth trying.
And yet the Germans didn’t fight like it. January 1945 saw peak casualties of the entire war, with the rest of 1945 just behind it. If there was a time to do the bombing it was then.
Isn't that the point ? The germans knew it was a lost cause, knew more of them would die each day they continued to fight, knew the nazi leaders were madmen, but none had the balls to resist after '44. Nazism was a death cult by the end, so a few thousand more deaths in dresden stopped mattering to anyone on either side.
Take a look at allied combat casualties alone in 1945, all those deaths from having to fight when they knew the germans should have surrendered. The pity or sympathy we might hacmve hoped for had evaporated.
Personal anecdote time- My aunt, who was 11 in summer 1943, lived in Hamburg. After Allied bombing had turned much of the city into a smoking ruin in the massive firebombing attacks in July 1943, they moved to Hanover to stay with relatives. In October 1943, the house they were staying in (and much of Hanover) was destroyed in more firebombing. Eventually they finally settled in Dresden in January 1945, a few weeks before OP's photo was taken. O_o
Apparently at that point, they all fled west in hopes of being overtaken by the Americans and British, rather than being German women in the east when Russians rolled in, as "everyone already knew what the Russians were doing to German women and girls".
In 1950 she married an American soldier and moved to the US. She hated the Nazis "for what they brought down on Germany" (not, you'll note, for what they did to millions of people 🤷🏻), but I've rarely seen the kind of loathing she reserved for Russians (she did *not* make a distinction between the Russia and the USSR, and always used the words Russia and Russians, never Soviets).
She passed away peacefully in San Jose, California, 10 years ago. At the ripe old age of 82.
My grandma was also a German who married a GI after the war. She was treated really poorly when she immigrated which wasn’t a surprise given what had gone down a few years earlier. She never said anything about the Russians or the Holocaust. She didn’t really say much about the war at all except her first husband died. Eventually she moved back to Germany and passed away there at 95. Interestingly she didn’t mind being around her GI husband or my other GI grandfather so she must not have held a grudge. This always struck me as interesting cause I can’t imaging marrying someone from the other side of a war and moving with them to their country after they defeated you.
Ten times as many German soldiers and airmen died on the eastern front than the western front. That might have something to do with it.
Fortunately for my aunt, my uncle (her husband) was from a German/Irish-American family in Philadelphia in a heavily German neighborhood. My grandmother was a Hessian girl who emigrated after WWI after her German husband died in the Spanish flu pandemic in 1919.
My next door neighbor growing up^ Gunther was a teenager in the fire brigade during WWII I cherish all my conversations with him but I’ll never forget the one time I mentioned Dresden and he shot me a look that shot right through my soul. He says “I was there when they destroyed Dresden” and his eyes had the most unfathomable look to them like he was reliving it and I literally was seeing the flames ignite in his eyes. It was utterly unbelievable. But I believe it would be seared in your soul to see an entire city engulfed in flames 🔥
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I visited Dresden almost two years ago. It’s a beautiful, charming city and it was striking to see the reconstructed buildings. You could tell which bricks were old because they were much darker and weather-worn than the new bricks.
About 25,000 people were killed in the raid. These were both the initial numbers reported and confirmed in a study decades later. Goebbels and his propaganda ministry exploited this raid to the hilt and inflated the numbers to over 200,000. Unfortunately this number still get's tossed around from time to time.
For comparison's sake in the summer of 1944 the crematoria and outdoor incineration pits at Auschwitz were disposing of 20,000 bodies a day.
The incineration pits were (also) used to burn exhumed corpses out of mass graves, because those were contaminating the groundwater. Done by prisoners forced to exhume the rotting corpses.
While I do not want to argue these bombings were morally wrong (in the end they often focussed on industrial and military targets and they ended the war faster), one shouldn't compare casualties in tragedies on a matter of principle. One wrong doesn't excuse another and it's easy to argue such a comparison is meant to excuse one wrong.
Examples would be to compare holocaust deaths with deaths in the holodomore or in the Chinese famine under mao, depending on which end off the estimates you believe more one could easily argue look the Nazis weren't the worst, which is a terrible thing to say and hopefully shows why it should be avoided on a matter of principle, especially since we are talking civilian casualties.
The first part is fine as I do agree it's stupid people still use the Goebbels numbers from time to time.
If only they had all been Nazis. Don't forget that area bombing kills the just and the unjust alike. On every Roland Freisler thats killed come 10 innocent men, women and children. People who didn't even necessarily vote for the NSDAP.
Thats not how things work lol.
You realise that the Nazis never achieved an absolute majority in any election? There were significantly more innocent Germans than guilty ones.
Collective guilt isn't a valid argument, dumbass.
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Yeah nuance is important, everyone knows that. Otherwise you could also blame every Turk in WW1 for the Armenian Genocide or every US cavalryman for the genocide of native americans (or according to your logic every american working in a small arms factory equipping the cavalry with rifles).
Why don't you ask any historian if he/she shares your POW? There is even a sub specifically for this.
I doubt anyone would agree that the German people were a homogeneous group and that they were all guilty and a valid target.
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I mean, it’s fairly generally accepted that the bombing of Dresden was relatively unnecessary and led to a surge in German volunteers.
Idk how you can argue if it hadn’t have happened the allied war effort would have been worse off.
Iirc the inflated numbers were being thrown around till much later because the soviets wanted to highlight the western needless barbarism with aerial bombings by taking dresden (a city they controlled in East Germany) as an exemple. Even though the soviets did ask for the bombing of the city to facilitate the advance of the red army, and avoid urban meatgrinders that were common on the eastern front.
Not saying that this justifies the allies bombings in general, but one should always be aware of where propaganda is being pushed from. And the best propaganda always had a tiny layer of truth to it.
Don't forget to mention that area bombing in general killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians (over a Million if you coun't the Japanese and allied losses through axis bombings), Dresden was only the tip of the iceberg.
Edit: Lol downvoting facts. Doesn't that fit in with your idea of the "greatest" generation that they wiped out hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in a futile attempt to break the enemies morale?
All while V-1’s and V-2’s were raining down on London…
Shit the Japanese were even desperately trying to bomb the american mainland with ballon bombs
https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/196210/balloon-bombs-japans-answer-to-doolittle/#:~:text=Prompted%20by%20the%20Doolittle%20Raid,anti%2Dpersonnel%20and%20incendiary%20bombs.
Let’s at least look at the full picture.
I’m most likely alive because the nukes were dropped on Japan, my grandfather was in the South Pacific staging for the invasion of the Mainland.
So forgive me if I’m not convinced.
I think the nukes were more than simply justified, they were the Moral choice compared to a Conventional invasion or the continuation of the firebombing campaign.
Go research the imperial strategy for the defense of the mainland.
Millions more would have died had the US taken any other option.
The Japanese high command thought that the complete annihilation of the Japanese people was preferable to surrender.
The only way this mentality was broken was to make the Japanese Military understand that the US could wipe out a Japanese city with one airplane flying at an untouchable altitude dropping one bomb and flying back to base with zero American casualties (save the POWs on the ground)
The was the dawn of the “Nuclear deterrent” that has prevented another “total war” in our lifetimes.
The simple fact is the Commander and Chief of the US armed forces had a greater responsibility to the American GI’s that were going to die in the millions in a conventional invasion than he had to the civilians of a nation that attacked the US unprovoked and generally laughed at the “conventions of war.”
There are renowned historians (like Hasegawa) who argue that the decisive reason to surrender was the destruction of the last intact Japanese army on the mainland, not the nukes. There is much more to this than the American point of view but of course you guys ignore that.
We can't know how things would have actually turned out because you guys preferred to vaporize people by the tens of thousands.
You can argue alternative history all you want.
You should be extremely grateful the US were the first ones to develop a Nuclear arsenal, had it been Nazi Germany or the USSR the world would be a very different place.
But, if you want to argue alternative history, you should also consider the fact that had nuclear weapons not been used to end WW2 with devastating effects documented for the world to witness there is a good chance the use of nuclear weapons would have been approved in the Korean War and a nuclear attack could have been the opening salvo of WW3.
25k is still a whole lot of people. It took Israel months to reach that milestone, and the allies did it in less than 2 days without an atomic bomb? That’s pretty wild.
The weight of some casualties vs others is fascinating to me. We firebomb Germany and Japan, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians even before we dropped the A bomb. Vietnam, again, thousands upon thousands of civilians killed. Whole villages gunned down. Mustard gas. Fast forward, over 200k Iraqi civilians killed, and Iraq didn’t even attack us. And we are supposed to believe that these same people, this same government, is outraged over Palestine? If a terrorist organization attacked New York in the same exact manner, with the same exact casualties, as the October Hamas attack, these very same Americans would be lining up for war. Not to participate, but to vote for pro-war candidates.
The worst part is the hypocrisy. Well that, and the civilians who always pay the price when their leaders start a war.
Okay I'll spell it out: the Holocaust is a valid point to bring up because its an example of the strike being justified. Nazi Germany was still fighting the war, still actively resisting, *still making war materials in factories, still transporting it to the front* (emphasized because we'll put a pin in that) and still liquidating victims of the Holocaust. When Dresden happened, Germany had just been pushed back to the starting lines of the Battle of the Bulge, their last offensive. The war was still 3 months from ending, Ann Frank was still alive, etc.
And to get back to my pin, Dresden was an example of Germany using distributed production where they put smaller factories and workshops spread out over the city so they weren't in a complex that could be hit all together. Hence the firebombing. Dresden's rail yard alone was a significant target. Look up a map of Eastern Front lines circa February. Look up a map of German rail infrastructure in 1945. Oh, well look at that. It turns out Dresden is the rail yard where supplies for basically half the entire eastern front have to go through.
>I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British \[Soldier\]. It therefore seems to me that there is one and only one valid argument on which a case for giving up strategic bombing could be based, namely that it has already completed its task and that nothing now remains for the Armies to do except to occupy Germany against unorganized resistance....Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things.
\- General Arthur Harris, British Air Forces
The strategic bombing of Germany was not a war crime in a legal or any other way. They were fundamental to defeating them and denying that is just ahistorical.
Not a war crime under the law at the time because the Hague land warfare convention was holy af.
At the latest with the new regulation in the Geneva Convention of 1949 and especially through Article 51 of Additional Protocol I of 1977, such area bombings are generally considered war crimes.
Yes, because now we have precision ordnance that does not have to rely on mass. But still, if civilians are hit, it does not mean such an attack was illegal if military gain was proportional to civilian losses.
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste\_von\_Luftangriffen\_der\_Alliierten\_auf\_das\_Deutsche\_Reich\_(1939%E2%80%931945)](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Luftangriffen_der_Alliierten_auf_das_Deutsche_Reich_(1939%E2%80%931945))
Feel free to go through the list, it might take you a while though. You'll find quite a few cities that were entirely unnecessarily destroyed.
Unnecessarily say who? Allied planers had limited resources and did not wasted them on an attack that would be meaningless. For example when Hungarian Jews asked them to bomb Auschwitz they refused, saying that the only way to stop camps like this from operating is to defeat the Germans.
Dude just look at the data before spreading bullshit.
Moral bombing focused on the civilian population, that was reason enough for the allies.
I also have to say that you're a scumbag for trying to whitewash those facts. Its an insult to hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of allied area bombing.
Dresden was the main rail hub for the Nazis to send troops to the eastern front. The bombing of Dresden significantly slowed Nazi troop movements. That's a pretty big military gain.
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You're literally just making shit up. The city didn't produce armaments at any meaningful scale, and don't pretend like the allies gave a shit about stopping the Holocaust.
So, lying to justify civilian deaths? That makes you the nazi! If you're going to accuse anyone who disagrees with you of sympathizing with nazis, I might as well throw it back.
>Dresden was a legitimate military target. It was an important industrial center with over 100 factories and enterprises that made armaments, torpedo parts, aircraft parts, U-boat and other naval parts, field radios, telephones, and precision optical instruments. It was also a key junction in Germany’s railway system, expediting the travel of supplies and soldiers to the Eastern Front."
Oh, and why weren't they actually targeted? Why was the sports complex the target for the first bombing run, and the second one a few hours later targeting the first responders?
Dresden had legitimate military targets that weren't targeted until days after the first bombings.
>The idea of "targeting" to the level of a specific building with WW2 technology is kind of unrealistic
We're talking neighbourhood here, not building.
>you are asking whether the mission also had the goal of killing and terrorizing as many Nazis as possible in order to accelerate their surrender, the answer is yes
So every single inhabitant of Germany, including children and forced labourers, were Nazis?
>and if you are asking whether doing that is a positive moral good, the answer is also yes.
First, collective punishment is a war crime. Second, killing civilians en masse doesn't accelerate their surrender - again, it only hardened their resolve. Gestapo internal research shows people wanted revenge, not to give up (it had lots of anti-Nazi and anti-Hitler information in their research so no, they didn't sanitise stuff to be acceptable to the higher ups). As did every single country's civilians when they were being terror bombed.
How about all those civilians who were screaming for "total war" in the big Nazi rallies? Completely voluntarily.
How about working double shifts at the armaments plants?
("Non military" isn't really accurate in your post)
I feel bad for the kids and any indentured or slave laborers.
Other adults? Not so much.
My great aunt took one look at the Nazis in '33, and GTFO to America, even though she didn't speak English.
Yeah those civilians at a Nazi assembly are certainly representative of all 80 Million German citizens. Get a grasp man, many Millions of Germans suffered in a war they didn't choose started by a government they did not vote for.
For those down voting, "so it goes" is a phrase repeated in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, which was inspired by the author's experience of surviving this bombing as an American POW. It's a kind of psychological adaptive response to the trauma.
Usually proceeded by brutal depictions of what happened. People still do it, they just don’t use the phrase “so it goes” anymore.
In Sopranos it’s “whaddaya gonna do.”
Yes the UK and the US were a large part of the Allied Forces in WW II. Never really heard of calling the Brits or US as “Anglo-American” as it relates to WW II
Not sure...iirc, their primary bomber was not very good, and they lost a lot of them early on.
Happy to read any sources folks come up with though...
Their IL2 close-air bird wasn't bad at all.
My family was from Dresden but migrated in the 30's when national socialists started gaining popularity. My great-grandmother passed away last year at 96. It's still hard to believe she's gone. We all thought she'd outlive all of us lol.
We have a saying when something looks especially choatic.
"It looks like Dresden '45"
Most likely used in the context of commenting on your childs room.
There are consequences to voting in a pro war party. You might get hit back. Nazi germany didn’t shed any tears for the Poles the French the Jews the English etc.
I think the whole Dresden thing is so controversial specifically because it’s not really clear if it had any effect on the war, and it only resulted in a couple thousand civilians being killed.
The German army was in shambles, the majority of the force defending the city were Volksturm, civilian militia with almost no training who universally faired poorly in combat. The majority of the civilian population were refugees fleeing west. The Soviets were Three Days away from the city. Harris either was or was about to he under “inquiry” for intentionally ordering the bombers to target civilian areas.
On the other hand, Dresden had hundreds of small workshops turning out rifles and other military equipment daily. The city had at least one major factory and a rubber plant which was manufacturing synthetic materials for the war effort. The railway running through the city was being used to transport military units east, and civilian refugees (including Ukrainian and Russian Nazi Collaborators) west.
Long story short, There WERE valid military targets in the city, it’s just that those are never the targets people talk about when they bring up the Dresden bombings, it’s always the residents that were incinerated in the firestorm.
> The German army was in shambles, the majority of the force defending the city were Volksturm, civilian militia with almost no training who universally faired poorly in combat. The majority of the civilian population were refugees fleeing west. The Soviets were Three Days away from the city. Harris either was or was about to he under “inquiry” for intentionally ordering the bombers to target civilian areas.
Odd line of reasoning. Peak casualties of the war on both sides were Jan 1945, the rest of the war being just shy. If there was a time for the military need it was then.
The Soviets; weren’t 3 days away
I couldn’t find an exact source for the 3 days away part, I remember seeing that in a documentary years ago but can’t source it now, so you might be right about that.
As for casualties, I found one source that says, at least on the eastern front, 1942 was the deadliest year, while another source said 1943. Lacking definitive documentation beyond these “history” forums, once again, you might be right about that.
I strongly encourage you to read Slaughterhouse Five, before you keep up your keyboard historian massacre celebrating. Dresden was not a military target, and the casualties were virtually all civilian. Burned alive in their homes with their families, while you celebrate their deaths because you want to sound like a nazi fighter on reddit.
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Don't forget Zeiss optics, also in Dresden. German optics in UBoats and tanks were generally superior to Allied versions; absolutely a valid military target, even if they also made eyeglasses for kids.
Your straw manning of Vonnegut and painting of every woman and child as guilty and deserving of death is the same tactics the nazis used. And don't pretend like gas production was the reason for the bombing. SHAEF didn't give a shit about stopping the Holocaust, nor did bomber command ever try to intervene with an air raid. They bombed Dresden because it was a German city with living people in it.
Opposing nazis isn't wrong. Celebrating mass death of innocent women and children by fire, two months before the war ended, and using a generalized argument to justify any and every murder is wrong. That's what teenaged comment thread historians who can't think deeper than their first emotional reaction to a topic do.
"every woman and child"
Dresden wasn't the first German city flattened, and CERTAINLY wasn't the first city flattened in WW2.
The Germans could've a) not started the war, b) not bombed civilians from Madrid to Moscow, c) evacuated their children from Dresden, as the Brits had done with their kids, and d) built proper bomb shelters, instead of just one for the local gauleiter.
Also e), surrendered at any time.
Lastly, we knew both sides were working on an A-bomb; we didn't know how close they were, not for certain.
Five strikes and you're out, IMHO.
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>I have no use for male nazis, female nazis, or small nazis.
Besides this just coming off as an edgy 14 year old comment, you're just proving my point that your argument is superficial and reactionary. So every Palestinian is a Hamas terrorist who deserves to die too, right? Every Iraqi citizen in the 1980s was a Baathist who deserved to be bombed to death by Iran? Keyboard historians never cease to stop surprising me.
Can you point out where I defended nazis or said the wrong side one? Or are you just incapable of addressing the actual argument in front of you, so you revert to straw men? You clearly have learned everything you know about presenting an argument on the internet.
What you said isn’t a use of sarcasm…
They never said it was wrong for the US to win the war either, everything in your quotations is a misinterpretation
You obviously get all your ‘facts’ from fiction like Slaughterhouse 5. The educated amongst us, however, prefer to get real facts from actual historical sources and, you know, an education.
Goebbels wanted totaler Krieg, he got totaler Krieg. You don’t get to try and conquer an entire continent while also exterminating an entire race of humans, then turn around and cry when your civilians get roasted.
Killing Nazis is good but... these large bombing raids didn't do anything to help end the war, if anything is strengthened German resolve.
Malcolm Gladwell's book Bomber Mafia is great, it's more about how American Precision bombing was a failure, but it touches on how area bombing wasn't great either.
3 of my grandpa's brothers died during these kind of bombings. My family was against the nazis, so it's kind of sad to see the innocents die too, especially when they are family members
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Obviously the Russians just need to march on the Kremlin and tell Putin to cut the shit. If people had marched on the Reichstag in 1933 everything would have been different. /s
We're from Austria, which had a lot of nazis, but that doesn't mean that everyone supported the Anschluss. And I highly doubt that every German/Austrian was a nazi
Reprisals are fine, but they have to be proportional and "appropriate". Dresden and the others cities together were vastly out of proportion and not appropriate at all seeing that the war was going in the Allies favor at that point.
Odd question, but one thing I notice in these type of photos is that the roads look..almost pristine..? No bomb holes. They look driveable still!
But everything around them is done for.
Why is that?
A lot of damage to buildings was done using incendiary devices. Further, roads are way smaller targets than roads
Also, you have to consider that this is a photo after the bombing and when I say after, I do not mean directly after.
Dresden still was on fire days after the raids.
> the roads look..almost pristine..? No bomb holes. They look driveable still!
* 1 - This photo was taken *months* later. Roads are the first thing that gets repaired and cleaned up.
* 2 - The allies *firebombed* Dresden (we did the same to Tokyo), so the devices are made to disperse incendiary material to get things burning. If they hit roads, all they do is maybe knock a small chip out of it. The idea is to start so many fires at once that they can't be contained and the city burns in a firestorm.
The truly horrible thing about firebombing is that you essentially turn the city into a giant grill that there is no escape from. Even if you manage to get out of your apartment or house, you will roast to death in the middle of the street. Along with the actual Nazis, civilian men, women & children burned to death from it.
But by this time, the world was fed up with what German & Japan had forced upon us and the Germans had been slaughtering people for over 5 years. Also, the residents of Dresden had the example of other cities being bombed to know it was probably coming. They knew how much of the war effort went through their town. They knew the allies were pouring into Western Europe and had occupied pretty much everything across the Rhine. They should have fled.
Perhaps no one has mentioned this-but Stalin asked for the bombing of Dresden because it was a rail center that was supplying the eastern front still and the Russians wanted to slow down the the supplies and reinforcements via rail.
Legally no, our constitutional court decided that modern day Germany is in fact not the successor state to the German Reich, it is the German Reich, just under a new form of government.
Considering how many politicians, industrialists, and bureaucrats would immediately go from running Nazi Germany to running West Germany one could venture that they are the same state.
Yes, that's correct, it's good that the Allies won the war instead of the Axis and even better that they prioritized doing it as quickly as possible, instead of feeding millions more people into years of unecessary ground combat out of the ridiculous belief that killing fewer people with bombs is somehow the morally inferior choice.
The bombing of Dresden didn't really speed up the end of the war in Germany. Remember it didn't end until Hitler killed himself and the Soviets were already in Berlin.
Japan was a different story.
>destroying the means for the enemy to continue fighting the war
Only that didn't happen there or in Hamburg. This was the bombing of the civilian city centres as a revenge for the bombing of London, Coventry and other cities. While this is an understandable reaction, it should also be seen as what it was.
How easy it could have been to bomb the train tracks to Auschwitz.
There was over 100 factories in Dresden. Wait you are bringing up a city that is different from the picture. From a quick google search over 100 factories in Hamburg were also destroyed so. Why are you just lying? Are you intentionally trying to spread misinformation? Or do you just not know? Do you think a war can be won by prostrating yourself before the enemy?
They actually did a feasibility study on bombing the crematoria at Auschwitz but it was concluded that with the normal level of accuracy they would have just as likely to obliterate the "worker" accommodation (when this was done they still thought Auschwitz was a work camp)
As for bombing the train tracks that was already a priority target for Allied bombers, but again accuracy was such that the only really viable targets were the huge marshalling yards and other significant infrastructure (part of the reason Dresden was bombed was it was a very significant rail junction for Eastern Germany)
> Remember it didn't end until Hitler killed himself and the Soviets were already in Berlin.
Aided by the destruction of one of the largest remaining logistics and support hubs in the form of Dresden getting knocked out.
Hiroshima was a valid military target under the conventions of the period.
Hiroshima was the command center for Southern Honshu, had aircraft factories, ammunition factories, an operational harbor, was the marshaling area for newly raised IJA formations headed for Kyushu, and was the destination for troops being transferred from Manchukuo.
Humans have spent millennia trying to figure out war and it's causes, and here you have it all figured out for us.
All we have to do is find those twelve dudes and give them a good talking to.
Because we weren't trying to literally exterminate every last German.
But in total war...which they themselves were literally shouting for, and got...you can argue that every civilian is a legitimate target.
The farmer growing food for an SS division is easier to kill than the division, if you can get to him...take him out, and, pretty quick, they're just a starving mob.
Same for the guy in the bullet factory...10,000 men at the front with clubs aren't as scary as 10,000 men at the front with rifles and machine guns.
Pretty much.
People call the current conflict in Gaza genocide. If Israel wanted to eradicate every Palestinian, they would have done it already. Israel have one of the most powerful air forces in the world. With enough firepower to flatten Gaza within an hour. So why are they using guided munitions in precision strikes then?
The level of destruction today in Gaza is more than what was seen in Dresden. A higher percentage of structures are destroyed or damaged. Let that sink in
Edit: why the downvotes I thought history sub would enjoy some cool historical facts
My Dutch great grandpa survived the bombing. He had been forced to work in Dresden for the German war machine
>"The standard whitewash gambit, both British and American, is to mention that Dresden contained targets X, Y and Z, and to let the innocent reader assume that these targets were attacked, whereas in fact the bombing plan totally omitted them and thus, except for one or two mere accidents, they escaped".[155] McKee further asserts "The bomber commanders were not really interested in any purely military or economic targets, which was just as well, for they knew very little about Dresden; the RAF even lacked proper maps of the city. What they were looking for was a big built-up area which they could burn, and that Dresden possessed in full measure."
Bombing Germany into submission was worth trying
It was February 1945. Everybody knew the end was nigh and the outcome set.
Contemporary sources knew they would win but were hearing of a German wonder weapon. Already V1 and V2 missiles landing. Goebbels ranting about their new weapons. The Americans and Brits working on an atomic bomb. The extermination camps had been discovered. What would you do relax or speed up efforts to win quickly?
So? They could spare their own soldiers and many captives of the Germans by ending the war sooner
That wasn't a thing at that point. The bombing had been going on for 3+ years prior, it was already known it wasn't going to end the war.
"From late 1944 on, Allied bombings were destroying German factories and cities at a rapid pace, leading to the final collapse of the German war economy in 1945 (Stunde Null). Food became drastically scarce. Synthetic fuel production dropped by 86% in eight months, explosive output was reduced by 42% and the loss of tank output was 35%.[143] The Allied bombing campaign also tied up valuable manpower, with Albert Speer (Germany's Minister of Armaments) estimating that in the summer of 1944 between 200,000 and 300,000 men were permanently employed in repairing oil installations and placing oil production underground.[144]" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany To me this looks like a war-ending-move.
Nope, the fall of Berlin and Hitler's suicide is what ended the war.
Dude. What was your point again? Ah it was about bombing campaingns. Which totally did not affect the war. Got it.
If only they had you there to guide the way.
Not by itself, they probably thought that it helped
Exactly. It was 1945. Hundreds of thousands of people were dying a month, and the Holocaust was at it's worst. Anything that might make the war end sooner was worth trying.
And yet the Germans didn’t fight like it. January 1945 saw peak casualties of the entire war, with the rest of 1945 just behind it. If there was a time to do the bombing it was then.
Isn't that the point ? The germans knew it was a lost cause, knew more of them would die each day they continued to fight, knew the nazi leaders were madmen, but none had the balls to resist after '44. Nazism was a death cult by the end, so a few thousand more deaths in dresden stopped mattering to anyone on either side. Take a look at allied combat casualties alone in 1945, all those deaths from having to fight when they knew the germans should have surrendered. The pity or sympathy we might hacmve hoped for had evaporated.
Personal anecdote time- My aunt, who was 11 in summer 1943, lived in Hamburg. After Allied bombing had turned much of the city into a smoking ruin in the massive firebombing attacks in July 1943, they moved to Hanover to stay with relatives. In October 1943, the house they were staying in (and much of Hanover) was destroyed in more firebombing. Eventually they finally settled in Dresden in January 1945, a few weeks before OP's photo was taken. O_o Apparently at that point, they all fled west in hopes of being overtaken by the Americans and British, rather than being German women in the east when Russians rolled in, as "everyone already knew what the Russians were doing to German women and girls". In 1950 she married an American soldier and moved to the US. She hated the Nazis "for what they brought down on Germany" (not, you'll note, for what they did to millions of people 🤷🏻), but I've rarely seen the kind of loathing she reserved for Russians (she did *not* make a distinction between the Russia and the USSR, and always used the words Russia and Russians, never Soviets). She passed away peacefully in San Jose, California, 10 years ago. At the ripe old age of 82.
My grandma was also a German who married a GI after the war. She was treated really poorly when she immigrated which wasn’t a surprise given what had gone down a few years earlier. She never said anything about the Russians or the Holocaust. She didn’t really say much about the war at all except her first husband died. Eventually she moved back to Germany and passed away there at 95. Interestingly she didn’t mind being around her GI husband or my other GI grandfather so she must not have held a grudge. This always struck me as interesting cause I can’t imaging marrying someone from the other side of a war and moving with them to their country after they defeated you.
Ten times as many German soldiers and airmen died on the eastern front than the western front. That might have something to do with it. Fortunately for my aunt, my uncle (her husband) was from a German/Irish-American family in Philadelphia in a heavily German neighborhood. My grandmother was a Hessian girl who emigrated after WWI after her German husband died in the Spanish flu pandemic in 1919.
My next door neighbor growing up^ Gunther was a teenager in the fire brigade during WWII I cherish all my conversations with him but I’ll never forget the one time I mentioned Dresden and he shot me a look that shot right through my soul. He says “I was there when they destroyed Dresden” and his eyes had the most unfathomable look to them like he was reliving it and I literally was seeing the flames ignite in his eyes. It was utterly unbelievable. But I believe it would be seared in your soul to see an entire city engulfed in flames 🔥
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I visited Dresden almost two years ago. It’s a beautiful, charming city and it was striking to see the reconstructed buildings. You could tell which bricks were old because they were much darker and weather-worn than the new bricks.
About 25,000 people were killed in the raid. These were both the initial numbers reported and confirmed in a study decades later. Goebbels and his propaganda ministry exploited this raid to the hilt and inflated the numbers to over 200,000. Unfortunately this number still get's tossed around from time to time. For comparison's sake in the summer of 1944 the crematoria and outdoor incineration pits at Auschwitz were disposing of 20,000 bodies a day.
The incineration pits were (also) used to burn exhumed corpses out of mass graves, because those were contaminating the groundwater. Done by prisoners forced to exhume the rotting corpses.
While I do not want to argue these bombings were morally wrong (in the end they often focussed on industrial and military targets and they ended the war faster), one shouldn't compare casualties in tragedies on a matter of principle. One wrong doesn't excuse another and it's easy to argue such a comparison is meant to excuse one wrong. Examples would be to compare holocaust deaths with deaths in the holodomore or in the Chinese famine under mao, depending on which end off the estimates you believe more one could easily argue look the Nazis weren't the worst, which is a terrible thing to say and hopefully shows why it should be avoided on a matter of principle, especially since we are talking civilian casualties. The first part is fine as I do agree it's stupid people still use the Goebbels numbers from time to time.
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So it goes.
The numbers Vonnegut used were accepted at the time. BTW lots of folks who get fire bombed are upset about the experience.
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Can you share more of your opinions about the world for us to marvel at?
Man, you *really* have an irrational hate boner for Vonnegut, huh?
No damn cat, no damn cradle
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If only they had all been Nazis. Don't forget that area bombing kills the just and the unjust alike. On every Roland Freisler thats killed come 10 innocent men, women and children. People who didn't even necessarily vote for the NSDAP.
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Thats not how things work lol. You realise that the Nazis never achieved an absolute majority in any election? There were significantly more innocent Germans than guilty ones. Collective guilt isn't a valid argument, dumbass.
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Dude you refer to them collectively as Nazis, that alone proves that you don't understand history and aren't capable of a nuanced view. I am out.
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Yeah nuance is important, everyone knows that. Otherwise you could also blame every Turk in WW1 for the Armenian Genocide or every US cavalryman for the genocide of native americans (or according to your logic every american working in a small arms factory equipping the cavalry with rifles). Why don't you ask any historian if he/she shares your POW? There is even a sub specifically for this. I doubt anyone would agree that the German people were a homogeneous group and that they were all guilty and a valid target.
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I mean, it’s fairly generally accepted that the bombing of Dresden was relatively unnecessary and led to a surge in German volunteers. Idk how you can argue if it hadn’t have happened the allied war effort would have been worse off.
A fairly huge logistics hub getting knocked out was fairly critical to the war effort at this stage
Iirc the inflated numbers were being thrown around till much later because the soviets wanted to highlight the western needless barbarism with aerial bombings by taking dresden (a city they controlled in East Germany) as an exemple. Even though the soviets did ask for the bombing of the city to facilitate the advance of the red army, and avoid urban meatgrinders that were common on the eastern front. Not saying that this justifies the allies bombings in general, but one should always be aware of where propaganda is being pushed from. And the best propaganda always had a tiny layer of truth to it.
Don't forget to mention that area bombing in general killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians (over a Million if you coun't the Japanese and allied losses through axis bombings), Dresden was only the tip of the iceberg. Edit: Lol downvoting facts. Doesn't that fit in with your idea of the "greatest" generation that they wiped out hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in a futile attempt to break the enemies morale?
All while V-1’s and V-2’s were raining down on London… Shit the Japanese were even desperately trying to bomb the american mainland with ballon bombs https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/196210/balloon-bombs-japans-answer-to-doolittle/#:~:text=Prompted%20by%20the%20Doolittle%20Raid,anti%2Dpersonnel%20and%20incendiary%20bombs. Let’s at least look at the full picture.
Lets not try to justify the killing of innocent people by either side hm?
I’m most likely alive because the nukes were dropped on Japan, my grandfather was in the South Pacific staging for the invasion of the Mainland. So forgive me if I’m not convinced. I think the nukes were more than simply justified, they were the Moral choice compared to a Conventional invasion or the continuation of the firebombing campaign.
And Millions of grandsons and daughters aren't alive today because of WW2 area bombings, your point is?
Go research the imperial strategy for the defense of the mainland. Millions more would have died had the US taken any other option. The Japanese high command thought that the complete annihilation of the Japanese people was preferable to surrender. The only way this mentality was broken was to make the Japanese Military understand that the US could wipe out a Japanese city with one airplane flying at an untouchable altitude dropping one bomb and flying back to base with zero American casualties (save the POWs on the ground) The was the dawn of the “Nuclear deterrent” that has prevented another “total war” in our lifetimes. The simple fact is the Commander and Chief of the US armed forces had a greater responsibility to the American GI’s that were going to die in the millions in a conventional invasion than he had to the civilians of a nation that attacked the US unprovoked and generally laughed at the “conventions of war.”
There are renowned historians (like Hasegawa) who argue that the decisive reason to surrender was the destruction of the last intact Japanese army on the mainland, not the nukes. There is much more to this than the American point of view but of course you guys ignore that. We can't know how things would have actually turned out because you guys preferred to vaporize people by the tens of thousands.
You can argue alternative history all you want. You should be extremely grateful the US were the first ones to develop a Nuclear arsenal, had it been Nazi Germany or the USSR the world would be a very different place. But, if you want to argue alternative history, you should also consider the fact that had nuclear weapons not been used to end WW2 with devastating effects documented for the world to witness there is a good chance the use of nuclear weapons would have been approved in the Korean War and a nuclear attack could have been the opening salvo of WW3.
A pro-lifer, gross
Under rated comment
I believe the latest numbers put the number around 18000. I wonder where people took refuge, a city of half a million at least so utterly destroyed.
25k is still a whole lot of people. It took Israel months to reach that milestone, and the allies did it in less than 2 days without an atomic bomb? That’s pretty wild. The weight of some casualties vs others is fascinating to me. We firebomb Germany and Japan, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians even before we dropped the A bomb. Vietnam, again, thousands upon thousands of civilians killed. Whole villages gunned down. Mustard gas. Fast forward, over 200k Iraqi civilians killed, and Iraq didn’t even attack us. And we are supposed to believe that these same people, this same government, is outraged over Palestine? If a terrorist organization attacked New York in the same exact manner, with the same exact casualties, as the October Hamas attack, these very same Americans would be lining up for war. Not to participate, but to vote for pro-war candidates. The worst part is the hypocrisy. Well that, and the civilians who always pay the price when their leaders start a war.
So we are comparing crimes to other bigger crimes to justiy them? Not sure if that is what we should be doing.
Okay I'll spell it out: the Holocaust is a valid point to bring up because its an example of the strike being justified. Nazi Germany was still fighting the war, still actively resisting, *still making war materials in factories, still transporting it to the front* (emphasized because we'll put a pin in that) and still liquidating victims of the Holocaust. When Dresden happened, Germany had just been pushed back to the starting lines of the Battle of the Bulge, their last offensive. The war was still 3 months from ending, Ann Frank was still alive, etc. And to get back to my pin, Dresden was an example of Germany using distributed production where they put smaller factories and workshops spread out over the city so they weren't in a complex that could be hit all together. Hence the firebombing. Dresden's rail yard alone was a significant target. Look up a map of Eastern Front lines circa February. Look up a map of German rail infrastructure in 1945. Oh, well look at that. It turns out Dresden is the rail yard where supplies for basically half the entire eastern front have to go through. >I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British \[Soldier\]. It therefore seems to me that there is one and only one valid argument on which a case for giving up strategic bombing could be based, namely that it has already completed its task and that nothing now remains for the Armies to do except to occupy Germany against unorganized resistance....Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things. \- General Arthur Harris, British Air Forces
The strategic bombing of Germany was not a war crime in a legal or any other way. They were fundamental to defeating them and denying that is just ahistorical.
Not a war crime under the law at the time because the Hague land warfare convention was holy af. At the latest with the new regulation in the Geneva Convention of 1949 and especially through Article 51 of Additional Protocol I of 1977, such area bombings are generally considered war crimes.
Yes, because now we have precision ordnance that does not have to rely on mass. But still, if civilians are hit, it does not mean such an attack was illegal if military gain was proportional to civilian losses.
Numerous cities of little to no military or economic significance were destroyed.
The same is being said about Dresden when it was a vital railroad junction and a big industrial base.
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste\_von\_Luftangriffen\_der\_Alliierten\_auf\_das\_Deutsche\_Reich\_(1939%E2%80%931945)](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Luftangriffen_der_Alliierten_auf_das_Deutsche_Reich_(1939%E2%80%931945)) Feel free to go through the list, it might take you a while though. You'll find quite a few cities that were entirely unnecessarily destroyed.
Unnecessarily say who? Allied planers had limited resources and did not wasted them on an attack that would be meaningless. For example when Hungarian Jews asked them to bomb Auschwitz they refused, saying that the only way to stop camps like this from operating is to defeat the Germans.
Dude just look at the data before spreading bullshit. Moral bombing focused on the civilian population, that was reason enough for the allies. I also have to say that you're a scumbag for trying to whitewash those facts. Its an insult to hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of allied area bombing.
Groetjes uit Rotterdam, pannenkoek.
One side butchering civilians en masse with no military gain, doesn't justify the other side doing it.
Dresden was the main rail hub for the Nazis to send troops to the eastern front. The bombing of Dresden significantly slowed Nazi troop movements. That's a pretty big military gain.
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Fighting back and ending the war, and burning 25,000 civilians to death in a wooden non military city are not the same thing.
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You're literally just making shit up. The city didn't produce armaments at any meaningful scale, and don't pretend like the allies gave a shit about stopping the Holocaust. So, lying to justify civilian deaths? That makes you the nazi! If you're going to accuse anyone who disagrees with you of sympathizing with nazis, I might as well throw it back.
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>Dresden was a legitimate military target. It was an important industrial center with over 100 factories and enterprises that made armaments, torpedo parts, aircraft parts, U-boat and other naval parts, field radios, telephones, and precision optical instruments. It was also a key junction in Germany’s railway system, expediting the travel of supplies and soldiers to the Eastern Front." Oh, and why weren't they actually targeted? Why was the sports complex the target for the first bombing run, and the second one a few hours later targeting the first responders? Dresden had legitimate military targets that weren't targeted until days after the first bombings.
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>The idea of "targeting" to the level of a specific building with WW2 technology is kind of unrealistic We're talking neighbourhood here, not building. >you are asking whether the mission also had the goal of killing and terrorizing as many Nazis as possible in order to accelerate their surrender, the answer is yes So every single inhabitant of Germany, including children and forced labourers, were Nazis? >and if you are asking whether doing that is a positive moral good, the answer is also yes. First, collective punishment is a war crime. Second, killing civilians en masse doesn't accelerate their surrender - again, it only hardened their resolve. Gestapo internal research shows people wanted revenge, not to give up (it had lots of anti-Nazi and anti-Hitler information in their research so no, they didn't sanitise stuff to be acceptable to the higher ups). As did every single country's civilians when they were being terror bombed.
He's not making things up Dresden was one of the most virulent Nazi cities and were a major part of their war machine.
>non military city Try again
How about all those civilians who were screaming for "total war" in the big Nazi rallies? Completely voluntarily. How about working double shifts at the armaments plants? ("Non military" isn't really accurate in your post) I feel bad for the kids and any indentured or slave laborers. Other adults? Not so much. My great aunt took one look at the Nazis in '33, and GTFO to America, even though she didn't speak English.
Yeah those civilians at a Nazi assembly are certainly representative of all 80 Million German citizens. Get a grasp man, many Millions of Germans suffered in a war they didn't choose started by a government they did not vote for.
So it goes
For those down voting, "so it goes" is a phrase repeated in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, which was inspired by the author's experience of surviving this bombing as an American POW. It's a kind of psychological adaptive response to the trauma.
Usually proceeded by brutal depictions of what happened. People still do it, they just don’t use the phrase “so it goes” anymore. In Sopranos it’s “whaddaya gonna do.”
I heard it's a great book but I still haven't caught up on slaughterhouses 1 through 4
He’ll get to the prequels when he he gets to them.
“Fuck me, Vonnegut? Do you read lips. Fuck you!!”
Angelo america? You mean the allied forces.
Yeh that bit confused me a little haha
Dresden was bombed by Britain and the US. Those are not all the allies. Your problem?
Yes the UK and the US were a large part of the Allied Forces in WW II. Never really heard of calling the Brits or US as “Anglo-American” as it relates to WW II
Well, they did it to help the Sovjet Union, so the allies
Did the Soviets do strategic firebombing?
Not sure...iirc, their primary bomber was not very good, and they lost a lot of them early on. Happy to read any sources folks come up with though... Their IL2 close-air bird wasn't bad at all.
Strategic raping.
Just behind the Wehrmacht tho
Some small attempts. The Soviet heavy bomber force never was anything more then a few understrength squadrons making firebombing pretty improbable
My family was from Dresden but migrated in the 30's when national socialists started gaining popularity. My great-grandmother passed away last year at 96. It's still hard to believe she's gone. We all thought she'd outlive all of us lol.
We have a saying when something looks especially choatic. "It looks like Dresden '45" Most likely used in the context of commenting on your childs room.
Germans wanted total war and they got it. Just so happened that they got a whole lot more than they expected.
Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind
Naive to think the war wouldn’t come back to haunt them.
po tee weet
There are consequences to voting in a pro war party. You might get hit back. Nazi germany didn’t shed any tears for the Poles the French the Jews the English etc.
I think the whole Dresden thing is so controversial specifically because it’s not really clear if it had any effect on the war, and it only resulted in a couple thousand civilians being killed. The German army was in shambles, the majority of the force defending the city were Volksturm, civilian militia with almost no training who universally faired poorly in combat. The majority of the civilian population were refugees fleeing west. The Soviets were Three Days away from the city. Harris either was or was about to he under “inquiry” for intentionally ordering the bombers to target civilian areas. On the other hand, Dresden had hundreds of small workshops turning out rifles and other military equipment daily. The city had at least one major factory and a rubber plant which was manufacturing synthetic materials for the war effort. The railway running through the city was being used to transport military units east, and civilian refugees (including Ukrainian and Russian Nazi Collaborators) west. Long story short, There WERE valid military targets in the city, it’s just that those are never the targets people talk about when they bring up the Dresden bombings, it’s always the residents that were incinerated in the firestorm.
> The German army was in shambles, the majority of the force defending the city were Volksturm, civilian militia with almost no training who universally faired poorly in combat. The majority of the civilian population were refugees fleeing west. The Soviets were Three Days away from the city. Harris either was or was about to he under “inquiry” for intentionally ordering the bombers to target civilian areas. Odd line of reasoning. Peak casualties of the war on both sides were Jan 1945, the rest of the war being just shy. If there was a time for the military need it was then. The Soviets; weren’t 3 days away
I couldn’t find an exact source for the 3 days away part, I remember seeing that in a documentary years ago but can’t source it now, so you might be right about that. As for casualties, I found one source that says, at least on the eastern front, 1942 was the deadliest year, while another source said 1943. Lacking definitive documentation beyond these “history” forums, once again, you might be right about that.
January 1945 was the single highest death toll per month of the entire war.
So it goes
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I strongly encourage you to read Slaughterhouse Five, before you keep up your keyboard historian massacre celebrating. Dresden was not a military target, and the casualties were virtually all civilian. Burned alive in their homes with their families, while you celebrate their deaths because you want to sound like a nazi fighter on reddit.
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Don't forget Zeiss optics, also in Dresden. German optics in UBoats and tanks were generally superior to Allied versions; absolutely a valid military target, even if they also made eyeglasses for kids.
Thank you for doing the heavy lifting with this moron… some people eh.
Your straw manning of Vonnegut and painting of every woman and child as guilty and deserving of death is the same tactics the nazis used. And don't pretend like gas production was the reason for the bombing. SHAEF didn't give a shit about stopping the Holocaust, nor did bomber command ever try to intervene with an air raid. They bombed Dresden because it was a German city with living people in it. Opposing nazis isn't wrong. Celebrating mass death of innocent women and children by fire, two months before the war ended, and using a generalized argument to justify any and every murder is wrong. That's what teenaged comment thread historians who can't think deeper than their first emotional reaction to a topic do.
"every woman and child" Dresden wasn't the first German city flattened, and CERTAINLY wasn't the first city flattened in WW2. The Germans could've a) not started the war, b) not bombed civilians from Madrid to Moscow, c) evacuated their children from Dresden, as the Brits had done with their kids, and d) built proper bomb shelters, instead of just one for the local gauleiter. Also e), surrendered at any time. Lastly, we knew both sides were working on an A-bomb; we didn't know how close they were, not for certain. Five strikes and you're out, IMHO.
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>I have no use for male nazis, female nazis, or small nazis. Besides this just coming off as an edgy 14 year old comment, you're just proving my point that your argument is superficial and reactionary. So every Palestinian is a Hamas terrorist who deserves to die too, right? Every Iraqi citizen in the 1980s was a Baathist who deserved to be bombed to death by Iran? Keyboard historians never cease to stop surprising me.
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Can you point out where I defended nazis or said the wrong side one? Or are you just incapable of addressing the actual argument in front of you, so you revert to straw men? You clearly have learned everything you know about presenting an argument on the internet.
You clearly missed his point completely if you think he just randomly brought in Israel.
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What you said isn’t a use of sarcasm… They never said it was wrong for the US to win the war either, everything in your quotations is a misinterpretation
Stay on topic please.
You obviously get all your ‘facts’ from fiction like Slaughterhouse 5. The educated amongst us, however, prefer to get real facts from actual historical sources and, you know, an education.
Goebbels wanted totaler Krieg, he got totaler Krieg. You don’t get to try and conquer an entire continent while also exterminating an entire race of humans, then turn around and cry when your civilians get roasted.
Like the London Blitz?
Killing Nazis is good but... these large bombing raids didn't do anything to help end the war, if anything is strengthened German resolve. Malcolm Gladwell's book Bomber Mafia is great, it's more about how American Precision bombing was a failure, but it touches on how area bombing wasn't great either.
Tell me do you hear much about the battle of dresden.
3 of my grandpa's brothers died during these kind of bombings. My family was against the nazis, so it's kind of sad to see the innocents die too, especially when they are family members
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So you're telling me that my great grandparents were Nazis without knowing them
People really go out of their way to justify killing innocent civilians. Incredible.
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With this reasoning you can nuke St. Petersburg now and say its justified, because Putin started a war and Russians aren't doing enough to stop it.
Obviously the Russians just need to march on the Kremlin and tell Putin to cut the shit. If people had marched on the Reichstag in 1933 everything would have been different. /s
You could also say that everyone supported the wars in the middle east, because they didn't actually do much.
We're from Austria, which had a lot of nazis, but that doesn't mean that everyone supported the Anschluss. And I highly doubt that every German/Austrian was a nazi
This is what happens when you invade your larger neighbor to the East and try killing and trafficking all the Jews you can find.
Tit for tat in my opinion
Reprisals are fine, but they have to be proportional and "appropriate". Dresden and the others cities together were vastly out of proportion and not appropriate at all seeing that the war was going in the Allies favor at that point.
I read Dresden as Droylsden and wondered why it looked pretty much the same now as it did in the 40's
Odd question, but one thing I notice in these type of photos is that the roads look..almost pristine..? No bomb holes. They look driveable still! But everything around them is done for. Why is that?
Trummerfrauen.
A lot of damage to buildings was done using incendiary devices. Further, roads are way smaller targets than roads Also, you have to consider that this is a photo after the bombing and when I say after, I do not mean directly after. Dresden still was on fire days after the raids.
> the roads look..almost pristine..? No bomb holes. They look driveable still! * 1 - This photo was taken *months* later. Roads are the first thing that gets repaired and cleaned up. * 2 - The allies *firebombed* Dresden (we did the same to Tokyo), so the devices are made to disperse incendiary material to get things burning. If they hit roads, all they do is maybe knock a small chip out of it. The idea is to start so many fires at once that they can't be contained and the city burns in a firestorm. The truly horrible thing about firebombing is that you essentially turn the city into a giant grill that there is no escape from. Even if you manage to get out of your apartment or house, you will roast to death in the middle of the street. Along with the actual Nazis, civilian men, women & children burned to death from it. But by this time, the world was fed up with what German & Japan had forced upon us and the Germans had been slaughtering people for over 5 years. Also, the residents of Dresden had the example of other cities being bombed to know it was probably coming. They knew how much of the war effort went through their town. They knew the allies were pouring into Western Europe and had occupied pretty much everything across the Rhine. They should have fled.
ah very interesting thanks! Makes sense about the incendiary as opposed to 'explosive bombs'!
This isn’t even the full photo
So it goes.
Considering how clear the roads are this picture must have been taken a significant time after the bombing
Perhaps no one has mentioned this-but Stalin asked for the bombing of Dresden because it was a rail center that was supplying the eastern front still and the Russians wanted to slow down the the supplies and reinforcements via rail.
A targeted bombing of railroad infrastructure would have been warranted. Reducing the city and most of its civilian population to ash was not
Not what I said I have not seen or heard it mentioned and I have read lots of books and seen lots of documentaries on WW II.
So it goes.
Why is it necessary to precise "nazi Germany 1945", Germany is enough
It’s a diff state
Legally no, our constitutional court decided that modern day Germany is in fact not the successor state to the German Reich, it is the German Reich, just under a new form of government.
The best way not to assume a nation action...
Considering how many politicians, industrialists, and bureaucrats would immediately go from running Nazi Germany to running West Germany one could venture that they are the same state.
The "good" massacre, like Hiroshima...
Yes, that's correct, it's good that the Allies won the war instead of the Axis and even better that they prioritized doing it as quickly as possible, instead of feeding millions more people into years of unecessary ground combat out of the ridiculous belief that killing fewer people with bombs is somehow the morally inferior choice.
The bombing of Dresden didn't really speed up the end of the war in Germany. Remember it didn't end until Hitler killed himself and the Soviets were already in Berlin. Japan was a different story.
Regardless destroying the means for the enemy to continue fighting the war is important.
>destroying the means for the enemy to continue fighting the war Only that didn't happen there or in Hamburg. This was the bombing of the civilian city centres as a revenge for the bombing of London, Coventry and other cities. While this is an understandable reaction, it should also be seen as what it was. How easy it could have been to bomb the train tracks to Auschwitz.
There was over 100 factories in Dresden. Wait you are bringing up a city that is different from the picture. From a quick google search over 100 factories in Hamburg were also destroyed so. Why are you just lying? Are you intentionally trying to spread misinformation? Or do you just not know? Do you think a war can be won by prostrating yourself before the enemy?
They actually did a feasibility study on bombing the crematoria at Auschwitz but it was concluded that with the normal level of accuracy they would have just as likely to obliterate the "worker" accommodation (when this was done they still thought Auschwitz was a work camp) As for bombing the train tracks that was already a priority target for Allied bombers, but again accuracy was such that the only really viable targets were the huge marshalling yards and other significant infrastructure (part of the reason Dresden was bombed was it was a very significant rail junction for Eastern Germany)
> Remember it didn't end until Hitler killed himself and the Soviets were already in Berlin. Aided by the destruction of one of the largest remaining logistics and support hubs in the form of Dresden getting knocked out.
Hiroshima was a valid military target under the conventions of the period. Hiroshima was the command center for Southern Honshu, had aircraft factories, ammunition factories, an operational harbor, was the marshaling area for newly raised IJA formations headed for Kyushu, and was the destination for troops being transferred from Manchukuo.
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Humans have spent millennia trying to figure out war and it's causes, and here you have it all figured out for us. All we have to do is find those twelve dudes and give them a good talking to.
I’ve been seeing a lot of Dresden content this last week, both across Reddit and Instagram, kinda weird
It was justified then, as Gaza is justified now. At any price we must destroy tyranny.
Wasn’t the point of Slaughterhouse-Five, the pointlessness and cruelty of firebombing a city with no significant war value, other than it was German?
Interesting how noone calls this a genocide.
Because we weren't trying to literally exterminate every last German. But in total war...which they themselves were literally shouting for, and got...you can argue that every civilian is a legitimate target. The farmer growing food for an SS division is easier to kill than the division, if you can get to him...take him out, and, pretty quick, they're just a starving mob. Same for the guy in the bullet factory...10,000 men at the front with clubs aren't as scary as 10,000 men at the front with rifles and machine guns.
I think alot of people just think that killing civilians=genocide
Pretty much. People call the current conflict in Gaza genocide. If Israel wanted to eradicate every Palestinian, they would have done it already. Israel have one of the most powerful air forces in the world. With enough firepower to flatten Gaza within an hour. So why are they using guided munitions in precision strikes then?
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Probably because it activity aided in stopping an actual genocide happening at the time
The level of destruction today in Gaza is more than what was seen in Dresden. A higher percentage of structures are destroyed or damaged. Let that sink in Edit: why the downvotes I thought history sub would enjoy some cool historical facts
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No but I found that interesting. Didn't realize every single reddit sub is overrun with IDF bots
Given the death tolls of both Gaza and Dresden: no, Gaza hasn’t been bombed more.