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Anyone who honestly and genuinely wants to understand as accurately and as impartially as possible what REALLY happened during WW2 needs to ask themselves a few questions BEFORE they start investigating:
- Have most historians up to the current day mostly been unconsciously conditioned by and thus naively regurgitating propaganda when writing about events?
- Can people subjected to decades of self-justifying, Allied 'history' consider that possibility? Or do they trust the official narratives with complete certainty?
- Can we apply a required level of open-mindedness to the Allied 'holocaust' war-crime of mass-murder by aerial bombing?
Hamburg in ruins
Köln/Cologne in ruins
Dresden in ruins
As most of us weren't alive, and as most of us have never been to Dresden, and most of us have never had access to check the primary sources in archives in Britain, Russia and Germany — we can only cast a wide net for all alternative views and apply whatever critical and impartial thinking we can muster.
The facts that aren't contested seems a good place to start before looking at what is debateable.
• British official documents and later memoirs admit to a deliberate policy to target civilian non-combatants. That meets the agreed definition of a mass-murderous warcrime.
• Dresden at the time had a permanent population of approx. three quarters of a million people. That was increased at the time of the massacre by around 300,000 to 600,000 anonymous refugees from the Eastern Front. That's a population total at the time of the crime of just over one to one and a quarter million people. (1,050,000 to 1,350,000).
• More than 4,500 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped. This created what is technically called a '
firestorm' which destroyed an area of approx. 13 square miles (34 km
2). Some reports minimise the area of the firestorm to 8 square miles (21 km
2).
•
FIRESTORMS: The warcrime bombing of cities using incendiaries by the Allies deliberately created firestorms. A ‘
firestorm’ is defined as a conflagration which attains such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system.
Tornado-force winds create superhot conflagrations that can generate temperatures of up to 1,000°C (1,800 degrees Fahrenheit).
Firestorms were created at other targeted civilian cities besides Dresden.
“The Germans again and again missed their chance, ...of setting our cities ablaze by a concentrated attack. Coventry was adequately concentrated in point of space, but all the same there was little concentration in point of time, and nothing like the fire tornadoes of Hamburg or Dresden ever occurred in this country. But they did do us enough damage to teach us the principle of concentration, the principle of starting so many fires at the same time that no fire fighting services, however efficiently and quickly they were reinforced by the fire brigades of other towns could get them under control.”
-- Bomber Offensive, pg. 83 by Sir Arthur 'butcher' Harris.
•
Comparisons:
The incendiary bombing of Hamburg in July 1943 resulted in 46,000 dead. A firestorm area of approximately 4.5 square miles (12 km
2) was reported at Hamburg. That's a third smaller than the larger report concerning Dresden. British bombs created a vortex and whirling updraft of super-heated air which created a 460 meter high tornado of fire.
'The furious winds created by the firestorm had the power to sweep people up off the streets like dry leaves: “Some people who tried to walk along, they were pulled in by the fire, they all of the sudden disappeared right in front of you (...)You have to save yourself or try to get as far away from the fire, because the draught pulls you in.
— Ursula Gray (1973).
from "Volume 21: Nemesis", The World at War – – Thames Television London (UK) 1973–1974
The firebombing of Tokyo on the 9th and 10th March 1945 started fires which converged into a devastating conflagration covering 16 square miles (41 km
2). Firestorm winds increased the damage done by the bombs by about 50%.
The death total for Tokyo was 100,000.
90,000–146,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and 39,000–80,000 people in Nagasaki; roughly half of the deaths in each city occurred on the first day.
Firestorm temperatures of 1,000°C
over TWO DAYS is going to incinerate human bodies to almost nothing. Bodies in underground shelters and cellars at Dresden are reported to have melted from the heat resulting in a cellar full of indistinguishable goo. Therefore the ability to carefully identify individual ashes of bodies in the open areas where refugees were sheltering and who would have been incinerated and then buried under collapsed building masonry would be limited. And who is supposed to have even attempted that? There was a war on.
To refute death tolls at Dresden many people refer to and wholeheartedly buy into the defamation of David Irving. Any attempted discussion of Dresden invariably includes negative reference to him, demonstrating an inability to resist consensus conditioning. As to accurately judge Irving's reliability as a historian requires becoming familiar with his writing and the precise nature of the examples of his claimed deliberate deceptions. Which very, very few people do. And yet they feel qualified to judge him and reject his research.
All historians can make errors. All historians have a conditioning due to their education and social upbringing. The question is whether they (and we) can recognise that and attempt to minimise how much we are influenced by it.
Irving's letter to The Times in 1966.
http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/General/Dr ... 70766.html
He wrote that BEFORE he found the Bletchley intercept confirming the higher figure at Dresden
Re: Missing Persons Situation in Dresden Air Raid Defence region.
Persons registries;
(b) 80 to 100,000 missing-person notifications are estimated to have been registered so far;
(c) 9,720 missing-person notifications have been confirmed as fatalities;
(d) to date, information on 20,000 missing person cases has been given out;
(e) accurate statistical data possibly only later.
. . . . . . . .
On to what is debateable.
Regarding the TB47 (Tagesbefehl no. 47) issued on 22nd March 1945 recording the number of dead recovered by that date.
As I understand it, it no longer exists, only a copy claimed to have been made, so there has never been an original "found".
A report from a deceased Colonel in the Dresden Order Police was claimed to have been discovered in then Soviet controlled East Germany in 1965.
From this a claim was made that Goebbels released a faked version of the TB47 document to the press:
“There was indeed only one explanation. A zero had been added to these figures for propaganda purposes.”
“...the extent of the wide, long-lasting ripple of international outrage that followed the Dresden bombing represents, at least in part, Goebbels's final, dark masterpiece.”
-- ‘Dresden: Tuesday 13th February 1945’ by Frederick Taylor, pg. 506 & 426.
But as I see it that is a retroactive speculation to explain the discrepancy. We should not be cherry-picking whichever explanation best fits a pre-concieved opinion/belief.
WW2 has been the most propagandised war. Psy-op atrocity reports were a key part of the Allied war-effort, NOT the other way around. That most people appear to think the opposite I suggest is a further sign that we are still unwittingly a victim of it.
Just think about it. How do we know what's true? Is it by going with the majority view? Like sheeple? Baaaaa.
Or do we use our own intelligence and critical thinking abilities?
. . . . . .
•
The death toll figures. Did Joe Goebbels add a zero?
The details of the Tagesbefehl (Order of the Day) no. 47 (TB47) which were given to Irving and which he made available to historians in 1963 are regarded by some as a forgery.
It references a statement made by the Police President of Dresden and it put the current number of known dead at 202,040 and expressed the expectation of a final figure of 250,000.
According to Theo Miller, Goebbels announced in a radio broadcast at the time a death total of about 300,000. So no "added zero" there.
Colonel Grosse is the purported author of TB47. The document on which he based his figures is claimed to have been the Final Report issued by the Dresden police on 15th March 1945. That report bore the initials of a Dresden police officer named Jurk. It was HIS daughter-in-law (not Colonel Grosse's) who supposedly gave it to the German historian named Weidauer. The report has the signature of Colonel Thierig, who had been a colonel in the Dresden police force at the time. It recorded the number of deaths up to 10th March 1945 as 18,375. So no “added zero” there either.
It was "discovered" in 1965, two years after Irving's revelatory book on the Dresden holocaust had been making more people aware of the mass-murderous war-crime.
In May 1966 another document 'turned up': Situation Report No 1404 of the Berlin Chief of Police dated 22nd March 1945 (the same day as TB47). It gave the same current death total as the Final Report of 18,375 and predicting a final toll of 25,000.
None of these fit the allegation that Goebbels just added a zero to the actual official figures for propaganda purposes.
Actually the Situation Report No. 1414 — a report also made by the Berlin Chief of Police and dated 3rd April 1945 — which it is claimed put the figure for the number of recovered bodies at 22,096.
In 1977 the historian Bergander obtained a copy of the original of TB47 from a reservist, Werner Ehlich. Ehlich stated that he had seen the original document and, in his capacity as a member of the Dresden police force, had made one typed and one hand-written copy of it. Ehlich's copy of TB47 put the total number of deaths at 20,204 and the expected dead at 25,000. British propagandist/historian Evans believes that the fake TB47 came into existence when someone doctored the genuine document by adding a '0' at the end of each number. Evans therefore claimed that the version of TB47 which had been given to Irving was a forgery, which SOMEONE had added 'zeros' to. As far as I an aware, Goebbels isn't accused of being that person nor of ordering the forgery.
Finally, I have never seen any photos of these documents giving a lower death total. So it would be just as easy to argue that these documents that conveniently were discovered AFTER Irving's research was published have had a zero deleted, to downplay the actual total.
I
HAVE seen a photo of the Bletchley Park intercept. (Produced above).
I saw it at David Irving's website.
Oh, the irony!!
Finally, finally, during the 1960's and 1970's there was still what is called '
the cold war'. Persons who lived in both British-American AND Soviet controlled Germany were still liable to repercussions for their war-time roles as part of the Third Reich whether they were innocent of war crimes or not. Trials of people who had already been investigated and tried continued into the late seventies. Showing any sign of defending, justifying or denying Third Reich actions or motives was punishable as a criminal offence. This is STILL the situation today in Germany.
Dresden was in the Soviet zone. The Soviets were renowned forgers and concealers of historical truth. E.g. forged documents created for the bogus John 'Ivan the terrible' Demjanjuk trial in the late 1980's.
In 1945 General Mehnert, City Kommandant of Dresden estimated a figure of 140,000 dead.
Professor Fetscher of the Civil Defence Organisation had spoken of 180,000 dead.
None of these fit with these other reports NOR fit the 'Goebbels added a zero' allegation.
The claim of a 25,000 expected death toll does NOT fit with the empirical evidence of the size of the area of the firestorm, the known numbers of people in Dresden at the time, nor with the comparisons of accepted death tolls in Hamburg and Tokyo. Nor does it fit with the figures recorded in the Bletchley intercept, nor the figures reported in American newspapers at the time.
