The Firebombing of Dresden
An atrocity
We aren’t actually taught WW2 history in this country, and never were. All we are taught is propaganda and fiction. Most Americans derive their knowledge of WW2 from 3 primary sources. Public school Holocaust-guilt classes, History Channel and Schindler’s list. The relentless stream of WW2 propaganda has never stopped being broadcast to the American public. Even in 2023 you can scroll through the channels on your cable subscription at any given time and find a program revolving around WW2 and Nazi Germany. The same can not be said about any other war. When was the last time you saw a 6 part History Channel documentary run 24/7 about the war of 1812? or Desert Storm? WW2 is still the most glamorized, propagandized, and glorified war in the minds of the American public.
When you start digging into the truth you would find that the “Good guys” of the war were committing atrocities. There is voluminous examples of this, but this article will be focusing on one specifically. The firebombing of Dresden. Before you go any further I will warn you that the events I will be describing are very graphic, atrocious, abhorrent and may cause you to question everything you know. If you’re squeamish or don’t want view the war any differently than what you’ve been told, turn back now.
Dresden was Germany’s 7th largest city, and a cultural hub of Europe. Dresden was the capital of the German State of Saxony and was the residence for Kings. When King Augustus the II became King in 1697 he began flooding the city with the best artists, musicians, architects and painters from all over Europe. The evidence of this is baked into the architecture of the city. I would describe Dresden as “awe-inspiring”, and a shining example of the beauty Europeans are capable of creating. During this era the architecture, and art that was created had God in mind, a far cry from the terrible eye-sores that dot our modern skylines today, and disgusting works of “modern art” we see in our museums. They created things out of love for God, and their people.
By 1945 the city of Dresden and the surrounding areas were largely unmolested by Allied forces. The city was being used as a refugee center where civilians from other parts of Germany were fleeing to escape the carnage. Many Allied POW’s were also being kept in Dresden and this was known by the Allied command. The Battle of the Bulge was over, and it was clear the Germans were losing badly on all fronts by this time. During the Battle of the Bulge the Germans lost 500 tanks, and an estimated 800 aircraft plus an estimated 100k casualties. Nonetheless the Allied command was not satisfied with these levels of decimation, and insisted on more counter-offensives deep into the heart of Germany. Dresden became a target because the Allies decided that it was a manufacturing hub of the German war-effort, but there is no evidence that was actually true. There was very little evidence that Dresden had a significant amount of German forces in it at all, but they still made the decision to strike Dresden.
In a joint operation with the British and the Americans they began their attacks on the night of February 13th 1945. The RAF (Royal Air Force) began the first wave of bombings encountering no resistance from the Luftwaffe or German air defenses (which should indicate what a soft target this city actually was). The bombings came in waves in a “double-strike” fashion. Once one wave of bombers depleted their payloads, a fresh wave of bombers would come behind them several hours later, as rescue teams were trying to put out the fires and rescue trapped civilians from the first wave. These tactics were devised to ensure total death.
The payloads in question were 375 tons of incendiaries and an enormous amount of conventional explosives known as “Blockbusters” that were specifically designed to level entire buildings, rupture water mains, and blow up streets. As the bombs fell, and kept falling during wave after wave of RAF bombers a firestorm engulfed the city. Burning men, women, children, and Allied POW’s alive. First responders and rescue teams that were left to deal with the blaze were completely wiped out ensuring that nothing would be able to come to the aid of trapped civilians. 18 year old Gotz Bergander who survived the bombings had this to say “There was an indescribable roar in the air—the fire. The thundering fire reminded me of the biblical catastrophes that I had heard about in my education in the humanities. I was aghast. I can’t describe seeing this city burn in any other way. The color had changed as well. It was no longer pinkish-red. The fire had become a furious white and yellow, and the sky was just one massive mountain of cloud.” Historian Donald Miller also has a hellish quote describing the events “People’s shoes melted into the hot asphalt of the streets, and the fire moved so swiftly that many were reduced to atoms before they had time to remove their shoes. The fire melted iron and steel, turned stone into powder, and caused trees to explode from the heat of their own resin. People running from the fire could feel its heat through their backs, burning their lungs.”
That was only the first night of the attacks. On February 14th (which was ash Wednesday) The USAF (United States Air Force) began a wave of bombings with 316 B-17 “Flying Fortress’s”. With black smoke from the original RAF attacks the night before still rolling some 15,000 ft. into the sky, the USAF did not have visual clarity of the city and began dropping their payloads indiscriminately. The original attacks on the night of February 13th focused mainly on the city-center, but the Americans were bombing residential neighborhoods, which was precisely where the survivors were fleeing. Hell rained down on civilians all through the night, and the Allies were still facing no military resistance from the Germans to speak of, so the bombs kept falling. Keep in mind that these civilian targets were sanctioned and approved to be hit by Allied command. They knew EXACTLY what they were doing, but it isn’t over yet.
February 15th was the final bombing run. Some 200 B-17’s which were originally en route to bomb an oil plant in Leipzig were diverted to finish off Dresden. Attacking solely residential targets, and ignoring railways the USAF relentlessly cratered the already cratered and burning city. A remorseless act of butchery that has few comparisons. As the bombers concluded their run the remaining RAF forces began strafing surviving civilians with machine gun fire. As ordered to, they were flying around looking for pockets of survivors and squirting them with lead. An act that will forever be steeped in shame.
The fires of Dresden rolled for weeks, and the city was leveled. The carnage on the ground was the stuff of nightmares as bodies were stacked sky high and the once gorgeous city of Dresden laid in apocalyptic ruin. It is estimated some 25,000 civilians were killed, but most historians (and myself) contest that number was actually MUCH higher. Out of fear of disease the SS decided to stack the dead on Iron beams, soaked them in Benzene and lit them ablaze in a crude funeral pyre. Most of the dead could not be identified, and were distributed into mass graves. At this point, what else could be done?
Another German survivor of the attacks by the name of Lothar Metzger had this to say “It is not possible to describe! Explosion after explosion. It was beyond belief, worse than the blackest nightmare. So many people were horribly burnt and injured. It became more and more difficult to breathe. It was dark and all of us tried to leave this cellar with inconceivable panic. Dead and dying people were trampled upon, luggage was left or snatched up out of our hands by rescuers. The basket with our twins covered with wet cloths was snatched up out of my mother's hands and we were pushed upstairs by the people behind us. We saw the burning street, the falling ruins and the terrible firestorm. My mother covered us with wet blankets and coats she found in a water tub. We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.”
Most Americans when met with these facts twist their brain into a pretzel and say things like “Well that’s what those evil Nazis get for gassing the jews in concentration camps”. It’s very much worth noting that Allied knowledge of supposed German death camps came AFTER the war’s conclusion. These tactics were devised with no official knowledge of these alleged crimes. Even if they had known, the innocent civilian population of Dresden would have had absolutely no involvement or knowledge of them. To use that as an excuse for these atrocities is shameful, and a good example of how brainwashed the average American is regarding the events of WW2.
As with the other war crimes and atrocities the Allies committed, it was all swept under the rug in the minds of the layman. Most Americans can recite things from memory about Auschwitz and Dachau but have no knowledge of this event. Still to this day if you ask an American which side won the war, they will tell you “the good guys”. Well in war there is no “good guys”, war is hell. Nothing in life is that simple, nothing is that black & White, and nothing in history is easily explained as “good guys vs bad guys” yet our education system and media presents everything that way. It’s an infantile worldview that isn’t any different than children playing “cops & robbers” and many tv watching Americans have no other way of looking at things. Everything is binary in their minds by design.
We will NEVER wash away the shame of this event. This is an irremovable stain on the United States and Britain that will never be reconciled. We allied with Soviet Russia and committed horrible atrocities against our ethnic brothers and have the audacity to refer to ourselves as the “good guys”. This will remain one of the worst atrocities ever committed in modern warfare and it happened for no damn good reason. The Germans were practically already defeated, and it served no purpose whatsoever to annihilate a civilian population. Even the staunchest defenders of the Allies in WW2 cannot intelligently defend these abhorrent acts, and SHAME on anyone that tries. God have mercy on us, and remember to say a prayer for the dead.
good article on a topic that is sensible around the mindless drones watching news.
the holocaust guilt classess in germany were first introduced around 20 years after the war,
because shortly after the war there were too many witnesses and the lies would have been easily exposed. but when they implemented their guilt history lessons it turned into a joke as a student was exposed to it in nearly all classes form music to biology.
it came to a point where you were bombarded to such an extent with ww2 propaganda as a student that the whole thing just become comical. brainwashed teachers could not understand why students started laughing during the horrible propaganda movies they had to watch in school.
if you actually talk to people that lived during ww2 and were soldiers on any side then you get the picture that we are fed lies about the war on both sides.
i have an uncle that is around 98 years old who lives in danzig, so he "fought" on both sides. his stories include being a soldier and walking around italy for 2 years with no fight or shoveling a ditch in hungary and sitting there for one year without a fight.
God bless thanks for the article.
I have read other accounts of the Dresden massacre with casualty estimates well above 200,000. I guess we'll never know. But it's important to note that the raid was carried out before the allies marched into the work camps to discover the deaths there. So it wasn't an act of revenge, but rather an act of brutal savagery. Worse yet, the allies let tens of thousands of captured German foot soldiers starve to death or die of their wounds or illnesses in overcrowded POW camps after the war. Another black mark on the U.S.