Neo-Nazis rally on Dresden bombing anniversary

[Hatalles]

Source: AP

DRESDEN, Germany – Thousands of protesters formed a human chain in Dresden on Saturday, determined to stop neo-Nazis from exploiting the German city's painful history on the 65th anniversary of its deadly Allied bombing in World War II.

Heavy security including riot police was in place to prevent clashes between the two groups, and five police helicopters flew overhead to monitor the crowds.

Neo-Nazis have caused outrage in the past by comparing the 1945 bombing of Dresden to the Holocaust. Organizers of a far-right protest Saturday characterized it as a "mourning march."

Some 5,000 far-right supporters poured into the city, according to police, who limited them to a rally near a railway station rather than a march for security reasons after opponents staged sit-down blockades in streets nearby.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100213/ap_on_re_eu/eu_germany_dresden_anniversary

[bluestateguy]

1. On the anniversary of the Dresden bombings

we should reflect and remember the risks and sacrifices made by the AMERICAN troops on that day.

[theoldman]

4. During a bombing, Americans troops are not at risk.

It was the innocent civilians on the ground who were mostly at risk. The airplane crew was at risk if the plane was shot down.

[Journeyman]

13. Tell that to the American prisoners inside Dresden that night. . .

or the American prisoners strafed by Allied fighters the following day.

Read a first hand account:

Slaughterhouse-Five

or "The Children's Crusade"

A DUTY-DANCE WITH DEATH

by Kurt Vonnegut

A fourth-generation German-American
now living in easy circumstances
on Cape Cod
(and smoking too much),
who, as an American infantry scout
hors de combat
as a prisoner of war,
witnessed the fire-bombing
of Dresden, Germany,
"The Florence of the Elbe,"
a Long Time Ago,
and Survived to Tell the Tale.
This is a Novel,
somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic
manner of tales
of the Planet Tralfamadore,
where the flying saucers
come from.
Peace.

[No Elephants]

38. Reply 1 spoke of taking risks. Reply 4 changed the wording to "at risk."

Unless the prisoners had something to do with the decision to bomb Dresden while they were imprisoned, they did not "take risks," but they happened to be "at risk."

You could also question the statement in Reply #1 about making sacrifices, to the extent that "made sacrifices" implies volition and intent. They may have been forced to sacrifice, though.

[aquart]

34. You mean, they felt like Londoners?

How sad.

[LanternWaste]

58. 160,000 casualties of the USAAF bombing campaign...

160,000 casualties of the USAAF bombing campaign. Civilian total range from 200,000-650,000. Looking at the ratio ranging from 1/1.6 - 1/5, and at the figures which illustrate that one out of every three strategic bombers were shot down compels me to believe that the American bomber crews were indeed at risk.

[AlienGirl]

5. We should remember the civilians who died, too. Kurt Vonnegut would want us to.

There is no contradiction between finding the Nazis abhorrent and knowing Germany had to be defeated, honoring the American and British fighters of the war, and mourning for the innocent lives that were lost, and even grieving for the people whose minds were twisted by Nazi ideology.

"The death of a multitude is a cause for mourning: Consider your triumph as a funeral."--Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching

Tucker

[dipsydoodle]

10. They were not on the ground

and as far as I'm aware they flew daytime missions only as they were not too keen on night flights. The British who are equally cupable flew the night nights.

Dresden held no strategic importance whatsoever : it was civilian population which was fire bombed. Its purpose was to serve as a lesson and help prevent an underground movement.

[JackRiddler]

59. Some of us can remember more than one thing at a time.

[47of74]

2. And people came together to peacefully stand in opposition to these scum bags

[heli]

3. The price of war and aggression. They should send their complaint form to their Führer

[theoldman]

6. The bombing of Dresden was not one of our finer moments.

Too many innocent civilians were killed because the bombs missed their target.

[RedstDem]

7. A thing to think about in all this

was Dresden was not a legitimate military target, the bombing had no effect on the outcome..

that's where "war is hell" came from.

[Chulanowa]

8. No, the bombs were right on target

Which is why Dresden needs to be regarded as not only a tragedy, but also as a significant crime, on par with the German bombings against Britain.

[DissedByBush]

11. Dresden was retaliation for Britain

The British admittedly came up with the plan in order to cause exactly the same problems as civilian bombing Britain caused.

The city was of little real military value, especially if you compare it to other cities that could have been bombed instead.

[fedsron2us]

26. A case of what goes around come around

Between September and November 1940 London had 13000 tons of high explosive bombs and more than a million incendaries dropped on it by the Luftwaffe. On 29 December 1940 it suffered it own firestorm in the ancient heart of the City which devastated many historic buildings and nearly burnt down St Pauls Cathedral. By May 1941 over 20,000 civilians had been killed in London alone with as many again dying in all other British cities. This experience definitely influenced the tactics of RAF Bomber Command throughout the rest of the war.

British civilians were still falling victim to German V1 and V2 weapons right upto the final month of the war with nearly 9000 being killed between June 1944 and 27 March 1945 when the last person, Mrs. Ivy Millichamp, of Orpington was killed in her home by a V 2 rocket. Given this experience there was definitely pressure felt by British politicians and military leaders to finish the war as quickly as possible by whatever means necessary.

[DissedByBush]

36. And here I thought we were supposed to be better

Than the Nazis.

Guess not.

[No Elephants]

39. The karma is all over the place. Sucks when the "good guys" can't claim the high road

when Neo Nazis demonstrate in Dresden. Or in Nagasaki or Hiroshima.

War is indeed hell.

Maybe, someday, our minds will evolve to where we can address differences and problems without war.

[aquart]

35. Seems fair and just to me.

I'm glad the war is over. Glad to be on good terms with Germany again. But weep over anything that happened to them because of that war? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

They lost a tourist attraction. My grandmother lost her family. EVERY ONE OF THEM.

This mourning over pretty Dresden is disgusting.

[No Elephants]

40. You don't distinguish between a civilian in Dresden and Hitler and his "enforcers"?

Since neither you nor I stopped Bush (or Obama), we'd better take cover if either of us runs into Iraqis who think that same way.

(And, no, I am not equating our invasion of Iraq with the Holocaust.)

[aquart]

53. I don't distinguish between a civilian in London and a civilian in Dresden.

Or are you unaware of the Blitz?

[DissedByBush]

9. I was raised ignorant of this

As an adult some German friends, decidedly NOT neo-Nazi or anti-American types, showed me a history book on the bombing.

I couldn't believe we were involved in that.

Later I researched more to see if their history book may have been biased.

Nope, we really screwed that one up. Not a proud moment in our conduct of WWII.

The best I can say is it was a British idea and we went along with it.

[No Elephants]

41. Hiroshima, mon ami?

A British idea and we went along with it?

We were not Britain's weaker ally, a mere helpless victim. And even if we were, that would not make us any less guilty with respect to Dresden.

[DissedByBush]

51. Hiroshima was bad, but at least it had a goo, rational reason

And the air war in Germany was not like Iraq where it's us and a bunch of people we order around. Britain could do what it wanted, and we supported them.

[Javaman]

63. Read up sometime on the fire bombing of Both Tokyo and Hamburg.

They only reason Curtis LaMay wasn't tried for crimes against humanity is; we won.

[Libertas1776]

12. We really screwed the pooch at Dresden,

us Brits and the Americans, and it is a permanent black mark on our involvement in the war. However, none of these tragedies would have never unfolded in the first place if wasn't for these fuckwad neo nazis and their historical counterparts. They are the ones that brought Germany and the rest of Europe to ruin.

[Stella_Artois]

15. Why ?

Why is Dresden the black mark ?

Why not Hamburg where twice the number died ?

Why not Tokyo where four times the number died ?

Dresden seems to captured the imagination as the most horrific bombing attack in WWII when it just wasn't.

[fedsron2us]

20. Interesting point

I have always wondered what the people of Hamburg or the Ruhr towns make of the special status given to Dresden since they suffered pretty much the same fate or worse. I expect it is because it is much harder to tag the 'War Crime' label to raids that took place in 1943 since it was far from certain at that date that the Nazis would lose the war, the towns were major parts of the Reichs military-industrial structure and the Luftwaffe ensured that the German populace was far from being 'defenceless' as the high level of Allied Bomber casualties attest (air crews having only a slightly better than even money chance of surviving the war an attrition rate almost comparable with German U boat crews). The truth appears to be that the Nazis fastened on Dresden as some sort of unique horror for propaganda purposes in the final days of the war and this was picked up and used by the East German Communist regime after the war to attack the West. It subsequently became generally accepted as a particularly heinous example of area bombing In fact Dresden was not unique nor was it quite the cultural and civilian idyll untouched by the hand of the Nazi war regime that some claim. It was just one of a range of eastern German cities selected for attack in 1945 by the Joint Intelligence Committee (rather than the much maligned Bomber Harris who appears to have been subsequently scapegoated for all such raids). The only real difference with this raid was that the bombs and the weather combined to start a firestorm which made the attack particularly deadly and horrific. This was not something that Allied Bombers could achieve at will and there are probably only one or two similar instances of it occurring in the whole of the Europen war (Hamburg being the most notable example).

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/dresden-tuesday-13-february-1945-by-frederick-taylor-569784.html


Of course the dead of Dresden (including many non German slave laborers) can't speak so the neo Nazi scum can abuse their memory with impunity and pervert their deaths to their own rotten ends.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

29. I do know that people in Tokyo who survived the war

resented the attention given to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They pointed out that more people died in the March 1945 bombing of Tokyo than died in either atomic bombing and that the bombs were targeted at a part of the city that was not only mostly homes and small businesses (the factories were on the other side of the city) but was characterized by wooden buildings huddled closely together. Incendiary bombs turned the whole area into a firestorm.

[No Elephants]

42. I didn't see anyone say Dresden was the only black mark. The OP is about Dresden, tho'.

[jwirr]

25. As a German American I find it difficult to forget that Dresden supported

Hitler and the death camps until the end. When you or your nation fall for idiot leaders and continue to support them (sometimes for more than 8 years) then there are consequences. When it came to supporting the war and the camps I suspect there were not many Germans who did not.

[No Elephants]

43. I am not seeing the connection between your German heritage and your claims.

Do you mean that you are a German born in America? Or are you saying that you were a German who was in Germany during WWII?

[jwirr]

56. Many of us who are German felt a quilt for what happened even though

we lived in the US. To this day I have a hard time reading or seeing the truth. I had 2 uncles who fought on the US side but that only helped a little - it is a feeling of there but for grace attitude. If my ancestors had not come to the US would I have been goose stepping my life away in Germany. It is the knowledge that we have the same weaknesses and can be mislead.

[naaman fletcher]

14. Kurt Vonnegut was there..

As a POW. He helped clean up the mess. It was the defining moment of his life, and he is no neo-nazi.

[mrbarber]

16. Dresden wasn't a miltiary target...

and the millions of innocent people murdered in the camps weren't of any important military value, either.

But that sure as shit didn't stop the nazi's.

War is hell.

[No Elephants]

44. Sure is. Just ask the Iraqis and Afghanis. Fortunately, America is never gets holier than thou, eh?

[activa8tr]

17. Today is the anniversary of the starting of that bombing, which continued

for months.

I can't understand why the Opera house or the churches or the other places of such fine history and culture, and places representing the BEST of the people of that land, were devastated. But then again, back at that time, bombing from the air was not very "surgical".
The riverbanks and train system were more legitimate areas to bomb, if one needed to bomb, but there was a bunch of HOOYAHH going on with the bombing missions, after the blitz of London had gone on so long.

None of it makes sense to us 65 years later, it really doesn't. But this was NOT the finest hour for the allied forces.

[hayu_lol]

18. Dissed made the point which always has to be made...

vis-a-vis the Dresden bombing. The only poster, so far, to do so.

Toward the end of the war, Churchill went to Eisenhower and proposed a bombing plan(around the clock)for Germany that would have reduced EVERY German city to rubble and corpses. Dresden and Hamburg(port city)were the first of what would have been all to suffer the 'firestorm' raids.

Eisenhower said NO to Churchill's plan which admittedly was a massive revenge strike for the random bombing of London and other English cities by aircraft and the V-1 and V-2 rockets.

One familiar to the history of the War in Europe, would know that Hitler's final orders to his Army and Air Force was to destroy everything that was Germany. He wanted total destruction and the earth to be salted. Hitler wanted the German nation to disappear from the earth.

Note that while we firebombed Tokyo and nuked Hiroshima and Nagisaki, we did not bomb Kyoto which continues to be the center of traditional Japanese culture...temples of antiquity and so on. Kyoto was never a target.

Don't blame our forces(many still do)for the destruction.

There is a town far in the north of Norway. Only way to get there during the war was by ship or fishing boat...Hammerfest. When the Germans left Hammerfest, they burned all the buildings in the town, all the foodstocks, destroyed the docks and sank the fishing fleet. The Germans had no problem leveling this and other outposts of civilization.

Have no sympathy for Dresden or the other affected cities...they brought their troubles on themselves.

[closeupready]

22. Hiter's PR filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl claimed in the biographical film

"The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl" that she parted ways with Hitler when it became apparent to her that he was pathologically oblivious to the suffering of the German people who were starving and barely surviving towards the end after all the Allied bombings. So I find it believable that he had such designs for Germany.

[activa8tr]

24. You make no sense with your last statement, and, quite frankly

I can't understand that you find SOME people on the planet "innocent" civilians and others "not innocent" civilians.

I'm quite thankful I don't have to live with your rationalizations of SOME atrocities and selective condemnations for others.


I bet you have studied history only to boost your ego here and there, not to get the whole picture of the amazingly horrific chapters of human experience on this planet.

To you, judging by your last statement in your rather arrogant post, it's still and "us versus them" kind of model you keep in your head.

I know lots of people who agree with your last statement. Unfortunately.

[EFerrari]

32. Welcome to DU, activa8tr.

:)

[No Elephants]

45. I disagree that the point always has to be made. Maybe we could sometimes

admit that we chose to do a bad thing without trying to excuse it by bringing Britain into it or pretending that wrong justifies wrong, or that German civlians had more power to stop Hitler and his marauding thugs than you and I had to stop Bushco's war crimes (or to force Obama to prosecute for them).

Please see also, Reply ##s 39, 40, 41 and 44.

[fascisthunter]

61. oy

[Taverner]

19. Why should THEY get to own that????

That was a horrific event - and it doesn't matter which country it was that suffered from it.

If anything, its anti-Nazi because if the German people never elected Adolf Hitler TWICE (as I liked to point out during the Bush admin) they never would have had that kind of response

[closeupready]

21. And yet, German ministers will tell you today that Dresden had to die

because war inevitably unleashes strong passions, and the world was on fire at the time due to Nazi Germany's aggression.

[No Elephants]

47. No one forced anyone to fire bomb towns with no military targets or

to drop atom bombs. Each person/country has to take responsibility for its own horrors. Hitler had much more to answer for, but I wish we stuck to the high road anyway.

[closeupready]

54. I wish we hadn't bombed Dresden. It was a bad decision and accomplished nothing.

And for a very long time, I hated the fact that we (the US) had a part in that.

I never did get around to reading Fahrenheit 451, but I did read a different autobiography of a native Dresden woman who got separated from her mother (or was it her daughter? I can't recall ATM) in the immediate aftermath of the firebombing, and wandered that region of Germany for many months afterwards, and finally was reunited - she saw her daughter on the other side of a bridge, I believe, and also, I think eventually, they emigrated to the US. Anyway, the moral of her story was that all war is bad, and that it ALWAYS extracts the highest price of women and children, never the men. She was saddened by the destruction of Dresden, but at the same time, she accepted it as just part of war, put the blame on Hitler and those who followed him, and moved on with her life. (Now I've got to see if I can find out what that book was, dangit.)

The book may have been "Return to Dresden" by Maria Ritter, though I thought I'd read this story in the early 90's. Just can't recall.

[24601]

23. "I hate Illinois Nazis" Jake Blues (1980) n/t

[ConcernedCanuk]

27. USA has a history of slaughtering civilians - I guess that makes them terrorist #1, right?

.
.
.

Nagasaki and Hiroshima were not military targets

Baghdad was not a military target,

in fact - Iraq wasn't at war with ANYBODY when the USA started slaughtering them

Remember Mai-Lai

"Road of Death" as they slaughtered thousands of Iraqis RETREATING from Kuwait

and so on

Someone mentioned Kurt Vonnegut whose books I have read, some more than once.

One phrase I remember distinctly, (though probably not in totality) to the effect that we were taught

"In 1492

Columbus sailed the ocean blue

And discovered "America" "

and thereby started to "civilize" the western world

In reality, the Europeans slaughtered the civilizations that were already there,

then stole their land"

And we haven't stopped yet . . .

(sigh)

[No Elephants]

49. Good thing Canada is perfect, eh?

[dugaresa]

28. What the Neo Nazis fail to remember is that Dresden is the direct result of Mr. Hitler starting it

Mr. Hitler who shot himself in the head rather than face the fucked up mess he made.

War is ugly and it has ugly consequences.

[No Elephants]

46. Hitler stunk So did firebombing civilian towns.. One thing does not cause or excuse the other..

[struggle4progress]

30. ... "We have for the first time succeeded in preventing the biggest neo-Nazi march in Europe," said

Lena Roth of the "Dresden without Nazis" alliance of politicians, artists and unionists ... A city hall spokesman said this rally, called by mayor Helma Orosz, was "a symbolic action" to show Dresden was "a city open to the world, opposed to violence and xenophobia" ... "Dresden without Nazis" said 500 neo-Nazis had attacked an underground cultural centre, injuring several people ...

Thousands prevent neo-Nazi rally in Dresden
By Andrea Hentschel (AFP) – 7 hours ago
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ggtpSWu8CFeHOuQl6fegI1lsuLxw

[EFerrari]

31. Maybe we should invite these good people over here for a training seminar.

:)

[struggle4progress]

33. Maybe. "Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?"

[Turbineguy]

37. They want to cause a repeat?

[RZM]

48. The question of German victimhood in WWII is an interesting one

And has to be placed in the context of German crimes and the level to which civilians 'knew about' the atrocities or acquiesced in them etc., which is still the subject of much debate. Dresden was just a small part of German suffering. There was lots of bombing beforehand and numerous atrocities committed by Soviet soldiers as they entered prewar German territory (most famously between 2-4 million rapes). There were also the postwar expulsions as borders were redrawn and ethnic German populations were expelled from their homes, (though some left on their own to avoid the Red Army), which totaled roughly 12 million people, the most concentrated migration in recorded history. Many of these folks had to perform slave labor before they were kicked out and plenty of them died due to terrible living/transport conditions.

This has to be placed alongside German crimes, of which the holocaust was only one (and generally not the motivation for much anti-German ferocity at the end of war). There was also the brutal German occupation regimes in the East, which claimed tens of millions of lives, not to mention the scorched earth policies the German army practiced in its long retreat, the barbaric treatment of Soviet POWs, the slave labor, etc. There were plenty of 'bad' Germans who suffered and plenty of 'good' ones, with most people falling somewhere in between. I think it's wrong to entirely condemn Allied conduct at the end of the war just as it's wrong to claim that everybody who suffered 'deserved it.'

[No Elephants]

50. Welcome to DU. Nice to see a reasoned, balanced, honest post.

Hope you hang around.

[Kurska]

52. A Excerpt from Alan Clark's Barbarossa: The Russian-German conflict.

"After the german's disastrous winter of 1942-1943, when the partisan (russian irregulars) were in control of huge areas of central russia, Bach (administrator of nazi occupied ukraine), had instituted a series of "Drives" in which tracs of "suspected" territory were systematically laid waste, the villages burned down, and the inhabitants killed on the spot"

More

"With the advent of warmer weather, though, it seems this particular problem was eliminated, for kube was able to report "In the past ten weeks we have liquidated about 50,000 jews... in the rural areas of minsk, Jewry has been eradicated without jeopardizing the labor situation"

"Tigers, panthers, Nebelwerfers, solothurns, schmeisters, came from the darkened sheds of krupp and daimler-benz, where slave labor toiled eighteen hours a day, cowering under the lash, sleeping six to a "dog kennel" eight feet square, starving or freezing to death at the whim of their guards."


CRY ME A FUCKING RIVER NAZI SCUM.

[and-justice-for-all]

55. I hope all the Neo Nazi fucks got jail time for their display...

Nazism is ILLEGAL in Deutschland.

[ProudDad]

57. There's way too much revisionist bullshit on this thread!!!

The Dresden bombing was UTTERLY MILITARILY UNNECESSARY!!

The cowards in their airplanes, unopposed, thousands of feet above the holocaust they created faced little danger.

The "good people" who perpetrated this holocaust belonged to the old Empire that killed millions around the world for the fucking queen (and her merchant masters) and the new Empire who killed millions of native peoples in order to steal their lands and resources...

The Dresden bombing wasn't a "show of force" to end the war...

It was a "military" experiment...

It was a DELIBERATE, cold-blooded, premeditated exercise designed to create a firestorm using "conventional bombs" in huge quantities on an untouched city that contained virtually NO military targets. That it had been untouched by war was its virtue. It would make it easy for the "Allies" to gauge the effects of their grisly experiment.

The same reasoning that led to millions being killed in the ovens over a multi-year period led to over 250,000 persons being incinerated in Dresden in one night, nearly all of them non-combatant civilians...

For atrocities, don't depend on totalitarians, hire the fucking "democracies"...

[Codeine]

62. Your death toll figure

is off by an order of magnitude. The city itself places the death toll around 25,000 at the absolute max.

The 250,000 figure is pure Nazi propaganda, which makes me wonder. . .

[gulfcoastliberal]

64. Does sound a bit Goebbelish to me, too.

Fucking Nazi's slaughtered 12+ million Soviet civilians.

A lot of factories in Dresden were making military supplies and the rail link there shipped nazi's out to & back from the eastern front.

[fedsron2us]

66. Every country in Europe can pile up its civilian war dead

and then engage in a pissing contest as to who has the most deserving victims.

To add to the body count it is worth pointing out that the Luftwaffe killed in the region of 500,000 Soviet civilians in air raids on towns such as Kiev, Leningrad, Stalingrad etc but as usual, in the West, they are simply forgotten.

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm

Truth is that targetting of civilians from the air or elsewhere was not invented by either the Allies or the Nazis in World War 2.

It was already happening in World War I. The Germans were bombing London from 1915 using first Zepplins and later Gotha bombers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_strategic_bombing_during_World_War_I

The British and French then built their own bomber force and began to retaliate in kind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing

To be honest all sides used very similar tactics in both World Wars, and the tactics of dumping incendiaries along with high explosives to start fires can be traced back to the beginnings of military aviation. All that changed over time was the ability of airforces to visit ever greater devastation on their opponents. Although sometimes the pretence was maintained that the targets of bombing were military or industrial the reality is that most bombs fell a mile or more away from their intended targets so civilians were likely to wind up getting killed in large numbers regardless of whether they were the intended victims. In fact in old European industrial towns built before the advent of the internal combustion engine this was almost inevitable even with the most precise attacks because workers housing ran right upto the factory gates.

[Stella_Artois]

65. Strange post

I suppose the fact that 50,000 RAF bomber command crews died over Germany in WWII can be attributed to a series of strange accidents. Or perhaps, over the course of the war, there was a certain amount of oppposition.

Perhaps by Feb 1945, after 5 and a half years of trying the RAF and USAF may have had some clue of what happens when you bomb a city, so maybe there was no need to carry out an experiment. Indeed no new tactics or weapons were used that night. It was a similar attack to the others carried out at the time.

As for military targets, sure it had no Krupps but it did have a Karl Zeiss plant producing optics for Panzers, as well as other factories.

As for the same reasoning between the attack and the holocaust, well if you do have something about the Allies waging a racial war against the Germans i'd love to read it.

[Raskolnik]

67. Really? "The same reasoning that led to millions being killed in the ovens..."

"...led to over 250,000 persons being incinerated in Dresden in one night?"

If you really think this, you either don't know a damn thing about WWII, or you have some, shall we say, unfortunate opinions about National Socialism.

[JackRiddler]

60. Why isn't the headline that 10,000 people rallied against a march of 5000 neo-Nazis?

That is, if the numbers given are correct.