Excellent article from The Occidental Observer

UKIP — Britain’s latest right-turn through a meandering political wilderness

Posted: 04 Feb 2014 

With the European Parliamentary elections imminent, talk of UKIP’s chances of a major breakthrough has reached fever pitch in the mainstream media, with some lauding them as a potential saviour to the British people and their way of life. As is often the case, however, TOO readers have seen several would-be advocates of our culture and heritage succumbing to the all-too-familiar practice of toning down rhetoric, in an ultimately forlorn hope that it will garner wider credibility. Therefore a much more critical appraisal of the party is needed, for amidst the frenzy (which has seen reactions range from enthusiastic praise, to mild approval and in some quarters, outright scathing), a crucial element of critical thought has been largely omitted; many have jumped on their bandwagon and nodded approvingly at what they stand against, but paradoxically, insufficient scrutiny is given to what they actually stand for.

Firstly, it is important to understand why they have risen to prominence, to become acknowledged as England’s third most popular political party, following the capitulation of the Liberal Democrats due to their ill-fated coalition with David Cameron’s “Conservative” party in 2010. While the treachery of New Labour during their 13-year reign of terror has already been comprehensively documented at TOO, it is no co-incidence that it was with the collapse of the BNP that Nigel Farage has taken UKIP from a party perceived merely (but not without merit) as a single-issue, breakaway group of disgruntled, Euro-sceptic conservatives, who bemoan that party’s move to a decidedly more pro-EU centre ground following the internal coup which ousted Margaret Thatcher in 1990.
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The BNP were never a serious option for the masses, but under Nick Griffin’s tutelage they made frequent, incremental overtures toward Britain’s Jewish diaspora, in a desperate attempt at credibility, going from being an openly anti-Semitic party in the 1980’s and 90’s, to accepting — and even electing, on one occasion— Jewish candidates, before altering their stance on Zionism from that of hostile, to neutral, then ultimately endorsing and praising Israel’s catastrophic actions in Gaza half a decade ago, in front of a live TV audience of millions. The common thread throughout these gradual shifts was their overwhelming reliance on an anti-Islam platform, with no such criticism of the Jewish lobbyist groups who brought them to the UK’s shores in the first place and who have been overwhelmingly complicit in the country’s continuing descent into a multicultural hellhole ever since. What stands out, though, is that despite numerous appeasements of Jewry, the Party — and indeed anyone considered right of centre in the UK — did not win a single ounce of reprieve and, if anything, only saw the media smear campaigns intensify as their (albeit modest) electoral success increased. With this, they have collapsed at the polls and their other elected European MEP Andrew Brons has since split from their ranks and formed a new party, with a manifesto barely distinguishable from their former paymasters.

With the only other notable right-leaning movement emerging in their wake being the EDL, who have also been outed as a Zionist front whose leader has recently “turned,” UKIP have effectively filled a void and gathered momentum at an intriguing rate, in the process staking a claim to be the acceptable voice of dissent and widely tipped to make huge gains in the Euro elections. Indeed, it is only the antiquated (and arguably undemocratic) closed shop nature of the “first past the post” London parliament that has thus far prevented them from securing any of the 600+ seats at Westminster, although they are odds-on to break this mould in the 2015 General Election. While this very system is unlikely to yield them any more than a handful of seats next year, more farsighted political analysts are predicting a possible scenario after the 2020 Election, in which they could act as Kingmakers in the event of another hung parliament a la 2010 and go on to form a Conservative/UKIP coalition. As things stand, they have clearly got the ruling elites looking over their shoulders, culminating in decidedly tougher rhetoric from both Labour and the Conservatives on issues such as welfare, immigration and the EU. (Prime Minister David Cameron has promised a Referendum in 2017 on continuing EU membership, although how genuine this overture is, one can only speculate at this stage.) It is clear that UKIP have been effective in communicating the disenchantment felt by of much of the population and so more and more are turning to the Party in the hope that they will break the mould. However, it goes without saying that getting into bed with any of the three main parties to tip the balance of power would render them a part of the very establishment they claim to so vehemently oppose, from which there would be no turning back.

A pivotal moment arrived last year upon the death of perhaps Britain’s most divisive (and possibly second only to Tony Blair as the most despised) leader of all time, Margaret Thatcher, when Farage loudly and proudly proclaimed her as his “inspiration.” It is therefore little surprise that despite their surge in popularity with so-called Middle England, they remain a non-entity in the UK’s three other constituent states, namely Scotland (where they haven’t even retained their deposit in elections), Wales, and Northern Ireland. Perceived historical divisions aside, it is with good reason that said regions (and the decimated industrial north of England) would be, at best, lukewarm to them, for their policies maintain an affection for the free market, London-centric, false economy and class-based system that divided the land so ruinously in the 1980’s. They are also prone to making public statements which range from the outlandish side of theological (here), eccentric and PC-baiting (here) and most recently, downright distasteful in making derogatory remarks to a disabled young student in a public debate (here). The need to maintain a high tone in all manner of correspondences is self-explanatory, but it is telling that Farage has issued a public admission of his Party’s lacking in this department.

Crucially, what many regular readers of TOO will pick up on, is that like those who have walked the right hand path before them, there is no attempt to address the all-too-crucial Jewish Question and the ramifications of which Kevin MacDonald warned in his “Culture of Critique” masterpiece. On the contrary, they — like their rivals in the Lib-Lab-Con ruling elite — have a vocal Friends of Israel group and friends in high (kosher) places. While Griffin’s recent attacks on them for their “Zionist leanings” seem ill-conceived, given his own party’s actions, they are not without merit. It is also noteworthy that they have received overtures from uber-zionist Geert Wilders with a view to joining his new, much-vaunted European Parliament anti-EU Alliance (note: many TOO readers will of course be familiar with Wilders’ love affair with Israel and his almost exclusively anti-Islam agenda. It does not require much thought to see where his endgame lies with courting European nationalists to this new in-group). This approach was rebuffed however, as Farage denounced Wilders’ allies, the French National Front, for their “anti-semitic stance.” All in all, it is beyond dispute that UKIP are very much toeing the Social Marxist party line in all matters pertaining to Jewry’s continuing role in Western politics. Inarguably, it is this refusal to acknowledge, in any discernible way, what stands as perhaps the biggest crisis facing the future of Western civilisation as we know it that will ultimately render their long-term impact useless.

While many may see merit in the argument that they can be a temporary solution in the quest to forge a breakthrough for a pan-European advocacy movement, UKIP have merely succeeded in bringing to the fore many key issues which resonate with ordinary British citizens and firm advocates of Western culture alike. It is their socially regressive domestic policies, love for international free markets, penchant for intellectual faux pas and refusal to address the Jewish Question in any way, shape or form which mean that, rather than being the saviours of Britain they purport to be, they are controlled opposition and, however unwittingly (or otherwise, as the case may be), a part of the very establishment which has proved so ruinous to its people and are thus, whether inadvertently or not, part of the problem.

Myth of foreign Nazi volunteers ‘debunked’
Thursday 12th December 2013

Swiss, Swedish and Danish men who volunteered for the Nazi Waffen-SS combat formation during the Second World War were not, as was previously believed, lower-class naive outsiders, but highly intelligent and ambitious individuals who fought willingly for the regime, a new study suggests.

In an article published in the journal Contemporary European History, Dr Martin Gutmann argues that men from the neutral countries of Scandinavia and Switzerland who offered their services “left for Germany with an active interest in contributing both physically and intellectually to the Nazi project”.

Gutmann challenges ‘the myth of the volunteers’ – namely, that they were uneducated social ‘losers’ and deviants, drawn by naivety or greed. Instead, he argues, most were well-travelled, well-educated, and of a middle or upper-class upbringing.

By examining documents detailing the lives of a number of volunteers, such as journals and school records, Gutmann concludes volunteers “were not weak followers, but confident leaders”.

Gutmann also found that volunteers were, with very few exceptions, convinced nationalists, who had a “sense of impending demographic and racial degradation”, and were fearful of both Bolshevism and liberal capitalism.

They were “at best ambivalent towards the German National Socialist party”, but had “an ideological inclination towards fascism”, and were keen to “reclaim the ‘purity’ of [their] nation[s]”, he found.

And from reading volunteers’ military evaluations, Gutmann surmised that many of the men had an inclination towards “viewing violence as having personal and socially redemptive qualities”.

While acknowledging that each volunteer had personal reasons for joining the Nazi regime, Gutmann concludes it was “a profound decision taken only by confident and ambitious individuals who were well aware of its potential consequences but willing to gamble for the sake of an ideal”.



Gutmann told historyextra: “There are already some excellent national studies that look at the various motivations and experiences among SS volunteers from Denmark, Norway and Sweden separately.

“But the transnational approach of my study offers some unique insights. By placing the more intellectual and influential volunteers from various countries side-by-side, I uncovered surprising similarities in the types of men from the smaller European peripheral countries who were attracted to the National Socialist ideology and project.

“I was motivated to conduct this study because my maternal grandfather served in the Swedish military during the war and my paternal in the Swiss. Both of them had vivid and patriotic memories of this time, and they often told me about the few ‘mentally deranged traitors’, as they called them – Swedish and Swiss who helped the Germans.

“So I decided to look into this issue more closely.

“It's easy and perhaps more convenient to lay the blame for this murderous ideology completely with Germans, and to some extent Italians, and to see other western Europeans as victims. Of course, the truth is rarely this straightforward.”

Dr Nir Arielli, a lecturer in international history at the University of Leeds, told historyextra: “Martin Gutmann makes an important contribution to the study of transnational volunteering by applying the dispassionate approach to foreigners who joined the Waffen-SS during the early stages of the Second World War.

“His very thorough analysis, which draws on material from 19 archives in seven countries, sheds new light on the motivations of these men.

“The German war effort offered individuals whose armies did not take part in the fighting a blend of adventure, a test to affirm their worthiness and the opportunity to fight for a cause – or parts of a cause – they believed in.

“Much like other transnational volunteers in the modern era, foreigners in the Waffen-SS wanted to add meaning to their lives, and chose to seek it in very dangerous and controversial settings.”

I saw this on Facebook. It's from Tomatobubble.com which introduces it thus:

It's the interview of the century. The Fuhrer himself visits the Queen of Daytime Talk, Oprah Winfrey. What will Oprah ask him? How will Hitler respond? How will the audience respond? Can he win over the hostile crowd with his charm and intellect? Or will he be mercilessly booed off the stage?

This is Jerry Seinfeld, one of the most Judaizing  voices of our times, and this is the essence of Jewish power.

"I have no interest in gender, race or anything like that" (2' 00") - and he means it!

I received this piece from Gunter Deckert . It's from The Runcorn and Widnes Weekly News.

Gunter Deckert aptly prefaced the article with:

To paraphrase Christian Scripture (Mark 8:36 KJV):  
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain a seat in the European Parliament,  but lose his inner freedom—i.e., his very soul— in trying to get there?

Halton union and BNP leader clash over ‘Holocaust denial’ claim 4 Feb 2014
Griffin hits back at Unison

BNP leader Nick Griffin










BNP chairman and Halton MEP Nick Griffin has denied claiming that the ‘Holocaust’ did not happen.





Paula Barker, Halton Unison branch secretary, had accused Mr Griffin of calling the infamous Nazi genocide as the ‘hoax of the 20th century’.





Halton Unison is affiliated to the Hope Not Hate diversity campaign, and Mrs Barker made the claim as she urged voters to oust the BNP boss from his post as a North West MEP in this year’s European elections.





Mr Griffin told the Weekly News he believed the Holocaust took place and accused Unison of trying to ‘exploit’ mass murder for political ends.





He added that ‘the left’ had perpetuated genocide in eastern Europe under Communism.





Mrs Barker said: “It’s shocking that in 2014 the people of the North West are represented in the European Parliament by Nick Griffin.





“Mr Griffin became known as a Holocaust denier, once describing the Holocaust as ‘the hoax of the 20th century’ and who in 1997 co-authored a pamphlet about Jewish conspiracies to brainwash people in Britain and was found guilty of distributing material likely to incite racial hatred.





“We have the opportunity in this year’s European elections to send a clear message that the North West is a tolerant and diverse region.”





Mr Griffin said: “I think it’s grotesque to see the far left whose ideological forebears were responsible for the mass murder of millions of people all over eastern Europe to be exploiting the suffering of others of political ends.”





He added that he believes ‘huge numbers were murdered’ during the Holocaust but said he cannot discuss his views and that representations of his thoughts are distorted because the power in the media is concentrated within a few big companies.





Mr Griffin said: “European law is so repressive I’m not able to say what I used to think and what I think now.





“It would end in me going to prison for saying it and you for writing it.”





The European elections are due to take place on May 22-25.

Softie that I am, I've always felt that nobody was beyond help - till I ran into this guy.

This year’s Oscar nominations are stirring angst in certain corners of the Internet, because of something that looks suspiciously like a new trend: movies about Jewish con men.

Granted, it’s just a couple of movies. Hollywood makes all kinds. Everyone knows they’re fake. That’s why it’s called the Dream Factory. Sure, some movies try to talk seriously about big issues. But not the movies we’re discussing.

One, “American Hustle,” is essentially an old-fashioned caper flick, sort of updating “The Sting.” The other, “The Wolf of Wall Street” is a black comedy about debauched excess, part “Bachelor Party,” part “The Doors.” In both films the con men end up looking more like charming rogues than evil wizards. If even Jewish evil wizards are made out to be likable and sold as charming to American audiences, the only danger these films pose is to prevent Americans from making sound judgments about the criminals in their midst.

And yet, a line has been crossed. Yes, Hollywood makes movies about all sorts of things, including Jewish gangsters and fools. But it hasn’t made movies about crooked Jewish financiers. That’s too close to the classic anti-Semitic trope. True stories about real life Jewish criminals in high finance are anti Semitic tropes?! Should we wonder if this term was invented to describe similar true stories?

Well, no longer. Now, suddenly, two of the year’s most celebrated movies are about Jewish swindlers. This, writes critic Naomi Pfefferman of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, is “the cinematic season of Bad Jews.”

What’s more uncomfortable, they’re both about real people. Would it be better for the Jews and less discomfitting to Goldberg if the movies were entirely made up? “The Wolf of Wall Street” is based on a memoir by the very real Jordan Belfort, who recruited a small army, he wrote, of “the most savage young Jews anywhere on Long Island” to man his crooked brokerage. “American Hustle” is a fictionalized version of Abscam, the 1970s FBI sting run by another real Jewish con man, Mel Weinberg. This stuff isn’t made up.

A Jew was running a government covert op designed to make the Arab lobby look bad. Would the FBI allow an Arab to run a covert op against AIPAC?

True, neither film features a villain on the scale of Bernie Madoff. For his story, watch a third Oscar nominee, “Blue Jasmine,” loosely built around a Madoff-type swindler played by Alec Baldwin. Its characters aren’t Jewish. But, hey, it’s made by Woody Allen. Enough said.

Is Hollywood trying to tell us something? Not consciously. It’s merely doing what Hollywood does, producing entertainment that mirrors the zeitgeist. It’s a sort of national Rorschach test, absorbing America’s subconscious thoughts and bouncing them back in high definition.

Right now America is thinking about the unending financial crisis. And when we think about the crisis, we encounter names like Lehman, Goldman and Sachs. Like Fuld, Blankfein and Greenberg. We taught ourselves and our neighbors (the goys?!) years ago not to notice when names like those surface in these situations. Noticing can spawn ugly thoughts.

The question is, how much longer can we expect folks not to notice? Maybe that’s what these movies are saying. Maybe something is bubbling in America’s subconscious that we need to think about.

.... Our protective layers of innocence, victimhood and vulnerability have been successively peeled away. A blogger at Jewlicious.com captured a widespread feeling about the 2014 nominees in a post headlined “Noble Arabs, Con-Men Jews Score Oscar Nods.”

But complaining is no longer enough. As L.A. Jewish Journal editor Rob Eshman argued in a gutsy December 31 essay, it’s time for the Jewish community to start examining itself. “Are the Belforts and Madoffs unnatural mutations,” he wrote, “or are they inevitable outgrowths of attitudes that have taken root in our communities?”

“We are blessed to be living at a time of unparalleled Jewish power and wealth, and it makes us so uneasy, we prefer to talk about everything but,” Eshman wrote. “…We are enjoying unprecedented wealth as millions struggle on minimum wages, facing hunger, unemployment, benefit cuts, homelessness. We look to our rabbis and institutions for guidance, but too many of them are afraid to upset the wealthy donors upon whom they are dependent. So we talk instead about Israel, about Swarthmore, and our communities become breeding grounds for the next Madoff, the next Belfort.”

He’s right. We need to talk.

Like Putin in 2014, Hitler in 1936 wanted to show off. The only difference was that unlike Putin, Hitler had something to show off about.

By 1936, after just three years in power Hitler and the National Socialists had worked wonders. Class conflict had been replaced by class co-operation. (Now where were those millions of Marxist voters? They couldn't all have been locked up in Dachau.)

The clip below is pure propaganda but that doesn't mean it isn't true. Of course, the hosts of these Olympic games were showing their best side, and that's what we see here - thousands and thousands of German workers thrilled to bits with their country, their government and their leader and, most important of all, with themselves - and just dying to show it to the whole world. And their visitors are equally thrilled to be there - those marching athletes weren't giving the Germans a quenelle!

Of course, there was that unpleasant business of Jesse Owens. Well I don't know how unpleasant 1936 Berlin was for Jesse Owens (My understanding is that he had a ball) but one thing's for sure...when he arrived home, after receiving his three golds from the foul, racist Adolf Hitler, why, he could go right back to sitting at the back of the bus.

The article below from the Guardian is just the usual sanctimonious Holocaust-worship so in itself, it's not all that noteworthy. But it caught my eyes because of its use of this image.

I don't know who chose and who cropped this picture but in my view, they have some serious questions to answer.

The Holocaust is not your metaphor to use in modern political debates

Using images of those killed by the Nazis to make a point about our own government's refugee policies is demeaning to victims. They should be remembered for their individual humanity

Hila Shachar

theguardian.com, Monday 27 January 2014

Following on from my reference to Jesse Owens here, Mike Robeson has sent me this from The Daily Mail.

Following that there's a piece by Mark Weber of the IHR. (Where else can you click onto an article on something and know it will be comprehensive, accurate and authoritative?)

Did Hitler shake hands with black 1936 Olympic hero Jesse Owens?

By ALLAN HALL
11 August 2009

It has long been regarded as the greatest sporting snub in history - when Adolf Hitler stormed out of the Olympic Stadium in Berlin because Germany had been humiliated by a black man.

The moment was 1936 and an incredible American athlete called Jesse Owens had just run his way to the first of four gold medals in the 100 metres.

Hitler, who had shaken hands the previous day with all the German Olympic winners, left the stadium furious that his Ayran supermen had been beaten by their supposed racial inferior.


Medal-winner: Jesse Owens was said to have treasured a photograph of Hitler congratulating him after winning gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

Painted in a bad light: Adolf Hitler gives the Nazi salute in the stadium

Or so the story goes.

But now a veteran sports reporter in Germany has come forward to claim that, though Hitler did indeed leave the stadium after the race, it was not before shaking Owens' hand.

Siegfried Mischner, 83, claims that Owens carried around a photograph in his wallet of the Fuehrer doing just that.

Owens, who felt the newspapers of the day reported 'unfairly' on Hitler's attitude towards him, tried to get Mischner and his journalist colleagues to change the accepted version of history in the 1960s.

Mischner claimed Owens showed him the photograph and told him: 'That was one of my most beautiful moments.'

Mischner said: 'It was taken behind the honour stand and so not captured by the world's press. But I saw it, I saw him shaking Hitler's hand.

'The predominating opinion in post-war Germany was that Hitler had ignored Owens.

'We therefore decided not to report on the photo. The consensus was that Hitler had to continue to be painted in a bad light in relation to Owens.'

Mischner, who went on to write a book about the 1936 Olympics, said other journalists were with him on the day that Owens produced the photo and they too did not report on it.


Snubbed: American sporting hero Jesse Owens taking gold at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 after Hitler claimed he had been humiliated by a 'sub-human'

'Owens was disappointed,' he said. 'He shook his head disapprovingly. The press then was very obedient. I can make no excuses, but no one wanted to be the one to make Hitler the monster look good.

'All my colleagues are dead, Owens is dead. I thought this was the last chance to set the record straight. I have no idea where the photo is or even if it exists still.'

Owens, who died in 1980, was the son of sharecroppers and won four track and field gold medals - the 100m, the long jump, the 200m and the relay race - at Berlin.

He insisted that he had not been snubbed by Hitler but made no reference to meeting him and shaking hands. 'He was probably made to buy into the myth as much as we were,' added Mischner.

Owens later said he was treated better in Germany than in America where blacks faced segregation.


Boasts of Germanic 'supermen': Hitler watches the Olympic Games at his showcase stadium in Berlin with the Italian Crown Prince.

Jesse Owens: Myth and Reality

By Mark Weber

Jesse Owens, the black track and field star who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, died in 1980 at the age of 66. As so often during his lifetime, even this occasion was used by the major television networks and print media to spread slanderous falsehoods which have acquired wide acceptance through repetition over the years. With the naming of a Berlin street after Owens in March 1984, yet another opportunity was afforded for the fanfarish media dissemination of outrageous myths. Particularly idiotic and despicable was the report on NBC Nightly News of Sunday, March 4, 1984.

The myths, which are usually asserted as fact, contend that German Chancellor Adolf Hitler was furious when Owens won; that Hitler refused to shake hands with Owens because he was black; that the Germans were embarrassed because the Owens victory “disproved” German ideas about racial differences, and so on.

Actually, Owens was acclaimed by the Berliners as enthusiastically as any German. Owens himself said that on one occasion, while in the stadium, he caught sight of Hitler: “When I passed the Chancellor, he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him.”

As for the alleged snubbing, the facts of the matter tell a story which is quite different than the one usually heard. Hitler was in his box on the first day of competition when Hans Woellke broke the Olympic record for the shot-put and, incidentally, became the first German to win an Olympic track and field championship. At Hitler's request, Woellke and the third place winner, another German, were lead to the box to receive personal congratulations from the Chancellor.

Soon afterward Hitler personally greeted three Finns who won medals in the l0,000-meter run. Then he congratulated two German women who won first and second place in the women's javelin throw. The only other scheduled event that day was the high jump, which was running late. When all the German high-jumpers were eliminated, Hitler left the stadium in the dark as rain threatened and was not present to greet the three winners - all from the United States, and two of whom were black.

Hitler left because it was late, not because he wanted to avoid greeting anyone. Besides, at the time he left Hitler could not know whether the final winners would be black or white. Count Baillet-Latour, president of the International Olympic Commission, sent word to the German leader that, as a guest of honor at the Games, he should congratulate all or none. So when Jesse Owens won the final of the 100 meters the next day, he was not publicly greeted by Hitler - nor were any other medal winners of that or any of the following events.

Any notion that the Germans were “embarrassed” because of victories by non-whites at the Berlin Games is ridiculous. Jesse Owens is very prominently featured in Olympia, the official German documentary of the Games. Leni Riefenstahl's film masterwork also devotes great attention to many other non-whites, including outstanding Japanese athletes. The same holds true in the deluxe, semi-official German picture book commemorating the Games, Die Olympischen Spiele 1936, released by the Cigaretten-Bilderdienst. Jesse Owens is pictured seven times in this book - more than any other athlete - and is admiringly referred to as "the fastest in the world.” A large picture in the book records the chiseling of the victors' names in granite at the stadium - and singled out in this picture is: “Owens U.S.A.”

Despite the remarkable achievements of Jesse Owens, and of other athletes of all races, Germany did capture more gold medals than any other nation, thus “winning” the Olympics - a fact usually ignored in discussions of the 1936 Games.

In a letter of March 14, 1984, to the Director of West German ZDF television, former German athlete Waither Tripps protested the false report by a West German television network news announcer that Adolf Hitler did not publicly greet Owens because of his African ancestry. Tripps was himself an outstanding relay runner at the 1936 Games. After sending his letter, Tripps further stated verbally that following the Games, Hitler invited all Olympic winners, including Owens, to a reception at the Reich Chancellory. Hitler personally congratulated and shook the hand of each winner, including Owens, who later confirmed this on several occasions.

Following is the text of Tripps's letter:


To the Director of the
ZDF [Second German Television]
Re: "Heute" ["Today"] news broadcast of 10 March 10, 1984

As part of his report on the unveiling of the "Jesse-Owens-Allee" street sign in front of the Berlin Olympic Stadium, your announcer made an absolutely untrue statement. He repeated the stupid lie that in 1936 Adolf Hitler refused to meet the incomparable, four-time Olympic winner Jesse Owens because of his skin color and Negro ancestry. It seems that the announcer sought to clearly emphasize the so-called race hatred indoctrination.

This story is not just a fairy tale. It is a wretched lie. Today the truth is suppressed for presumably political reasons. But it will not die. There are too many contemporary witnesses. I am one of them.

In fact, Adolf Hitler received and congratulated the German Olympic winners of the 1936 Games in the place of honor at the Olympic stadium. The 800,000 daily spectators, including many foreign visitors, enthusiastically applauded this. Dr. Gisela Mauermayer (now living in Munich), Tilly Fleischer-Grothe (now living in Lahr), Gerhard Stoeck (now living in Hamburg) and others were among those personally honored.

It was also arranged to honor the outstanding and unforgettable Jesse Owens in this way as well. But at this point the President of the International Olympic Committee, Count Baillet-Latour, stopped Hitler's plan by pointing out that this practice conflicted with the Committee rules. The Count, however, had no objection to holding this kind of congratulatory reception in the Reich Chancellory.

Dr. Karl Ritter von Halt, then President of the German National Olympic Committee and head of the German athletic association, later confirmed these facts at a meeting of the former members of the German team. I was one of those present at this meeting in Stuttgart with the unforgettable Ritter von Halt, which took place shortly after his release from the Soviet-run Sachsenhausen concentration camp. (Among others, actor Heinrich George and Reich Trainer Dr. Nerz died there!) Also present were Borchmeyer (competitor in the final race against Owens, now living in Frankfurt), Blask, Hem. Tilly Fleischer, Dr. Gisela Mauermayer, Dr. Metzner, Hornberger, Stoeck, Syring, Dessecker, and many others. They are contemporary witnesses for fairness and truth.

The facts will be published in the magazine of the “Former German Winners' Sports Club.” As National Olympic Committee President Daume rightly stated during the ceremony in Berlin, honor belongs to those who deserve it. Microphone personalities who spread lies do not belong on the television screen!

[signed]
Walther Tripps

To his credit, Jesse Owens himself never contributed to the myth-making. He repeatedly stressed the warmth of his reception in Germany and his happiness during those days in Berlin. But he couldn't prevent others from using him as a symbol, in life as well as in death, to slander Germany for motives of their own.

http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2014/02/10/3939266.htm

These all come via the IHR. 

The blood of Dresden

(This was published by Pulsemedia)
June 25, 2011

Following is an extract from Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut in which he describes the scenes of ‘obscene brutality’ he witnessed as a prisoner of war in Dresden which inspired his classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five.


Dresden before the allied bombing

It was a routine speech we got during our first day of basic training, delivered by a wiry little lieutenant: “Men, up to now you’ve been good, clean, American boys with an American’s love for sportsmanship and fair play. We’re here to change that.

“Our job is to make you the meanest, dirtiest bunch of scrappers in the history of the world. From now on, you can forget the Marquess of Queensberry rules and every other set of rules. Anything and everything goes.

“Never hit a man above the belt when you can kick him below it. Make the bastard scream. Kill him any way you can. Kill, kill, kill – do you understand?”

His talk was greeted with nervous laughter and general agreement that he was right. “Didn’t Hitler and Tojo say the Americans were a bunch of softies? Ha! They’ll find out.”

And of course, Germany and Japan did find out: a toughened-up democracy poured forth a scalding fury that could not be stopped. It was a war of reason against barbarism, supposedly, with the issues at stake on such a high plane that most of our feverish fighters had no idea why they were fighting – other than that the enemy was a bunch of bastards. A new kind of war, with all destruction, all killing approved.

A lot of people relished the idea of total war: it had a modern ring to it, in keeping with our spectacular technology. To them it was like a football game.

[Back home in America], three small-town merchants’ wives, middle-aged and plump, gave me a ride when I was hitchhiking home from Camp Atterbury. “Did you kill a lot of them Germans?” asked the driver, making cheerful small-talk. I told her I didn’t know.

This was taken for modesty. As I was getting out of the car, one of the ladies patted me on the shoulder in motherly fashion: “I’ll bet you’d like to get over and kill some of them dirty Japs now, wouldn’t you?”

We exchanged knowing winks. I didn’t tell those simple souls that I had been captured after a week at the front; and more to the point, what I knew and thought about killing dirty Germans, about total war. The reason for my being sick at heart then and now has to do with an incident that received cursory treatment in the American newspapers. In February 1945, Dresden, Germany, was destroyed, and with it over 100,000 human beings. I was there. Not many know how tough America got.

I was among a group of 150 infantry privates, captured in the Bulge breakthrough and put to work in Dresden. Dresden, we were told, was the only major German city to have escaped bombing so far. That was in January 1945. She owed her good fortune to her unwarlike countenance: hospitals, breweries, food-processing plants, surgical supply houses, ceramics, musical instrument factories and the like.

Since the war [had started], hospitals had become her prime concern. Every day hundreds of wounded came into the tranquil sanctuary from the east and west. At night, we would hear the dull rumble of distant air raids. “Chemnitz is getting it tonight,” we used to say, and speculated what it might be like to be the bright young men with their dials and cross-hairs.

“Thank heaven we’re in an ‘open city’,” we thought, and so thought the thousands of refugees – women, children and old men who came in a forlorn stream from the smouldering wreckage of Berlin, Leipzig, Breslau, Munich. They flooded the city to twice its normal population.

There was no war in Dresden. True, planes came over nearly every day and the sirens wailed, but the planes were always en route elsewhere. The alarms furnished a relief period in a tedious work day, a social event, a chance to gossip in the shelters. The shelters, in fact, were not much more than a gesture, casual recognition of the national emergency: wine cellars and basements with benches in them and sandbags blocking the windows, for the most part. There were a few more adequate bunkers in the centre of the city, close to the government offices, but nothing like the staunch subterranean fortress that rendered Berlin impervious to her daily pounding. Dresden had no reason to prepare for attack – and thereby hangs a beastly tale.

Dresden was surely among the world’s most lovely cities. Her streets were broad, lined with shade-trees. She was sprinkled with countless little parks and statuary. She had marvellous old churches, libraries, museums, theatres, art galleries, beer gardens, a zoo and a renowned university.

It was at one time a tourist’s paradise. They would be far better informed on the city’s delights than am I. But the impression I have is that in Dresden – in the physical city – were the symbols of the good life; pleasant, honest, intelligent. In the swastika’s shadow, those symbols of the dignity and hope of mankind stood waiting, monuments to truth. The accumulated treasure of hundreds of years, Dresden spoke eloquently of those things excellent in European civilisa-tion wherein our debt lies deep.

I was a prisoner, hungry, dirty and full of hate for our captors, but I loved that city and saw the blessed wonder of her past and the rich promise of her future.

In February 1945, American bombers reduced this treasure to crushed stone and embers; disembowelled her with high explosives and cremated her with incendiaries.

The atom bomb may represent a fabulous advance, but it is interesting to note that primitive TNT and thermite managed to exterminate in one bloody night more people than died in the whole London blitz. Fortress Dresden fired a dozen shots at our airmen. Once back at their bases and sipping hot coffee, they probably remarked: “Flak unusually light tonight. Well, guess it’s time to turn in.” Captured British pilots from tactical fighter units (covering frontline troops) used to chide those who had flown heavy bombers on city raids with: “How on earth did you stand the stink of boiling urine and burning perambulators?”

A perfectly routine piece of news: “Last night our planes attacked Dresden. All planes returned safely.” The only good German is a dead one: over 100,000 evil men, women, and children (the able-bodied were at the fronts) forever purged of their sins against humanity. By chance, I met a bombardier who had taken part in the attack. “We hated to do it,” he told me.

The night they came over, we spent in an underground meat locker in a slaughterhouse. We were lucky, for it was the best shelter in town. Giants stalked the earth above us. First came the soft murmur of their dancing on the outskirts, then the grumbling of their plodding towards us, and finally the ear-splitting crashes of their heels upon us – and thence to the outskirts again. Back and forth they swept: saturation bombing.

“I screamed and I wept and I clawed the walls of our shelter,” an old lady told me. “I prayed to God to ‘please, please, please, dear God, stop them’. But he didn’t hear me. No power could stop them. On they came, wave after wave. There was no way we could surrender; no way to tell them we couldn’t stand it any more. There was nothing anyone could do but sit and wait for morning.” Her daughter and grandson were killed.

Our little prison was burnt to the ground. We were to be evacuated to an outlying camp occupied by South African prisoners. Our guards were a melancholy lot, aged Volkssturmers and disabled veterans. Most of them were Dresden residents and had friends and families somewhere in the holocaust. A corporal, who had lost an eye after two years on the Russian front, ascertained before we marched that his wife, his two children and both of his parents had been killed. He had one cigarette. He shared it with me.


Dresden after the allied bombing

Our march to new quarters took us to the city’s edge. It was impossible to believe that anyone had survived in its heart. Ordinarily, the day would have been cold, but occasional gusts from the colossal inferno made us sweat. And ordinarily, the day would have been clear and bright, but an opaque and towering cloud turned noon to twilight.

A grim procession clogged the outbound highways; people with blackened faces streaked with tears, some bearing wounded, some bearing dead. They gathered in the fields. No one spoke. A few with Red Cross armbands did what they could for the casualties.

Settled with the South Africans, we enjoyed a week without work. At the end of it, communications were reestablished with higher headquarters and we were ordered to hike seven miles to the area hardest hit.

Nothing in the district had escaped the fury. A city of jagged building shells, of splintered statuary and shattered trees; every vehicle stopped, gnarled and burnt, left to rust or rot in the path of the frenzied might. The only sounds other than our own were those of falling plaster and their echoes.

I cannot describe the desolation properly, but I can give an idea of how it made us feel, in the words of a delirious British soldier in a makeshift POW hospital: “It’s frightenin’, I tell you. I would walk down one of them bloody streets and feel a thousand eyes on the back of me ’ead. I would ’ear ’em whis-perin’ behind me. I would turn around to look at ’em and there wouldn’t be a bloomin’ soul in sight. You can feel ’em and you can ’ear ’em but there’s never anybody there.” We knew what he said was so.

For “salvage” work, we were divided into small crews, each under a guard. Our ghoulish mission was to search for bodies. It was rich hunting that day and the many thereafter. We started on a small scale – here a leg, there an arm, and an occasional baby – but struck a mother lode before noon.

We cut our way through a basement wall to discover a reeking hash of over 100 human beings. Flame must have swept through before the building’s collapse sealed the exits, because the flesh of those within resembled the texture of prunes. Our job, it was explained, was to wade into the shambles and bring forth the remains. Encouraged by cuffing and guttural abuse, wade in we did. We did exactly that, for the floor was covered with an unsavoury broth from burst water mains and viscera.

A number of victims, not killed outright, had attempted to escape through a narrow emergency exit. At any rate, there were several bodies packed tightly into the passageway. Their leader had made it halfway up the steps before he was buried up to his neck in falling brick and plaster. He was about 15, I think.

It is with some regret that I here besmirch the nobility of our airmen, but, boys, you killed an appalling lot of women and children. The shelter I have described and innumerable others like it were filled with them. We had to exhume their bodies and carry them to mass funeral pyres in the parks, so I know.

The funeral pyre technique was abandoned when it became apparent how great was the toll. There was not enough labour to do it nicely, so a man with a flamethrower was sent down instead, and he cremated them where they lay. Burnt alive, suffocated, crushed – men, women, and children indiscriminately killed.

For all the sublimity of the cause for which we fought, we surely created a Belsen of our own. The method was impersonal, but the result was equally cruel and heartless. That, I am afraid, is a sickening truth.

When we had become used to the darkness, the odour and the carnage, we began musing as to what each of the corpses had been in life. It was a sordid game: “Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief . . .” Some had fat purses and jewellery, others had precious foodstuffs. A boy had his dog still leashed to him.

Renegade Ukrainians in German uniform were in charge of our operations in the shelters proper. They were roaring drunk from adjacent wine cellars and seemed to enjoy their job hugely. It was a profitable one, for they stripped each body of valuables before we carried it to the street. Death became so commonplace that we could joke about our dismal burdens and cast them about like so much garbage.

Not so with the first of them, especially the young: we had lifted them on to the stretchers with care, laying them out with some semblance of funeral dignity in their last resting place before the pyre. But our awed and sorrowful propriety gave way, as I said, to rank callousness. At the end of a grisly day, we would smoke and survey the impressive heap of dead accumulated. One of us flipped his cigarette butt into the pile: “Hell’s bells,” he said, “I’m ready for Death any time he wants to come after me.”

A few days after the raid, the sirens screamed again. The listless and heartsick survivors were showered this time with leaflets. I lost my copy of the epic, but remember that it ran something like this: “To the people of Dresden: we were forced to bomb your city because of the heavy military traffic your railroad facilities have been carrying. We realise that we haven’t always hit our objectives. Destruction of anything other than military objectives was unintentional, unavoidable fortunes of war.”

That explained the slaughter to everyone’s satisfaction, I am sure, but it aroused no little contempt. It is a fact that 48 hours after the last B-17 had droned west for a well-earned rest, labour battalions had swarmed over the damaged rail yards and restored them to nearly normal service. None of the rail bridges over the Elbe was knocked out of commission. Bomb-sight manufacturers should blush to know that their marvellous devices laid bombs down as much as three miles wide of what the military claimed to be aiming for.

The leaflet should have said: “We hit every blessed church, hospital, school, museum, theatre, your university, the zoo, and every apartment building in town, but we honestly weren’t trying hard to do it. C’est la guerre. So sorry. Besides, saturation bombing is all the rage these days, you know.”

There was tactical significance: stop the railroads. An excellent manoeuvre, no doubt, but the technique was horrible. The planes started kicking high explosives and incendiaries through their bomb-bays at the city limits, and for all the pattern their hits presented, they must have been briefed by a Ouija board.

Tabulate the loss against the gain. Over 100,000 noncombatants and a magnificent city destroyed by bombs dropped wide of the stated objectives: the railroads were knocked out for roughly two days. The Germans counted it the greatest loss of life suffered in any single raid. The death of Dresden was a bitter tragedy, needlessly and wilfully executed. The killing of children – “Jerry” children or “Jap” children, or whatever enemies the future may hold for us – can never be justified.

The facile reply to great groans such as mine is the most hateful of all clichés, “fortunes of war”, and another: “They asked for it. All they understand is force.”

Who asked for it? The only thing who understands is force? Believe me, it is not easy to rationalise the stamping out of vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored when gathering up babies in bushel baskets or helping a man dig where he thinks his wife may be buried.

Certainly, enemy military and industrial installations should have been blown flat, and woe unto those foolish enough to seek shelter near them. But the “Get Tough America” policy, the spirit of revenge, the approbation of all destruction and killing, have earned us a name for obscene brutality.

Our leaders had a carte blanche as to what they might or might not destroy. Their mission was to win the war as quickly as possible; and while they were admirably trained to do just that, their decisions on the fate of certain priceless world heirlooms – in one case, Dresden – were not always judicious. When, late in the war, with the Wehrmacht breaking up on all fronts, our planes were sent to destroy this last major city, I doubt if the question was asked: “How will this tragedy benefit us, and how will that benefit compare with the ill-effects in the long run?”

Dresden, a beautiful city, built in the art spirit, symbol of an admirable heritage, so antiNazi that Hitler visited it but twice during his whole reign, food and hospital centre so bitterly needed now – ploughed under and salt strewn in the furrows.

There can be no doubt that the allies fought on the side of right and the Germans and Japanese on the side of wrong. World war two was fought for near-holy motives. But I stand convinced that the brand of justice in which we dealt, wholesale bombings of civilian populations, was blasphemous. That the enemy did it first has nothing to do with the moral problem. What I saw of our air war, as the European conflict neared an end, had the earmarks of being an irrational war for war’s sake. Soft citizens of the American democracy had learnt to kick a man below the belt and make the bastard scream.

The occupying Russians, when they discovered that we were Americans, embraced us and congratulated us on the complete desolation our planes had wrought. We accepted their congratulations with good grace and proper modesty, but I felt then as I feel now, that I would have given my life to save Dresden for the world’s generations to come. That is how everyone should feel about every city on earth.


© Kurt Vonnegut Jr Trust 2008

APOCALYPSE AT DRESDEN

by R. H. S. Crossman     (Esquire Magazine - November 1963)

The long suppressed story of the worst massacre in the history of the world.

If the British Commonwealth and the United States last a thousand years, men may say that this was their darkest hour.

Were all the crimes against humanity committed during World War II the work of Hitler's underlings? That was certainly the impression created by the fact that only Germans were brought to trial at Nüremburg. Alas! It is a false impression. We all now know that in the terrible struggle waged between the Red Army and the German Wehrmacht, the Russians displayed their fair share of insensate inhumanity. What is less widely recognized -- because the truth, until only recently, has been deliberately suppressed -- is that the Western democracies were responsible for the most senseless single act of mass murder committed in the whole course of World War II.

The devastation of Dresden in February, 1945, was one of those crimes against humanity whose authors would have been arraigned at Nüremberg if that Court had not been perverted into the instrument of Allied justice. Whether measured in terms of material destruction or by loss of human life, this "conventional" air raid was far more devastating than either of the two atomic raids against Japan that were to follow it a few months later. Out of 28,410 houses in the inner city of Dresden, 24,866 were destroyed; and the area of total destruction extended over eleven square miles.

As for the death roll, the population, as we shall see, had been well nigh doubled by a last-minute influx of refugees flying before the Red Army; and even the German authorities -- usually so pedantic in their estimates -- gave up trying to work out the precise total after some 35,000 bodies had been recognized, labeled and buried. We do know, however, that the 1,250,000 people in the city on the night of the raid had been reduced to 368,619 by the time it was over; and it seems certain that the death roll must have greatly exceeded the 71,879 at Hiroshima. Indeed, the German authorities were probably correct who, a few days after the attack, put the total somewhere between 120,000 and 150,000.

How was this horror permitted to happen? Was it a deliberate and considered act of policy, or was it the result of one of those ghastly misunderstandings or miscalculations that sometimes occur in the heat of battle? There are many who will say that these are academic questions belonging to history. I do not agree. Of course, what happened at Dresden belongs to the prenuclear epoch. But it has a terrible relevance to the defense strategy which the Western democracies are operating today. If the crime of Dresden is not to be repeated on a vaster scale, we must find out why it was committed. That, at least, has been my feeling, and there are two special reasons which have prompted me to go on investigating the facts for so many years. In the first place, I was myself involved in a quite minor capacity in the decisions which preceded it. When the Germans overran France in 1940 and the Chamberlain Government in London was replaced by the Churchill Government, there was a purge in Whitehall. Unexpectedly I found myself recruited to a secret department attached to the Foreign Office, with the title "Director of Psychological Warfare against Germany." My main task was to plan the overt and subvert propaganda which we hoped would rouse occupied Europe against Hitler. But I soon found myself caught up in a bitter top-secret controversy about the role of bomber offensive in the breaking of German morale.

The Prime Minister was haunted by fears that the bloodletting of the Somme and Passchendaele in World War I would have to be repeated if we tried to defeat Hitler by landing and liberating Europe. So the Air Marshals found it easy to persuade him that if they were given a free hand they could make these casualties unnecessary by smashing the German home front into submission. What Hitler wreaked against London and Coventry, our bombers would repay a thousandfold, until the inhabitants of Berlin, Hamburg and every other city in Germany had been systematically "de-housed" and pulverized into surrender. To achieve this, the Air Marshals demanded that top priority in war production should be given not to preparations for the second front, but to the construction of huge numbers of four-engined night bombers.

Eagerly Sir Winston Churchill accepted their advice, with the backing of his whole Cabinet. The only warning voices raised were those of a number of very influential scientists who, by means of careful calculations, threw serious doubt on the physical possibility of wreaking the degree of destruction required. Their mathematical arguments were reinforced by the studies we psychological warriors had made of British morale in the blitz. Assuming, wisely as it worked out, that the German people would behave under air attack at least as bravely as the British people, we demonstrated that the scale of frightfulness our bombers could employ against German cities would almost certainly strengthen civilian morale, and go stimulate the war production that it was intended to weaken.

Early in 1941, these arguments were finally swept aside, and Britain was completely committed to the bomber offensive. By the time it reached its first climax in the raid on Hamburg, however, I had been transferred to Eisenhower's staff. I was happy, first in North Africa and then in SHAEF, to work with an Anglo-American staff who did not trouble to conceal how much they detested the hysterical mania for destruction and the cold-blooded delight in pounding the German home front to pieces displayed by the big-bomb boys. Indeed, one of my pleasantest memories is the attitude General Walter Bedell Smith displayed a few weeks after the Dresden raid. Sir Winston had accused "Ike" of being soft to the German civilians and ordered him to use terror tactics in order to panic them out of their homes and onto the roads, and so to block the German retreat. No one contradicted Sir Winston, but as soon as his back was turned, we were instructed to work out a directive that would prevent him getting his way.

On V.E. Day, when I flew back to Britain in order to stand as a Labour Candidate in Coventry, I assumed with relief that my concern with bombing was over. But I was wrong. Within years, Coventry -- the main victim of the Luftwaffe -- had "twinned" itself with Dresden, the main victim of the R.A.F. And when Germany was divided and it became difficult for Westerners to go behind the Iron Curtain, I had a standing invitation to visit Dresden as the guest of its Lord Mayor. I have done so frequently, and on each occasion I have tried to match the inside experience of bombing strategy I acquired during the war with firsthand information from its victims "on the other side of the hill." I have also checked the published accounts of the destruction of Dresden available in Western and Eastern Germany, against the official History of the Strategic Bombing Offensive published only two years ago in Britain. These researches have left me in no doubt whatever how Dresden was destroyed, why it was destroyed, and what lessons we must draw from its destruction.

The prelude to the bombing of Dresden was sounded by the Russian communique of January 12, 1945, which announced that the Red Army had resumed its offensive all along the front, and was advancing into Prussia and Silesia. This news could hardly have been more embarrassing, either to General Dwight D. Eisenhower whose armies were still recovering from the humiliating effects of General Karl von Rundstedt's Christmas offensive in the Ardennes, or to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill who were now preparing for the Yalta Conference due to start on February 4. Since the post war settlement was bound to be discussed with Josef Stalin in terms not of principle but of pure politics, Sir Winston felt that the impression created by the Red Army's occupation of Eastern Europe and advance deep into Germany must somehow be countered. But how? The obvious answer was by a demonstration right up against the Red Army of Western air power. What was required, he decided, was a thunderclap of Anglo-American aerial annihilation so frightful in the destruction it wreaked that even Stalin would be impressed.

January 25 was the day when the decision was taken that resulted in the blotting out of Dresden. Until then, the capital of Saxony had been considered so famous a cultural monument and so futile a military target that even the Commander in Chief of Bombing Command, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, had given it hardly a thought. All its flak batteries had been removed for use on the Eastern front; and the Dresden authorities had taken none of the precautions, either in the strengthening of air-raid shelters, or in the provision of concrete bunkers that had so startlingly reduced casualties in other German cities subjected to Allied attack. Instead, they had encouraged rumors that it would be spared either because Churchill had a niece living there, or else because it was reserved by the Allies as their main occupation quarters. These rumors were strengthened by the knowledge that no less than some 26,000 Allied prisoners were quartered in and around the city, and that its population had doubled to well over a million in recent weeks by streams of refugees from the East.

All this Sir Winston knew on January 26. But early on that winter morning he had learned that the Russian Army had crossed the Oder at Breslav and was now only sixty miles from Dresden. Angrily he rang up Sir Archibald Sinclair, his Secretary of State for Air, and asked him what plans he had for "basting the Germans -- in their retreat from Breslav." Sir Archibald, whose main function it had been to protect Bomber Command from public criticism by a series of lying assurances that scrupulous care was taken to bomb only military targets, remained true to type. He prevaricated over the phone and next day replied that in the view of the Air Staff "intervention in winter weather at very long range over Eastern Germany would be difficult." To this the Premier replied with a memorandum so offensive in its controlled fury that the Minister and the Air Staff, never noted for their moral courage, were stampeded into action. At once, orders were given to concert with the American Eighth Air Force a plan for wiping out Leipzig, Chemnitz and Dresden.

Sir Winston and his staff left for Yalta, where it became only too clear that the Premier's forebodings were justified. Strengthened by his victories, Stalin pressed his political demands upon a President now weakened and very near his death, and a Prime Minister isolated and ill at ease. When suggestions were made that the Western bombing should be used to help the Red Army advance, the Russian generals were chilly and unresponsive. Nevertheless, Sir Arthur Harris had already selected Dresden, now only sixty miles from the front, for destruction. And day by day, Sir Winston hoped that he would be able to impress Stalin with the demonstration of what Allied air power could achieve so near the Russian allies. But the weather was against him. The conference broke up on the eleventh, and it was only three days later -- long after the conference when it could no longer have any effect on the negotiations -- that the R.A.F.'s spokesman in London proudly announced the destruction of Dresden.

We must now turn back and see what the airmen had been planning. Sir Arthur Harris was quick to seize the opportunity presented by the Prime Minister's insistence that Bomber Command must make its presence felt in Eastern Germany. Since 1941, by a slow process of trial and error which had cost him many thousands of air crews, he had perfected his new technique of "saturation precision bombardment." First, daylight operations over Germany had been discarded as too costly; then, with raiding confined to nighttime target bombing, after a long period of quite imaginary successes, had been abandoned as too wildly inaccurate. The decision was taken to set each city center on fire and destroy the residential areas, sector by sector.

In this new kind of incendiary attack, highly trained special crews were sent ahead to delineate a clearly defined target area with marker flares, nicknamed by the Germans "Christmas trees." When this had been done, all that remained for the rest of the bomber forces was to lay its bomb carpet so thickly that the defense, the A.R.P., the police, and the fire services would all be overwhelmed.

This fire-raising technique was first used with complete success in the great raid on Hamburg. Thousands of individual fires conglomerated into a single blaze, creating the famous "fire-storms" effect, first described by the Police President of the city in a secret report to Hitler that soon fell into Allied hands:

"As the result of the confluence of a number of fires, the air above is heated to such an extent that in consequence of its reduced specific gravity, a violent updraft occurs which causes great suction of the surrounding air radiating from the center of the fire... The suction of the fire storm in the larger of these area fire zones has the effect of attracting the already overheated air in smaller area fire zones... One effect of this phenomenon was that the fire in the smaller area fire zones was fanned as by a bellows as the central suction of the biggest and fiercest fires caused increased and accelerated attraction of the surrounding masses of fresh air. In this way all the area fires became united in one vast fire."

The Hamburg fire storm probably killed some 40,000 people: three-quarters by carbon-monoxide poisoning as a result of the oxygen being sucked out of the air; the rest by asphyxiation.

As soon as he heard that permission had been given to destroy Dresden, Air Marshal Harris decided to achieve this by a deliberately created fire storm, and to increase the effect he persuaded the Americans to split the available bombers into three groups. The task of the first wave was to create the fire storm. Three hours later, a second and much heavier night force of British bombers was timed to arrive when the German fighter and flak defenses would be off guard, and the rescue squads on their way. Its task was to spread the fire storm. Finally, the next morning, a daylight attack by the Eighth Air Force was to concentrate on the outlying areas, the new city.

Two-pronged attacks had been successfully carried out during 1944 against a number of German towns. The three-pronged attack employed at Dresden was unique and uniquely successful. The first wave, consisting of some two hundred fifty night bombers, arrived precisely on time and duly created a fire storm. The second force -- more than twice as strong and carrying an enormous load of incendiaries -- also reached the target punctually, and, undisturbed by flak or night fighters, spent thirty-four minutes carefully spreading the fires outside the first target area. Finally, to complete the devastation, some two hundred eleven Flying Fortresses began the third attack at 11:30 a.m. on the following morning. Without exaggeration, the commanders could claim that the Dresden raid had "gone according to plan." Everything which happened in the stricken city had been foreseen and planned with meticulous care.

So far, we have been looking at the Dresden raid from "our own side of the hill" -- considering the point of view of Mr. Churchill, concerned to create the best impression possible on Stalin at the Yalta Conference, and of Air Marshal Harris, eager to demonstrate the technique for creating a fire storm. But what was the impact on the Dresdeners? Inevitably the raid has created its own folklore. Thousands of those who survived it now live in Western Germany, each with his own memory to retail to the visitor. In Dresden itself, the city fathers have now established an official Communist version, of which the main purpose clearly is to put the main blame on the "American imperialists" (we are solemnly told, for instance, that the R.A.F. was directed to special targets in the city by an American capitalist whose villa on the far side of the Elbe is now a luxury club for favored Communist artists). Nevertheless, anyone who bothers to read the books published in both Germanies and to compare the stories he hears from Communist and anti-Communist witnesses soon discovers that not only the outline of events but the details of the main episodes are agreed beyond dispute.

Dresden is one of those German cities which normally devotes Shrove Tuesday to Carnival festivities. But on February 13, 1945, with the Red Army sixty miles away, the mood was somber. The refugees, who were crowded into every house, each had his horror story about Russian atrocities. In many parts of the city, and particularly around the railway station, thousands of latecomers who could find no corner in which to sleep were camping in the bitter cold of the open streets. The only signs of Carnival spirit, when the sirens sounded at 9:55 p.m., were the full house at the circus and a few gangs of little girls wandering about in fancy dress. Though no one took the danger of a raid very seriously, orders must be obeyed and the population just had time to get down to its shelters before the first bombs fell at nine minutes past the hour.

Twenty-four minutes later, the last British bomber was on its way back to England, and the inner city of Dresden was ablaze. Since there were no steel structures in any of its apartment houses, the floors quickly capsized, and half an hour after the raid was over the fire storm transformed thousands of individual blazes into a sea of flames, ripping off the roofs, tossing trees, cars and lorries into the air, and simultaneously sucking the oxygen out of the air-raid shelters.

Most of those who remained below ground were to die painlessly, their bodies first brilliantly tinted bright orange and blue, and then, as the heat grew intense, either totally incinerated or melted into a thick liquid sometimes three or four feet deep. But there were others who, when the bombing stopped, rushed upstairs. Some of them stopped to collect their belongings before escaping, and they were caught by the second raid. But some 10,000 fled to the great open space of the Grosse Garten, the magnificent royal park of Dresden, nearly one and a half square miles in all.
Here they were caught by the second raid, which started without an air-raid warning, at 1:22 a.m. Far heavier than the first -- there were twice as many bombers with a far heavier load of incendiaries -- its target markers had been deliberately placed in order to spread the fires into the black rectangle which was all the airmen could see of the Grosse Garten. Within minutes the fire storm was raging across the grass, ripping up some trees and littering the branches of others with clothes, bicycles and dismembered limbs that remained hanging for days afterward.

Equally terrible was the carnage in the great square outside the main railway station. Here, the thousands camping out had been reinforced by other thousands escaping from the inner city, while within the station a dozen trains, when the first sirens blew, had been shunted to the marshaling yards and escaped all damage. After the first raid stopped, these trains were shunted back to the station platforms -- just in time to receive the full force of the bombardment. For weeks, mangled bodies were littered inside and outside the station building. Below ground, the scene was even more macabre. The restaurants, cellars and tunnels could easily have been turned into effective bombproof shelters. The authorities had not bothered to do so, and of the two thousand crowded in the dark, one hundred were burned alive and five hundred asphyxiated before the doors could be opened and the survivors pulled out.

The timing of the second raid, just three hours after the first, not only insured that the few night fighters in the area were off their guard, but it also created the chaos intended and effectively interrupted all rescue work. For many miles around, military detachments, rescue squads and fire brigades started on their way to the stricken city, and most of them were making their way through the suburbs when the bombs began to fall. Those who turned back were soon swallowed up in the mad rush of panic evacuation. Most of those who proceeded toward the center perished in the fire storm.

The most terrible scenes in the inner city took place in the magnificent old market square, the Altmarkt. Soon after the first raid finished, this great square was jam-packed with panting survivors. When the second raid struck, they could scarcely move until someone remembered the huge concrete emergency water tank that had been constructed to one side. This tank was a hundred by fifty yards by six feet deep. There was a sudden stampede to escape the heat of the fire storm by plunging into it. Those who did so forgot that its sloping sides were slippery, with no handholds. The nonswimmers sank to the bottom, dragging the swimmers with them. When the rescuers reached the Altmarkt five days later, they found the tank filled with bloated corpses, while the rest of the square was littered with recumbent or seated figures so shrunk by the incineration that thirty of them could be taken away in a single bathtub.

But perhaps the most memorable horror of this second raid occurred in the hospitals. In the last year of the war, Dresden had become a hospital city, with many of its schools converted into temporary wards. Of its nineteen hospitals, sixteen were badly damaged and three, including the main maternity clinic, totally destroyed. Thousands of crippled survivors were dragged by their nurses to the banks of the River Elbe, where they were laid in rows on the grass to wait for the daylight. But when it came, there was another horror. Punctually at 11:30 a.m., the third wave of bombers, the two hundred eleven American Flying Fortresses, began their attack. Once again, the area of destruction was extended across the city. But what the survivors all remember were the scores of Mustang fighters diving low over the bodies huddled on the banks of the Elbe, as well as on the larger lawns of the Grosse Garten, in order to shoot them up. Other Mustangs chose as their targets the serried crowds that blocked every road out of Dresden. No one knows how many women and children were actually killed by those dive-bombing attacks. But in the legend of Dresden destruction, they have become the symbol of Yankee sadism and brutality, and the inquirer is never permitted to forget that many choirboys of one of Dresden's most famous churches were among the victims.

For five days and nights, the city burned and no attempt was made to enter it. Then at last the authorities began to grapple with the crisis and to estimate the damage. Of Dresden's five theatres, all had gone. Of her fifty-four churches, nine were totally destroyed and thirty-eight seriously damaged. Of her one hundred thirty-nine schools, sixty-nine ceased to exist and fifty were badly hit. The great zoo which lay just beyond the Grosse Garten had been struck in the second raid, and the panicked animals had mingled with the desperate survivors. Now they were rounded up and shot. Those who escaped from the prisons, when they too were blown up, had better fortune: they all managed to get away, including a number of brave anti-Nazis.

But some things had survived destruction. The few factories Dresden possessed were outside the city center, and soon were at work again. So too was the railway system. Within three days, indeed, military trains were running once again right through the city, and the marshaling yards -- untouched by a bomb -- were in full operation. It was as though an ironical fate had decided that the first fire storm deliberately created by mortal man should destroy everything worth preserving, and leave untouched anything of military value.

In their salvage work, the Nazis relied on some 25,000 Allied prisoners of war, concentrated in and around the city. Dresden, as was known very well in London and Washington, was not only a hospital city but a prisoner-of-war city -- still another reason why the authorities assumed it would not be attacked. Faced with the appalling scenes of suffering, the prisoners seemed to have worked with a will, even after some of their fellow-prisoners had been shot under martial law for looting.

What Dresdeners chiefly remember, of these first days after the raid, is the disposal of the bodies. Throughout the war, German local authorities had been extremely careful to show great respect for death, enabling relatives wherever possible to identify and to bury their own dead. At first, this procedure was followed in Dresden. But weeks after the raid there were still thousands of unopened cellars under the smoldering ruins, and the air was thick with the fog and sweet stench of rotting flesh. An S.S. commander made the decision that the daily procession of horse-drawn biers from the city to the cemeteries outside must be stopped. If plague was to be prevented, the rest of the corpses must be disposed of more speedily. Hurriedly, a monstrous funeral pyre was constructed in the Altmarkt. Steel shutters from one of Dresden's biggest department stores were laid across broken slabs of ironstone. On this macabre gridiron, the bodies were piled with straw between each layer, soaked with gasoline and set ablaze. Nine thousand corpses were disposed of in this way, and eight cubic meters of ash were then loaded into gasoline containers and buried in a graveyard outside the city, twenty-five feet wide and fifteen feet deep.

If it was expected in either London or Washington that the destruction of Dresden, despite its negligible military significance, would at least shatter German morale, this hope was soon to be disappointed -- thanks to Paul Joseph Goebbels' skillful exploitation of the disaster. For days, the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin poured out, both in its foreign and in its home services, a stream of eyewitness accounts of the stricken city, backed up by moralistic attacks on the cold-blooded sadism of the men who created the fire storm. In his secret propaganda, Dr. Goebbels did even better by leaking to the neutral press a fictitious top-secret estimate that the casualties had probably reached 260,000. As a result of this Nazi propaganda campaign, the German people were convinced that the Anglo-American forces were indeed bent on their destruction. And their morale was once again stiffened by terror of defeat.

Disturbed by the success of Dr. Goebbels' propaganda, the airmen decided to call a press conference on February 16 at SHAEF. As a result of the briefing, given by a British Air Commodore, Associated Press cabled a special dispatch all over the world, announcing "the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombings of German population centers as a ruthless expedient of hastening Hitler's doom." The correspondents added that the Dresden attack was "for the avowed purpose of heaping more confusion on Nazi road and rail traffic, and to sap German morale."

When this dispatch reached London, it was immediately censored on the ground that officially the R.A.F. only bombed military targets, and the attribution to it of terror raids was a vicious piece of Nazi propaganda. In the United States, where the dispatch was widely publicized, the embarrassment caused to the Administration was acute, since the Air Force spokesmen had seldom failed to point out the difference between the indiscriminate R.A.F. night attacks and the selective and precise nature of the daylight bombing carried out by the Eighth Air Force.

In order to stop awkward questions, General George C. Marshall then gave a public assurance that the bombing on Dresden had taken place at Russian request. Although no evidence was produced either then or since for the truth of this statement, it was accepted uncritically and has since found its way into a number of official American histories.

But suppression was not sufficient to stem the rising wave of public protest. Coming as it did when the war was virtually over, the wanton destruction of the Florence of the North and the mass murder of so many of its inhabitants was too much, even for a world public opinion fed for years on strident war propaganda. The publication of a lengthy report by a Swedish correspondent caused a revulsion of feeling.

Within a few weeks, this revulsion against indiscriminate bombing had affected even Sir Winston Churchill. Up till now, the critics in the British Parliament of area bombing had been a small derided minority. Suddenly, their influence began to grow, and on March 28, Sir Winston in response to this new mood, wrote to the Chief of the Air Staff, beginning with the remarkable words:

"It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed."

Since the Premier had taken the lead in demanding the switch from target to area bombing and had actively encouraged each new advance proposed by Air Marshal Harris in the technique of air obliteration, this memorandum could hardly have been less felicitously phrased. It provided damning evidence that so long as terror bombing was popular, the politicians would take credit for it; but now that public opinion was revolting against its senseless brutality, they were only too obviously running for cover and leaving the air force to take the blame.

So outraged was the Chief of the Air Staff that on this occasion he stood up to Sir Winston, forcing him to withdraw the memorandum, and to substitute for it what the official historians -- who narrate this incident in full -- have described as "a somewhat more discreetly and fairly worded document."

But in Britain at least the damage had already been done. From that moment, Bomber Command, which for years had been the object of adulation, became increasingly discredited, and the nickname of its Commander in Chief changed from "Bomber" Harris to "Butcher" Harris. Although the bomber crews, suffered far the heaviest casualties of any of the British armed services, no campaign medal was struck to distinguish their part in winning the war. In his victory broadcast of May 13, 1945, Sir Winston omitted any tribute to them, and after the Labour Government came to power, Earl Attlee was just as vindictive. In January, 1946, he omitted their Commander in Chief from his victory honors list. Sir Arthur Harris accepted the insult loyally, and on February 13 sailed to exile in South Africa.

The Eighth Air Force was treated more gently, both by the politicians in Washington and by the American public. Its airmen received their share of campaign medals, and to this day it has never been officially admitted that by the end of the war they were bombing city centers and residential areas as wantonly by day as the R.A.F. was by night. There was, however, an important difference between the public image of the two Air Forces. The British Cabinet, having secretly decided to sanction indiscriminate terror bombing, concealed this decision from the British public and therefore compelled Bomber Command to operate under cover of a sustained and deliberate lie. In the case of the Eighth Air Force, self-deception took place of lying. Instead of doing one thing and saying another, the myth was maintained that on every mission the Flying Fortresses aimed exclusively at military targets, and this is still part of the official American legend of World War II. It was because it was impossible to square this legend with what had happened at Dresden that General Marshall had to excuse American protestation in that holocaust on the fictitious ground that the Russians had requested the attack.

I leave it to the reader to decide which form was more nauseating -- British lying or American self-deception. For what concerns me in this inquiry is not the public image of Anglo-American idealism that was shattered by the Dresden raid, but the crime against humanity which was perpetrated. That it was decided to bomb a city of no military value simply in order to impress Stalin. That a fire storm was deliberately created in order to kill as many people as possible, and that the survivors were machine-gunned as they lay helpless in the open -- all this has been established without a shadow of a doubt. What remains is to ask how decent, civilized politicians enthusiastically approved such mass murder and decent, civilized servicemen conscientiously carried it out.

The usual explanation -- or excuse -- is that strategic bombing was only adopted by the Western powers as a method of retaliation in a total war started by totalitarians. This is at best a half-truth. The Nazis and the Communists dabbled in terror raids on civilian targets. But they were old-fashioned and imperialist enough to hold that the aim of war is not to destroy the enemy, but to defeat his armies in the field, to occupy his country, and exploit its resources. That is why both Stalin and Hitler preferred to use their air power, not as a separate weapon of unlimited war, but as a tactical adjunct to conventional land and sea operations. In fact, the only nations which applied the theory of unlimited war really systematically were the two great Western democracies. Both created a gigantic strategic air force and carried out quite separate but eventually unsuccessful attempts to defeat Germany by aerial annihilation.

Yet, at first sight, terror bombing seems to me, as an Englishman, a form of warfare repugnant to our national temperament, and utterly unsuited to an island people, itself hopelessly vulnerable to indiscriminate air attack. And I suspect that most Americans also feel that it does not conform with the traditions of the American way of life.

Why then did both nations adopt it?

I believe that the motive which prompted us was a very characteristic Anglo-Saxon desire to defend ourselves without preparing for war to win the fruits of victory; without actual fighting, and (if this proved impossible) at least to keep casualties down to a minimum among our own soldiers. Not only do British and American fighting men demand a far higher standard of living than most of their enemies. Even more important, they insist that they should not be required to risk death in close combat if remote-control methods of destroying the enemy are available. That, I am sure, is the main reason why our politicians and generals felt morally justified in conducting a bomber offensive against Germany which culminated in the destruction of Dresden.

Once we see this, we are no longer surprised that, as soon as an atomic bomb had been perfected, President Truman decided, with the full approval of the British Prime Minister, to use it. In this way, he could finish off the Japanese without a landing that would have cost thousands of American lives!

The moral I draw from the terrible story of Dresden is that the atom bombs employed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not inaugurate a new epoch in the history of war. They merely provided a new method of achieving victory without the casualties involved in land fighting far more deadly and far more economical than the thousand-bomber raid of World War II. Here, our politicians and generals felt, was the ultimate weapon which would enable the democracies to disarm and to relax -- yet deter aggression.

Alas! Nearly twenty years of bitter experience have taught us that the world was not made safe for democracy either by the "conventional" fire storm created by the bombers in Dresden, or by the atomic fire storm of Hiroshima. Even in modern war, crime does not always pay!

Again, it's Valentine's Day and also Dresden Day and my contribution to the festivities is to re-post this:

The famous photograph in which August Schreitmueller's sculpture 'Goodness' surveys the city

February 14th is Valentine's Day when we all remember the ones we love. It's also in the middle of three days when, in 1945 the German city of Dresden was bombed by the Anglo-Americans. On a visit to Germany with my friend Dr. Francis Clark-Lowes I visited the city. We trod the tourist route so my guess is that we saw what Dresden wanted us to see. But it was only in the Altmarkt that we saw any public memorial to the bombing. It was a partially obscured metal plate on the ground which marked the spot where, to cope with disposing of the bodies, the citizens of Dresden had set up a huge funeral pyre. The inscription read:

"After the air-raids of 13/14 February 1945 on Dresden, it was at this place that the bodies of 6865 people were burned."

Then engraved in stone

"Germany brought war to the world and here it was brought back to Germany.”

Not 50 meters away in the Kreuzkirche was an exhibition - “The Yellow Star” about the fate of Dresden’s Jews – and through it passed a long stream of visitors all shaking their heads in the now-obligatory expression of Holocaust-horror and dutifully inscribing their “never agains” in the visitors book.

So how is it that not fifty meters from where 6865 of their own citizens were incinerated, the citizens of Dresden chose only to remember their Jews?

Abe Foxman is retiring after a glittering career. Kevin MacDonald in the Occidental Observer gives him a well-deserved send-off.