Dresden, 1945

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Michael Kenny
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Re: Dresden, 1945

#331

Post by Michael Kenny » 17 Mar 2017, 13:07

sandeepmukherjee196 wrote:Only..in this case ..there is no theory being driven. Only a query as to why serious historians are cherry picking the evidence. Why is this piece of paper being completely disregarded...
It is not being disregarded. It is being placed in context along with lots of other bits of information so a balanced and reasoned 'guess' can be made as to the actual numbers. The only cherry-picking I detect is from 'revisionist' members who have a track record of denying and excusing court proven German War Crimes. The same people who falsely claim the bombing of Dresden was a war crime for instance.

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Re: Dresden, 1945

#332

Post by redcoat » 17 Mar 2017, 13:56

Sid Guttridge wrote:Hi Histan,

As I understand it, about 25,000 bodies were initially recovered. Based on previous experience from other raids, there were probably around 10,000 unrecovered bodies. This gives the total of around 35,000. This is according to the German rule of thumb of the time
The final report of the Dresden police and SS a month after the raid put the estimated figure of recovered bodies at 20,204.


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Re: Dresden, 1945

#333

Post by Peter » 17 Mar 2017, 14:57

The Black Rabbit of Inlé wrote:RJ Evans wrote his his expert report for Penguin-Lipstadt:
[In his 1965 book the Major of Dresden Walter] Weidauer added that far from being destroyed, the death register which Voigt claimed showed 80,000 to 90,000 dead was still extant in the Dresden Town Hall with a highest card number of 31,102 for an unidentified body.
Justice Gray claimed in his judgment [11:43]:
The register is still in Dresden Town Hall. Deaths by reason of the bombing are recorded on numbered cards. The highest card number for an unidentified body was 31,102.
RJ Evans also quotes two letters to Irving written in 1965 by Theo Miller, a member of the Dresden Clearing Staff [Aufräumungsstab], who insisted that the death toll could not have exceeded 50,000:
At the wall of my bunker [the Staff Quarter in the bunkers under the Brühl’sche Terrasse] I had pinned up a big map of the town. Every evening the commanders of rescue units had to report on the figures of corpses found and on the shelters which had been cleared of deads [sic]. The streets and shelters which had been cleared of corpses I marked with red colour in my map. Furthermore, I had to keep book on the figures of deads [sic]. In the middle of March, 1945, our task was almost completed. The town was free of corpses. I then received the order to return to my division in Latvia.

Soon after the attack we heard in the radio Joseph Goebbels reporting on the attack on Dresden. He spoke of 300,000 deads [sic]. In your book you mention the figure of 135,000 victims. My records at the Clearing Staff showed 30,000 corpses. If you assume the amount of deads completely burnt etc. would reach 20%, the total figure of victims will not exceed 36,000. Still this figure – two full divisions – is terrible enough.
My counting system was very simple. I used a thick book like that of a bookkeeper. In this book I wrote down exactly the names of the reporting unit, the name of the reporting officer, the figure of corpses found and the areas of the town, where they had been collected, and the place they had been buried. When I left the Staff on about March 20 with the order to return to my tankdivision in Latvia, I handed this book over to another officer. My last figure of deads was about 30,000 – this figure I remember well, because after my return to my division I was asked by many of my comrades, who were born in Dresden and did not know anything about their relatives.
Did the Commission make mention of these either of these two registers of dead, both of which supposedly feature higher death tolls than the Commission's?

I hope that Weidauer didn't just lie, considering his say-so is now passed off as fact in a British High Court judgment.
I apologise if this is a factor which has already been covered but I suggest that of the 31,102 cards which represented dead bodies, a number of cards may have been duplicates. The RAF night attack dropped 1,478 tons of high explosives and 1,182 tons of incendiaries, this was followed within hours by the 8th USAAF raid with 771 tones of bombs, a further 8th USAAF raid on 15 Feb and another by 8th USAAF on 2 March [Middlebrook & Everett, "Bomber Command War Diaries", p.663-664 and Roger Freeman, "The Mighty Eighth", p.207-208 and p.211]. Considering the use of high explosives, the resulting collapse of buildings and the fire, not to mention further bomb damage in the same vicinity from later raids, it would be expected that the dead would not necessarily be intact or even that the remains of a single person would necessarily be in close proximity or would even found on the same search/recovery operation. Consequently I'd suggest that there is the potential for one or more cards for an individual death.

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Re: Dresden, 1945

#334

Post by The Black Rabbit of Inlé » 17 Mar 2017, 20:38

redcoat wrote:
Sid Guttridge wrote:Hi Histan,

As I understand it, about 25,000 bodies were initially recovered. Based on previous experience from other raids, there were probably around 10,000 unrecovered bodies. This gives the total of around 35,000. This is according to the German rule of thumb of the time
The final report of the Dresden police and SS a month after the raid put the estimated figure of recovered bodies at 20,204.
You're confusing three, maybe four, different documents, congrats. that's some going!

1. The "final report" of Dresden police colonel Wolfgang Thierig dated 15 March which states: "Casualties: as of early 10 March 1945: 18,375 dead, 2,212 seriously injured, 13,718 lightly injured; 350,000 people homeless and long-term re-quartered."

2. The 20,204 figure of recovered dead comes from a document found in possession of Werner Ehlich during 1977, which is either a typed or handwritten copy [Evans doesn't specify which] that the former police reservist Ehlich made of the original 23 March TB47 before the figures of 20 204 and 25 000 [projected death toll] were doctored to read 202 040 and 250 000.

3. The 22 March Situation Report No. 1404 of the Berlin Chief of Police, which is based on the figures in Thierig's 15 March report.

4. The 3 April Situation Report No. 1414 of the Berlin Chief of Police reads "Commander of the Orpo, Dresden: Up to 31.3.45 the number of killed recovered numbers 22,096 persons".
Last edited by The Black Rabbit of Inlé on 17 Mar 2017, 20:49, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Dresden, 1945

#335

Post by The Black Rabbit of Inlé » 17 Mar 2017, 20:40

Peter wrote: I apologise if this is a factor which has already been covered but I suggest that of the 31,102 cards which represented dead bodies, a number of cards may have been duplicates. The RAF night attack dropped 1,478 tons of high explosives and 1,182 tons of incendiaries, this was followed within hours by the 8th USAAF raid with 771 tones of bombs, a further 8th USAAF raid on 15 Feb and another by 8th USAAF on 2 March [Middlebrook & Everett, "Bomber Command War Diaries", p.663-664 and Roger Freeman, "The Mighty Eighth", p.207-208 and p.211]. Considering the use of high explosives, the resulting collapse of buildings and the fire, not to mention further bomb damage in the same vicinity from later raids, it would be expected that the dead would not necessarily be intact or even that the remains of a single person would necessarily be in close proximity or would even found on the same search/recovery operation. Consequently I'd suggest that there is the potential for one or more cards for an individual death.
Thank you for addressing the issue.

I agree; it's possible that there may have been many instances in which more than one card was produced for an individual death. I also agree with histan's point that many people may have been registered as missing by various survivors which pushed the total of registered missing far higher than it actually was.

I'm just hoping that someone on this board can tell us what the Commission's findings were on the death registries mentioned by Weidauer and Miller, and the missing person register mentioned in the 15.03.45 "final report" and the decode of 24.03.45 which give the figures of 35,000 and c.80-100,000 respectively.

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Re: Dresden, 1945

#336

Post by sandeepmukherjee196 » 17 Mar 2017, 21:08

Black Rabbit..I don't think anyone has taken these on board. If anyone had addressed these then we would have heard by now.Whenever a document of this type is uncovered by someone like Irving the odds are high that lots of people would try to shoot them down pronto and then call them out for this or that.. The fact that no one has done it yet means they have nothing to shoot them down with.. so..

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Re: Dresden, 1945

#337

Post by Michael Kenny » 17 Mar 2017, 23:44

sandeepmukherjee196 wrote:Black Rabbit..I don't think anyone has taken these on board. If anyone had addressed these then we would have heard by now.Whenever a document of this type is uncovered by someone like Irving the odds are high that lots of people would try to shoot them down pronto and then call them out for this or that.. The fact that no one has done it yet means they have nothing to shoot them down with.. so..
Quite simply rubbish. There is no new information from Irving or anyone else. All that has surface is a new 'conflicting' document. Just one of many. Reputable historians will consult all the work and make a judgement. Those who are on a mission to rehabilitate Nazi Germany will focus solely on paperwork that supports their twisted version of reality. This is the Irving way and he would be proud of his devoted followers who seem not to have realised this was his downfall. Irving is a proven falsifier of fact and his disciples are just as dishonest.

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Re: Dresden, 1945

#338

Post by histan » 18 Mar 2017, 02:06

It isn't even a conflicting document - it gives valuable information on the number of missing person reports and the degree to which, at the time of its production. No serious and very busy historian is going to waste his time on something that doesn't have an impact on his conclusions. He would take a quick look, ask the question "if I had this in front of me at the time would I have come to a different conclusion given all the other evidence?" His answer would be "no" and so he would move on.

Richards and Saunders in their book on the history of the RAF in the second world war " state:
"The lowest estimate given by the Russians was 25,000, the highest 32,000"

Here we are sixty plus years later involved in a discussion about whether it was the lower or the higher of these estimates.

In between - there was David Irving! Who has tainted not only historical but scientific works with his inflated figures.

The commission undertook an analysis from scratch, as I understand it based on an analysis of the records of individual people. A method I believe favoured by the head of the statistics team. This resulted in an estimate at the lower end of the scale. This type of method has come under criticism when applied to estimates of German casualties [rather than analysis of contemporary documentation] for giving a different answer to other analyses. In the case of German casualties the criticism is that it gave too high an estimate.

On the other hand, I also believe, that the available documentation was considered by a British High Court Judge who decided on an estimate closer to the higher end of the scale.

The point is that different analysis methods can lead to different estimates which inevitably leads to debate.

I don't think it's wrong to point out the different estimates accepted by the commission and the judge or to present evidence that supports one estimate or the other.

Regards

John

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Re: Dresden, 1945

#339

Post by Michael Kenny » 18 Mar 2017, 02:48

histan wrote:
Here we are sixty plus years later involved in a discussion about whether it was the lower or the higher of these estimates.
I think it is a bit more than that. The aim is to cloud the issue and create doubt by focusing on one single fact that you are challenged to 'explain' why it is ignored. Given that it has been public for years and failed to have the effect Irving thinks it deserves his base is spreading the false narrative that this 'fact' is so crucial historians have to ignore it because it exposes their duplicity. Apologist claptrap where they demand you explain why no one is taking their killer fact seriously. It never occurs to them that it is because it has no information that was not already in the public domain.
In reality it is just another way of slowly upping the body-count to the X00,000 needed to be able to claim both sides were as bad as each other as far as the killing of civilians is concerned.

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Re: Dresden, 1945

#340

Post by histan » 18 Mar 2017, 13:23

Michael

You could be right, perhaps I am being a bit naive with regard to Dresden.

It is certainly true that there has been a strong attempt by certain people to re-define the term "Strategic Bombing" as "The use of bombing to kill civilians" and that the bombing of Germany was a "War Crime".

Perhaps the answer to that one is to stop using the term "Strategic Bombing" and instead use a phrase such as "Attacks on the sources of German military power that enabled them to commit acts of genocide across Europe"

Regards

John

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Re: Dresden, 1945

#341

Post by Sid Guttridge » 18 Mar 2017, 14:02

Hi Histan,

Except nobody was bombing in order to stop Germany committing "acts of genocide across Europe".

The bombing was done to shorten the war by damaging the well-spring of German military power at home. The ending of genocide was a happy by-product of that, not its aim.

Dresden was bombed because the local Wehrkreis HQ administered some 10% of German Army manpower, it contained some 20 military barracks, depots, etc., it was the main centre producing the key optical components for German gun sights, bomb sights and periscopes, etc., and because it was a key railway hub behind the Eastern Front.

Cheers,

Sid.

P.S. Have you had any thoughts about my earlier question regarding Dresden and "proportionality": "How many deaths would have been justified by "proportionality"?"

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Re: Dresden, 1945

#342

Post by histan » 18 Mar 2017, 15:00

Hi Sid

Bad choice of phrase, I was looking to remind people that German military power enabled the invasion and occupation of much of Europe between 1939 and 1941 and immediately following the military campaign the Germans instituted programs of genocide such as that undertaken against the Polish "intelligentsia and ruling classes" in September 1939.

You are correct in pointing out that these attacks were in no way aimed at halting the genocides against the mentally and physically disabled, and the gypsies being carried out within Germany itself.

The bombing of targets of military value in German cities that started in May 1940 was a direct response to the German invasion of Belgium and Holland. a policy approved in November 1939. There was a naive hope that bombing transportation targets in Germany would in some way slow down the German advance. These were discriminate attacks against designated military targets.

The first indiscriminate attack on a German city was carried out by the Luftwaffe against Freiburg on 10 May 1940. Tasked with attacking the French city of Dijon, or the alternative target Dole–Jura Airport, as part of the Battle of France, they got lost, found a city and bombed it. The statement on the monument to this attack reads -
"Among the 57 dead in the mistaken bombing of Freiburg were 20 children. 13 of them died on this playground. Nazi propaganda presented the incident as a terrorist attack of enemy planes so as to justify so called retaliations by the German air force. Let us not forget the dead - never again war."
The German air defence system had identified the aircraft as German and so no action was taken and no air raid sirens sounded. Hitler used this incident in speech on 10 December 1940 to justify attacks on British cities.

Regards

John

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Re: Dresden, 1945

#343

Post by Sheldrake » 21 Mar 2017, 22:32

Hop wrote:
sandeepmukherjee196 wrote:Oh dear Sheldrake...

Actually I wasn't trying to discuss moral equivalence etc in the context of the 1940 bombing raids. As I have mentioned here before , I am merely trying to track the sequence of events leading to the free for all subsequently.

Cheers
Sandeep
That's fairly easy to track down. The Luftwaffe began bombing Poland on 1 September. As early as 1 September they planned a strategic raid on armament works in and around Warsaw but it was cancelled due to bad weather. (source, USAF Historical Study 151, The German Air Force in the Polish Campaign of 1939, by William Speidel (1956), volume 3, p43)

On 2 September they bombed radio stations in Warsaw. On the night of 2/3 September they bombed an airfield in Warsaw, but also hit residential areas.

On 3 and 4 September the Luftwaffe carried out attacks on rail targets in several areas of the city.

On 8 September incendiaries were dropped on the suburb of Praga from 20,000 ft. (my comment: this can only have been an area attack as incendiaries cannot be aimed against precise targets from that altitude)

The Luftwaffe also carried out strategic attacks against infrastructure targets in Norway. As an example, they carried out multiple raids on Kristiansund between 28 April and 1 May 1940. 724 of the town's 1,500 houses were destroyed. Source: The Battle for Norway: April-June 1940, Geirr Haarr.

It's indisputable that the Luftwaffe carried out the first strategic attacks in Europe in WW2.
It goes further than this. The Germans chose to try to starve and burn the inhabitants in some throwback to the 30 Years war in order to minimise their own casualties.

I have just been reading Mungo Melvin's biography of Manstein. It seems clear that the Germans made a conscious choice NOT to attack Warsaw, but to bombard and starve the city into submission. They did not want to become embroiled in street fighting. The Germans refused to allow refugees to leave the city to add to the number of mouths to be fed. Then they bombed the water supply. All very seventeenth century.

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Re: Dresden, 1945

#344

Post by BarKokhba » 21 Mar 2017, 23:42

A reminder to all the revisionists out there: by September 1939 everyone on Earth who owned a radio knew exactly what the threat to civilization was by Hitler's Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. They clearly announced their intentions and acted on them. Wars of unprescedented brutality were already being waged in China and Ethiopia, and invasions and aggression by the Axis powers were widespread in 'non-combat' zones too numerous to mention. By February 1945 the evidence of widespread atrocities and destruction caused directly by that initial Axis aggression and terror was known by everyone with access to a newspaper or movie theater. Italy was knocked out of the war, and the Allies smelled final victory. The only question was how to hasten the end. Thus, morality put aside, they sowed the whirlwind onto the cities of Japan and Germany with a vengeance that we can't relate to today. Counting the dead in Dresden, Hamburg or Nagasaki doesn't make anything better for the victims, or easier for us to comprehend, but somehow these horrific attacks did culminate in ending the War, once and for all. At the time it was completely understandable. Now, we can't understand it.

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Re: Dresden, 1945

#345

Post by luftschiff » 21 Mar 2017, 23:53

BarKokhba wrote:A reminder to all the revisionists out there: by September 1939 everyone on Earth who owned a radio knew exactly what the threat to civilization was by Hitler's Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. They clearly announced their intentions and acted on them. Wars of unprescedented brutality were already being waged in China and Ethiopia, and invasions and aggression by the Axis powers were widespread in 'non-combat' zones too numerous to mention. By February 1945 the evidence of widespread atrocities and destruction caused directly by that initial Axis aggression and terror was known by everyone with access to a newspaper or movie theater. Italy was knocked out of the war, and the Allies smelled final victory. The only question was how to hasten the end. Thus, morality put aside, they sowed the whirlwind onto the cities of Japan and Germany with a vengeance that we can't relate to today. Counting the dead in Dresden, Hamburg or Nagasaki doesn't make anything better for the victims, or easier for us to comprehend, but somehow these horrific attacks did culminate in ending the War, once and for all. At the time it was completely understandable. Now, we can't understand it.
This is silly. Why no mention of the Soviet Union's genocide of some 20 million people? Why no mention of their invasions of Finland. Poland, and the Baltics? The stated goal of the communists was world domination. It was never Germany's.

If incinerating tens of thousands of civilians in a city with no military significance was "ending the war quickly" then the Germans can make the same claim for every one of their "crimes.

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