I read three entire books in less than a week for this video, so I'd appreciate if you give the video a thumbs up 👍 (it's the reason I look so tired in the video) In addition, you know full well that the National Socialists will be in the comments spouting nonsense about this topic, so be careful not to believe everything you read down there.
The reason the targets for most of the heavy bombers was changed from factories etc. 6:43 was because the primary purpose of strategic bombing was to draw up the German fighter planes so they could be destroyed. This strategy was so the Allies would have air supremacy on D-Day and the Normandy breakout. Thumbs up! 👍
Once the ammunition trains lose their priorities and get sidelined, the craven, offside pamphleteers can then grind their axes, sell their biased views mostly unmolested, and be very much noticed in the popular press. Thanks for another great definitive item.
I am living in Dresden and I talked to actual witnesses of the bombing who were children at the time wandering through the firestorm and seeing burning people all around them while searching for their parents. It is said that people were running into the water of the river but then the water was burning too. Unimaginable for me. Now there are almost no eye witnesses alive to talk about it. I am afraid that we might loose touch with how devastating war can be.
To make matters worse, they had refugees there as the city was a safe haven as it didn't even have any war-related targets of value To reduce public outrage, it was later claimed by Britain that they did (history is written by the victors) - but ironically, historical accounts concluded that these so-called targets weren't even hit What was hit was the city center and other residential areas and the use of explosives followed by incinerary bombs, proved that the point was to kill the civilian population The firestorm that ensued melted the roads and people fleeing had their feet burnt alive. To summarise, over 200k people died (Allies claimed only 20k) and it took two weeks for the Germans just to burn the bodies of the dead due to the sheer number of them. It was a war crime and Holocaust of epic proportions that lasted two days. As a Brit and American I apologize to the Germans profusely. As bad as the Nazis were, innocent Germans didn't deserve this atrocity.
The writer Kurt Vonnegut was in Desden as a Prisoner of War when the bombarbment happend. There is book by him: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse-Five
My wife's grandfather (from Belgium) was a forced laborer in Germany when he became 18 years old. He made searchlights not that far from Dresden. He tells that night turned into day and that he could feel the wind sucked towards Dresden. He was forced to help with the "cleanup". When he talks about this (the men is 97) tears come in his eays and he stops talking. The images he saw are to difficult to talk about. Thank you TIK for a great and balanced video.
@@kfl611 The NAZIs had to deal with the dead bodies. There were not enough of them. The Germans didn't have a problem gassing millions, so we shouldn't have a problem killing them. General Harris was correct, all the people killed in Dresden weren't worth the life of one British Grenadier. It was the generals that took the NAZI bait and didn't fire back in the press that helped push those men to suicide. Most generals are spineless politicians not warriors.
@@kfl611 Very interesting you mention The American Civil War , War Btwn: The States , where nearly 720000 men died ;it was Union General William Tecumseh Sherman that said "War Is Hell " as he laid a wasteland of Georgia marching toward the sea late 1864- up til Appamaddox Va. ( Pretty sure General Lee surrendered in Va.). The American Civil War brought death and destruction, civilian displacement , including the displacement of slaves , and trench warfare, the introduction of the battling gun , and machine gun It was a harbinger of what was to come later by 1914. In fact quite a few European powers looked how the USA hah mobilized in the North , and South , and warrily looked @ the potential military prowess the USA might exert down the road.
As someone living in Dresden: the city hasnt recovered completely even now in 2022. still every few months there is a WW2 bomb being found on construction sites. There are still quite a few areas/properties that just stand vacant since the buildings there were destroyed in the bombings now nearly 80 years ago.
@@zopEnglandzip Just like everybody else... same happens in the former West Germany. If I interpret the DW report correctly, most bombs these days are found in Nordrhein-Westfalen that took the bulk of allied bombings in WW2. It is practically impossible to detect a buried bomb in the urban environment. We ("the Soviets") still excavate unexploded ordinance in midtown Moscow, every year. There were no wartime bombings in the affected areas, just some warehouses and WW1-period infantry training range.
Seventy years ago, my mother and I visited a family on a tranquil farm in New England after Church services. The father of the family remained at home and seldom spoke as he shuffled between the family home and a separate workshop where he made briar pipes. In fact, I can't recall ever hearing his voice during our many visits. A half century later, I met the daughter who was my age and she explained why her father never spoke. Before the war, he'd studied at Dresden and knew the people, places, and cultural richness of that city. His name was Gettsinger. During WW2 he flew a B-24 during bombing raids over Germany. He knew what he was destroying at Dresden and couldn't bear to ever hear any mention of that city. Despite the passage of many years, he would spontaneously burst into tears at any mention of Dresden. He was a pilot, or co-pilot, and had no choice. He had to fly and knew what he was destroying. A court-marshal awaited if he refused. He was not alone. During the VietNam era, I heard of pilots from that war who had similar experiences of after having had to bomb Hue. How was it that politicians could declare who should bear the blame other than themselves.
I think ... we all like to blame the other guy's politicians. Never blame ours, it's never our own fault. Fair enough, too. If there was/were any justice then the nice folks who start wars should be the first casualties of those wars ... and the last.
We allow our politicians immunity from the consequences of their actions no matter how bad the consequences are. We've done that throughout history. What's even worse, we usually reward them for it. If you do the killing, you have to learn to live with it. If you order somebody else to do the killing, you feel fine. I don't know why that happens but it's the way people work.
My aunt was a member of forced labor in Dresden as a part of all kids born in 1924 in Bohemia. After the first wave she was told by the German supervisor : "Leave, as a Czech you don't deserve this, go home to Prague, this is not your doing , it's our war!", thus saving her life. So she run with other Czech laborers to the hills a watched in horror from above Dresden the inferno staged by the second wave. ....I'm sure it was a long walk home but the war was for her over.
The 55 million deaths caused by the Nazi nation are shocking and the consequence of the Nazi nation's barbarism. By the way, this bombing of Dresden would not have happened without the barbarism of the Nazi nation before it. The first German attack on Poland in 1939 was just the beginning of German bomb terror! The Nazi nation actually started this war with the Air Force bomb terror. The bombing of Wieluń comprised air raids on the Polish town of Wieluń by German air force on 1 September 1939. Germany's air force began bombing Wieluń in the early morning on the first day of World War II. The bombing has been described by several historians as the first act of World War II. The city had neither air defenses nor any apparent military targets. Germany's air force bombed also such nearby towns as Działoszyn, Radomsko, and Sulejów, which also had no military targets. The Wieluń bombing destroyed at least 70 percent of the town's buildings (as much as 90 percent, in the city center). There were many civilian casualties and that was intentional. One of the first places hit was the hospital, which likely had Red Cross markings. 32 persons in the hospital were killed. After the hospital began burning, German pilots shot at patients trying to escape the building. The German pilots were actually chasing civilians throughout the town. Targets destroyed by German bombing included: Farna Church, built in the 13th-14th centuries A mid-19th-century synagogue The Augustinian cloister. Parts of the 19th-century Royal Castle. The 15th-century city walls, severely damaged Over a dozen historic 18th- and early-19th-century houses. The city hall, with its 14th-century Kraków Gate, survived when a bomb got stuck in the city hall's roof and failed to explode. That was the first bombing of many German bombings against civilians in Poland! But bombing was just one of the many methods of them to killing civilians! Most were gassed and shot! Tens of Millions have been murdered by all means including bombs. Including millions of children. So no pity for the Nazi Nation!
We had a family friend- who survived the raid- he was Lithuanian and was fleeing the Soviet advance. My mother said he was the most unhappy man she had ever met- he was in a cellar and somehow survived but his mother and sister did not. I assume he felt guilty about this but I never ever discussed Dresden with him and he never mentioned it. His life was changed when he met and married a German woman who was originally from Konigsberg but had come to Nottingham to work in the lace factories after WW2 and his life changed- they were an incredibly happy couple. .
We said it would never happen again. Then it did. Then we said it would happen again. Then it did. Then we said it would never happen again. Now we're receiving unconfirmed reports of chemical weapons used in ukraine
Victor Gregg was another POW in Dresden as was the American Kurt Vonnegut, when the bombardment occured.... Victor Gregg wrote several books and had numerous interviews and speaking engagements discussing his experience during the Dresden firestorm.... He was a 25 year old British paratrooper when he got captured at Arnhem (aka: Operation Market Garden) and was sent to Dresden as a POW. He sabotaged a soap factory machine and was sentenced to death the following day. That evening, while him and large group of condemned men awaited death, incendiaries crashed through the glass cupola ceiling in the building they were held. This killed many by both falling glass and incendiaries burning into their bodies and nothing could be done to put the incendiaries out. Shortly afterwards, a large high explosive bomb blew the wall out killing many more including his POW friend. As he exited the building in danger of collapse, he seen horrific scenes of fire everywhere with explosives and incendiaries still falling and detonating. He seen many people of all ages, dead, on fire and horribly burnt and injured. Only a combination of keeping calm from years of combat experience (he was in North Africa including the Alamein battle, and the Arnhem battle), and lots of luck, allowed him to escape to safety in the outskirts of the city. He passed by many who didn't make it, as explosions, falling buildings, heat and incendiaries took many.....Days later, him and other prisoners were taken in to search for survivors in the rubble. One day he was able to escape and made it to the Russian lines..... Sadly, Victor Gregg passed away on October 12, 2021, just 3 days shy of his 101 birthday. R.I.P..... Many of his interviews are on UA-cam.
Victor Gregg stated in those interviews that it was the most evil thing he ever witnessed. Mr. Gregg said he was ashamed that his country committed this atrocity, but claimed he never blamed the pilots because they were just following orders!
@Rodger Dennan Well least finally people are starting to talk about war crimes allies committed. Till now i have seen only positive coverage of allies as heroes and angels and Germans as unspeakable evil who exterminated quadtrillion billion gorillion, literally satan and demons. When in reality war is hell and there is no good side in war, just different shades of warcrimes, but its the victors who write the history and can push their propaganda supreme upon rest of us for century until truth starts to come out.
@Rodger Dennan All I've ever heard ( .. I'm 66 ) .. is spelled horror. My shop in Las Vegas, Nevada was adjacent to the old Basic Magnesium plant, circa WW II, which manufactured the magnesium, ( the continuously burning ingredient) my native leaselord informed me, to " burn down Germany & Japan. "
My Aunt Hikie was born in Dresden and as a young girl survived both the bombing and firestorm. She was 8 years old and today is 85. Her sister and mother also survived but are both passed on now. She told me when the bombing stopped they came up from the celler and tried to run out the front door but stopped because their neighbors were all sucked down the street into part of the firestorm. So they turned ahd ran out the backdoor and this saved their lives. Their neighbors were a family of 5. Mother and 4 children. They were physically sucked off their feet and straight into a massive firestorm at the end of the street. Scary.
I really appreciate that you put your references at the bottom of the screen as you make each point. I haven't seen any other essay-style youtuber do this and I think it's a really good practice.
It is a good practice. However the problem with referencing some history books is if you were to check they referenced other history books who referenced other history books who referenced other history books who referenced other history books. Zero original sources. Or the first book bases it's facts on estimates. Then people reference this, but stop saying it is an estimate. It would be like If I made a video about Dresden and referenced other UA-cam videos as proof. Things get reworded in every rewriting. Adjectives change, synonyms are used, until the "facts" sometimes bare little resemblance to the original facts. That is why some history books say completely different facts about the same thing. This is why some history books say only 10,000 died, others say 300,000 died.
The father of a German friend survived the Dresden bombing at the age of 5. His mother had, at the last minute, chosen to go to a different shelter. The first one ended up being destroyed. Since this raid, the survivor has considered the raid to be his "second birthday".
My uncle Clyde stover from Tennessee was captured at Normandy on jun.7th 1944.He was taken to a P.O.W. camp outside Dresden.He told my mom that they had to come to the city and drag out dead bodies and bury them.He suffered from PTSD and took his own life 6 months after coming home in the winter of 45.
@@steffenritter7497 Yes it was Stephen .He was about 30 miles from Dresden and in early apr was liberated by the Russian steam rollers.He told my mother they captured the camp,and made the German SS strip naked.The Russians got drunk and broke all these bottles on this dirt road leading into the camp.Thry made the Germans run up and down this road naked with broken glass on it until they bled to death or the first one that stopped running was shot in the head!After that they would not deter from their line of attack and would not take American POWS to American lines but did tell them the direction to walk in whereas the lines were 30 miles away.My uncle walked and got there to tell others where the guys were.They rescued the Americans a few hours later.I don't remember the name of the camp.
In that moment he probably realized maybe he wasnt fighting for the good guys. So sad. His brain probably melted down seeing all that and trying to reconcile it with american war propaganda
Sad story! It would not have bothered me to bury members of the Nazi nation! I probably would have enjoyed seeing so many of them dead. The reason is obvious! To think what crimes this Nazi nation committed. By the way, if your uncle Clyde would have been a Polish prisoner of war (POW) after the fights of 1939 or a Soviet soldier, he probably wouldn't have come home. The Nazi soldiers or the like would very likely have murdered him as POW. Polish prisoners of war were beaten, sent to perform slave labour or shot. Commanders of units which had put up a stiff fight were penalised for their ‘impudence’ by being shot when they eventually surrendered or, in a few instances, incinerated with flame-throwers. According to their racial views resistance by Polish ‘sub-humans’ was not considered military virtue, just insolence which was very inhumanly punished. There were many massacres of Polish POWs committed by Nazi Wehrmacht soldiers. (For those who don't know what the Wehrmacht is. That's what the German army was called back then.) The Wehrmacht and their generals were willing tools of the German Nazi government! Polish civilians were murdered by the Wehrmacht but also Polish Prisoners of war were murdered by the Wehrmacht. During the German raid on Poland, soldiers of the Wehrmacht carried out about 60 percent of the mass murders of Polish civilians. These were not just a few massacres by the Wehrmacht on Polish POWs and civilians. That had a method and was part of the war of extermination against the Slavs wich Poles are too. Because according to the genocidal German "General Plan East", the majority of the Slavic Poles, like all Slavs, were to be murdered. In many cases large groups of Polish soldiers were murdered after capture. For example Massacre of Ciepielów: Ciepielów massacre that took place on 8 September 1939 was one of best documented war crimes of the Wehrmacht during its raid of Poland. The number of the murdered Polish soldiers was 300. The murder of the Slavic Polish soldiers was part of the genocide against the Poles, because according to the genocidal German "General Plan East". The same genocidal German "General Plan East" applied to Polish civilians. As already mentioned, the Wehrmacht soldiers also murdered civilians! For example after the Warsaw uprising in Wola a suburb of Poland's capital city, Warsaw there was a systematic murdering in various massacres of between 70,000 and 90,000 Polish civilians by German Wehrmacht, SS and other special murder units! So units of the Wehrmacht and the SS and other special murder units massacred in Wola captured Polish resistance fighters, men, women, children and the elderly. Not even nuns or hospital staff and hospital patients were spared. In terms of the number of victims, the Wola massacre was the largest war crime on European soil in World War II. During and after the Warsaw uprising there were also other various massacres in which the Wehrmacht was also involved. After the uprising, Warsaw was almost systematic completely destroyed, taking part in this destruction as well Units of the Wehrmacht. There were also many rapes committed by soldiers of the Wehrmacht contrary to the legend that is spread that the Wehrmacht did not rape. Soldiers who murder also rape. Rapes were also committed against Polish women and girls before shooting the female captives in massacres carried out by the Wehrmacht soldiers, SS and other special murder units like Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz. Otherwise, the Polish POWs, who were captured in combat together with the western allies in western allied uniforms, had the same luck as the American uncle Clyde and were treated somewhat according to the rules of the Geneva Convention.The Soviet POWs didn't have such luck like uncle Clyde and Polish POWs, who were captured in combat together with the western allies in western allied uniforms. Because they were murdered just like the Slavic Polish POWs in 1939 according to the same genocidal racist "General Plan East". For according to this plan, the Slavic peoples of the Soviet Union were to be exterminated. All in all a total of 3.5 million Soviet POWs were murdered with 2 million murdered by starvation. Incidentally, the German government was very generous to the survivors of the death camps for soviet POWs and paid the last ones still alive the one-off sum of 2,500 euros in compensation 70 years after the end of the war. By the way, since 1936 the vast majority of German followers and supporters of the German Nazi government were thus they were Nazis. So civilians of the Nazi nation also were often murderers, because not only the Wehrmacht and the SS and other special murder units murdered! For example, my grandpa was hit by a German civilian to death. This German civilian was the watchdog for the Polish workers in a factory seized by the Germans in Poland. My grandpa worked there. By the way, it was impossible to quit the job. The Germans had the list of employees. And besides, my grandfather had to work to feed the family. The German overseer got angry with my grandpa! He hit him in his anger until he died. This happened more often in Poland. By the way, even their children murdered! One can read about these murderous children in this link! Unfortunately I can't post the link because this will delete the comment, but one can find the link by entering that as a google search term: "death-marches-book-details-german-citizens-role-in-end-of-war-killings" Quote from the link: "A genocidal mentality that had systematically dehumanized the Jews and the Slavs, led to the collective hunt...More than 250,000 concentration camp prisoners died in death marches shortly before the end of World War II." The link reports that Civilians participated in the hunt for hundreds of concentration camp prisoners who, during an American bombing attack on the city and its train station, had fled from the freight wagons, some of them in flames, in which they were being transported. Local police officers, guards and members of the Volkssturm national militia and the Hitler Youth executed their victims in a nearby forest." Hitler Youth were children! Civilians participated in the hunt for hundreds of concentration camp prisoners who, during an American bombing attack on the city and its train station, had fled from the freight wagons, some of them in flames, in which they were being transported. Local police officers, guards and members of the Volkssturm national militia and the Hitler Youth executed their victims in a nearby forest." Hitler Youth were children! I further quote: "The prisoners were killed like animals, according to a British military report. Up to 300 people died in the massacre, with the leader of a Hitler Youth group in Celle killing more than 20 alone. Government and local officials and the Hitler Youth, as well as local residents abused or killed large numbers of those who, in the last stage of their lives filled with suffering, were forced on marches or had spent days being transported across Germany in overfilled freight cars. The Allies captured the city four days later. At least 250,000 prisoners lost their lives on death marches between January and May 1945." This Nazi nation was completely megalomaniac, mad, criminal, amoral and degenerated! Uncle Clyde probably didn't know all that because then he wouldn't have any mercy and no pity for the Nazi nation!
One of your best videos TIK. You made it feel like I was there. I could almost feel the fear, the heat and the fire. No glory in war for sure, but sometimes people can be very brave.
One ma dicks was there it was huge even in the firestorm everyone seen say so it like a real dick tower silhouetted in the night just like Godzilla but for nazis anyway it was a long time ago (1944) so everyone forgot but I inherited it from grampa
My grandma was evacuated from Ukraine through Dresden. She worked in a shoe factory for a few weeks and then she was sent to work in Austria. She still has her German citizenship papers. Half my family was sent back to the Soviet Union after the war and were never heard from again.
My Latvian in-laws were given the option to leave Europe or return to Latvia, now under Soviet control. One brother went to Canada, the rest came to Australia. My father-in-law still thought the Russians were after him in the 1970's.
One messed up thing I read about Dresden bombing is they piled up hundreds of civilian bodies after the bombing. It was so much that it created two massive piles on each street, and you had to walk in between on a "path". Many of those bodies were children or women because all the men were in the army at the front.
My uncle was in that 2nd raid as a navigator he said he didn't have to do much because he could see the glow at 20.000 feet. He never got over the shock off the death toll and took his own life in 1948.
My Grandfather was a navigator in 187 squadron - He cried if he remembered that event. After the war he would ride his motorcycle at dangerous speeds hoping it would take his life. apparently the smells were unmistakeable at even 20,000 ft.
@@StihlmaddArborist he probably didn't need to smell anything. Common sense would have told him just how bad the fires were. I would imagine he probably had either first hand or at least second hand knowledge of the terror and loss suffered by the inhabitants of cities like London, York or Manchester. Putting 2 and 2 together was probably easy from that point. I don't envy him.
One of my greats was a pow in a camp near Dresden. Sorry to hear about your family member; but remember there were massive forces labour camps near Dresden.
My great-grandparents lived in Radebeul at the time of the bombing. Radebeul is about 11km outside Dresden. She wrote to my grandfather (he was a Namibian farmer interned in South Africa during the war), that the light from the fires was sufficient enough that one could read a newspaper.
@@OmmerSysselIt's a nasty comment from you. Many people really lived a normal life. My grandparents told me their parents were threatened by Nazis if you all but had a different opinion. When you have kids you think twice about what to say to those people. You didn't have to live through those times...
My grandmother's family was in a group of Latvian refugees hiding on a train heading toward Dresden when the bombs fell. The train stopped when they saw the flames on the horizon. According to my great grandfather, "It was like a hell."
My Grandfather told me last year, that the burning skyline over Dresden is his oldest memory. He grew up a few km south-west of Dresden and the airplanes flew over his village. He was almost 4 years old. Thank you for showing us this video. Esp for mentioning Leipzig and Chemnitz too. PS: As a Leipzig citizen who grew up in Saxony, I can tell you there is no week whithout a news about neutralizing some bombs in that cities.
So what? There is not a DAY in your victims memory which isn't haunted by your insane ancestors deliberately chosen evilness! 50 million victims should calm you down? You deserved every single bomb. Regards from a peaceful neighbour who decided rescuing their entire fellow Jewish population...
I only saw my father cry once. He was a waist gunner in a B17, and was in one of the bombers that destroyed Dresden. After the war, when I was only 4 years old, we traveled to Germany to visit my uncle, who had married a German girl, and was living in Leipzig. We took a day trip to Dresden, and as soon as we were in sight of the city my father broke down hysterically. It scared us all. He was inconsolable for several hours. We never talked about it.
Your American grandfather travelled into the Soviet zone to see a city he bombed? And he was upset about killing the enemy who was trying to kill him? Your story sounds implausible on the face of it.
As it turns out, I think your narrative sufficiently, and poignantly, conveys the horrific nature of the raid without the need for graphic images (which are widely available elsewhere). We are able to better focus on the humanity, and tragedy, of those involved. Thanks for another outstanding discussion.
Great *research* AND *narrative* by TIK indeed. Has me as turned upside down and emptied as after reading the actions orchestrated by the German personnel & friends in Kiev, Warsaw, or towards then in Treblinka.
This is an interesting subject that deserves some recognition (especially this video, given your tired state in it). Someone having to discuss this in such detail deserves so much respect.
Your high quality work is very much appreciated ! Detailed documentarys that are done with striving to produce the best and with pride in your work in mind is very much evident . 👍 Second to none !
Excellent analysis. I have an ancestor who carried on a long correspondence with the German philosopher Leibniz. This entire correspondence was destroyed in the Dresden bombing. I would very much like to have studied this exchange of letters and ideas, as I am a philosopher, also, who has taught in a university setting. So much is destroyed in war. That ... besides the deaths of so many people ... is a real human tragedy.
I work for a small company. One day I came to work and they were busy putting up fencing all the way around the place. The boss says don't worry. Next there was a gate post with a guard. The boss says don't worry about it. Much later on I found out we were making lenses for the Department of Defense. That little company had become a strategic Target and I had no idea. Isn't that interesting a sweet simple job can become dangerous and War is why
I remember when my Grandparents told me about the endless formations of Allied Bombers in 1944/45 over our little village in Czechoslovakia.. they said when they flew over to germany, they were pretty low, full of bombs.. and when they flew back, they were higher than before... They said you could actually watch the citites burning in the distance.. in the middle of the night..
Many people in the twin towers during 911 suffered the same fate as the people of Dresden because they listened to the "authorities" and returned to their offices. Note to self; during an emergency, follow your gut instinct. It's no guarantee you'll survive but at least you live or die by your own decision rather than someone elses.
How about all those kids and their teachers on the South Korean ferry MV Sewol… the idiots masquerading as “authorities” kept them in their cabins even as the ship was flipping over and filling up with water. Oh but the Captain and other “authorities” got up on deck where the Coast Guard could rescue them,
The 50 million deaths caused by the Nazi nation are shocking and certainly not the consequence of the Nazi nation's barbarism like the bombing of Dresden. The first German attack on Poland in 1939 was just the beginning of German bomb terror! The Nazi nation actually started this war with the Air Force bomb terror. The bombing of Wieluń comprised air raids on the Polish town of Wieluń by German air force on 1 September 1939. Germany's air force began bombing Wieluń in the early morning on the first day of World War II. The bombing has been described by several historians as the first act of World War II. The city had neither air defenses nor any apparent military targets. Germany's air force bombed also such nearby towns as Działoszyn, Radomsko, and Sulejów, which also had no military targets. The Wieluń bombing destroyed at least 70 percent of the town's buildings (as much as 90 percent, in the city center). There were many civilian casualties and that was intentional. One of the first places hit was the hospital, which likely had Red Cross markings. 32 persons in the hospital were killed. After the hospital began burning, German pilots shot at patients trying to escape the building. The German pilots were actually chasing civilians throughout the town. Targets destroyed by German bombing included: Farna Church, built in the 13th-14th centuries A mid-19th-century synagogue The Augustinian cloister. Parts of the 19th-century Royal Castle. The 15th-century city walls, severely damaged Over a dozen historic 18th- and early-19th-century houses. The city hall, with its 14th-century Kraków Gate, survived when a bomb got stuck in the city hall's roof and failed to explode. That was the first bombing of many German bombings against civilians in Poland! After Poland, they then murdered civilians with their warplanes in other countries as well. But bombing was just one of the many methods of them to killing civilians! Most were gassed and shot! Tens of Millions have been murdered by all means including bombs. Including millions of children. So no pity for the Nazi Nation
@@GreatPolishWingedHussars I totally understand your anger. The Nazi atrocities were bad are unforgivable. Wanting to inflict horror and misery on them is understandable. Unfortunately, there were undoubtedly many German civilians living in Dresden who despised the Nazis and did whatever they could to stop them. The indiscriminate devastation of the fire bombing was unfortunate. And I say it again: I don’t blame you for your anger.
@@jelliebird37 This sentence of you is wrong: "The Nazi atrocities were bad are unforgivable." In the sentence, the word Nazis must be replaced by Germans, then the sentence is correct! This sentence is also a lie: "Undoubtedly many German civilians living in Dresden who despised the Nazis and did whatever they could to stop them." Because there was hardly any resistance in the German population because since 1936 the vast majority of German followers and supporters of the German Nazi government were thus they were Nazis. The women were Germans too! No pity for followers and supporters of the Nazis because they were Nazis themselves! Women have also participated in crimes. Such as murdering, guarding and torment of slave labourers. A total of twenty million slave laborers were maltreated by millions! The range of their crimes was wide. Even their children murdered! One can read about these murderous children in this link! Unfortunately I can't post the link because this will delete the comment, but one can find the link by entering that as a google search term: "death-marches-book-details-german-citizens-role-in-end-of-war-killings" Quote from the link: "A genocidal mentality that had systematically dehumanized the Jews and the Slavs, led to the collective hunt...More than 250,000 concentration camp prisoners died in death marches shortly before the end of World War II. Many of them were murdered by civilians... For example they participated in the hunt for hundreds of concentration camp prisoners who, during an American bombing attack on the city and its train station, had fled from the freight cars, some of them in flames, in which they were being transported. Local police officers, guards and members of the Volkssturm national militia and the Hitler Youth executed their victims in a nearby forest." Hitler Youth were children! I further quote: "The prisoners were killed like animals, according to a British military report. Up to 300 people died in the massacre, with the leader of a Hitler Youth group in Celle killing more than 20 alone. The Allies captured the city four days later...The more the war approached its end, and the more obvious the prisoners' presence in the midst of the German population became, the more regularly German civilians participated. Those civilians included government and local officials, members of the Nazi Party and the Hitler Youth, as well as local residents. They abused or killed large numbers of those who, in the last stage of their lives filled with suffering, were forced on marches or had spent days being transported across Germany in overfilled freight cars. At least 250,000 prisoners lost their lives on death marches between January and May 1945." This Nazi nation was completely megalomaniac, mad, criminal, amoral and degenerated! The indiscriminate devastation of the fire bombing was not an unfortunate but the just punishment of the Nazi nation! No mercy and no pity for the Nazi nation!
When I was a young boy my neighbor that was a German WW2 veteran told me stories about the war from his perspective. If I remember correctly he said he thought it was "near 30,000" burned to death. I wish I would have asked him to write all of his stories down, 3rd and 4th grade me thought they were fascinating.
I feel you, my great-uncle Clarence was a combat engineer in George Pattons 3rd army and fought from d+12 to just after Market Garden. It's only now 20 odd years since he passed that I kick myself for never getting them on audio or any other form of documentation. Now all I have are stories, papers and a box of medals. He claimed to have recovered the medals from dead U-boat men that washed up on the East Coast of the U.S.
I remember seeing in a documentary that what’s-his-face in charge of German propaganda took the 10,000 death toll and added a zero to make the Allies look bad….er, worse. Views from both sides of a conflict are valuable but the German side especially was being lied to more often than not.
One of my best friends father, Mr. Frank Glover I believe flew in the 2 RAF raids as a Lancaster tail gunner. I recall he'd tried to join the RCAF but they realized he was under age. He went to England where I assume they needed people more and over looked his age. I understand he survived 2 tours.
My Grandfather was an ethnic German living in Yougoslavia during the war. From what I understand he disliked both Hitler and Tito. His brother wrote down his experiences but my family has yet to get it translated into readable English. The one time sombody tried to translate it the result was low quality
learn to listen! Fcking illiterate jerks! Read anf listen what was said! The Germans themselves estated 35thousands. What the f. are you now? The brainbug knowing things thatbeven the authorities, the order police didnt know? Pathetic little fckers
We can follow TIK’s deeply researched, highly intelligent commentary that corresponds to other recent reports, or we can pay attention to your worthless comment.
It depends on a lot of things. If the Hamburg firestorm raids were anything to go by then yes, there probably were a number of people who were incinerated and never found or identified. But the casualty figures for Dresden have always been ‘in play’. The truth is that nobody knows. Do you count the victims in the city and stop there? Or do you include the refugees on the roads outside the city in the days following? The figures over 100,000 are almost certainly not accurate and yes, some of that was Nazi propaganda but with books from the likes of Frederick Taylor, I think there has been a bit of a tendency to swing back the other way, perhaps to the extent of underestimating. I didn’t like Taylor’s book. I didn’t like his book on the Berlin Wall either, for much the same reason. Not because his version of events didn’t tally with mine - in fact, he did succeed in changing my view. But Taylor seems to be trying to erase that sense of guilt felt by many a bomber crew on this operation and so many others like it and he’s just a bit too strident in his characterisations for me to be comfortable with what he’s saying. I will never know how those men felt and yes, everyone knows there was a war on. But adopting the, ‘Oh well, the Germans bombed Coventry’, line as a central tenet for thinking it only right and proper that Dresden should suffer as it did doesn’t quite cut it. Sure feelings ran high at the time but trying to take us back to thinking the same way isn’t a particularly noble position fifty or sixty years later. I was in Dresden a bit over 30 years ago and it was still in ruins but with a large amount of realestate occupied by DDR-era monoliths. In fact I stayed in one of them, a former youth training facility to the south west of the city centre. The cobblestone streets still spoke, even then, of the city’s tragic history.
This is the commentary and thoughtful response I did not expect here. Thank you, I position this with what Howard Zinn talks about in a people's history about how bombers actually felt.
Damn do I love this channel. In detail going through all the evidence and then at the end concluding that it was a war crime, I was not expecting that.
A professional connection of mine was a teenager in Vienna during the last years of the war. While we rarely discussed the war, she did mention once that her most vivid memory of the bombing raids was the aftermath...when they came out of the shelters in the morning the were greeted with a surreal sight...."Everything was covered in tinsel"... Of course she was referring to "window" (chaff) that the Allies were using to fox German radars. I must admit that I was taken aback when she first described it, neither of us realized what it was until I had a bit of time to think about precisely what it was.
@@GrrMeister Try looking at Armenia's Artsakh Sronghold too. Stepanakert pounded non-stop (for 6 weeks), in the 2020 Karabakh War. But, it got very little got media attention, and what was discussed was infiltrated by a poisoned well, from Azerbaijan's Propaganda Machine.
Growing up in Dresden I heard the story, that we were actually lucky that the war ended before a Nuclear Bombs were ready. The story goes that they wanted to try one on a city in flat terrain and one on a city in a valley. And Dresden was the candidate
They never wanted to stop a bomb on Europe . No need they knew war was over. I’ve heard that it was destroyed so Soviet’s couldn’t use it. All depends on where you live and what you read. Either way it was an ugly awful affair. Dresden was hiroshima without radiation in some ways
I reckon that Dresden, or Hamburg for that matter, showed that you don't need a nuclear bomb to destroy a city. As it stands the atomic bomb wasn't ready to be used until August, and its usage against Japan was clearly a case of a hail mary attempt to end the war without having to invade the Japanese mainland. Which was projected to cost more American lives then the US had lost in the war up till then. Whereas the war against Germany was clearly regarded to be over within a couple of months, even in february 1945. The Allies were nearing the Rhine, projected to cross it in march and then fan out into Germany. And the Red Army was already at the Oder. There might be some costly battles ahead, but nowhere near enough as projected in Japan. Also it can be argued that the cities to be nuked would be in Eastern Germany, the intended Soviet occupation zone. Which would allow for the Soviets to sift through the rubble and collect all the data. Which would make nuking Dresden as an experiment kinda worthless. And also also, the US had no infrastructure in Europe that could handle the atomic bomb. The only plane that was designed to carry and drop the atomic bomb was the B-29, and those were all deployed against Japan. There were no B-29's in the European theater. Even though I reckon plenty of 8th Air Force crews wouldn't mind having had that aircraft instead of the B-17 or B-24, as it meant flying in air pressurized comfort instead of freezing their nads off in the open B-17 or B-24.
Gratulations to this very balanced and objective analysis. My grandmother was witnessing this as a refugee and told me the horrific stories like you mentioned it. It was just an lucky incident that she survived and, following this, I’m able to write this.
Did your grandmother tell you that Germans tortured, gassed and killed 6 million Jews, 4 million Poles, 27 million Russian civilians not to mention handicapped people, Gypsies, Jehovah Witnesses......? Some Germans just love playing the victim card and expect the rest of the world to forget about their atrocities.
Congratulations on this video. It’s excellent in every way. The subject is grim, but it’s a balanced account that shows all of the statements on both sides for what they were. Well done!
I also agree, this was a very balanced summary. Keep in mind both sides used propaganda and disinformation to keep their populations supporting their respective causes. The truth is always the first to suffer in war.
The RAF found that if you keep dropping incendiary bombs in one place you can start a firestorm. The hot air goes up through the center of the fire. This creates a partial vacuum that creates a strong wind that goes from the perimeter to the center of the fire. Sometimes people who were too close to the fire would get blown off their feet and sucked into the center of the fire. The British did not have atomic bombs, but if you can do a firestorm you don't need an A-Bomb.
@@tonyclough9844 So what is your point? It achieved its goal . Kill your enemy and end the war. Stop moralizing 77 years after a world war in which you did not fight. Do you honestly think given the Japanese record for depravity and torture that they would have acted any better if they had gained the upper hand? The sooner you hand wringers get over yourselves the better. Killing evil is neither pretty or fun.
The Americans knew about firestorms since they studied a massive 'natural' firestorm that occurred in the 1870's killing some 2500 men, women, and children in one night.
A friend of mine, Eric (Scottish) , had a wife Erika (German), whose mother was in MI6 during the war. She was married to the mayor of Dresden. He managed to lead his family to the river, then they escaped along the bank during the raid.
my dad was a prisoner of war in that city when it was bombed his camp was hit also he had to repair the railway tracks he also sayed that the prisoners thought it was the end of the world
I never understood why Harris and other Brit officers had such a brutal attitude towards those who suffered nervous breakdowns of various types. Always thank you for your comprehensive presentations
I've no idea - I'm not trained or anything near qualified to say. But, I'd imagine if he had to think about what those with PTSD were going through, he might be forced to contemplate the consequences of his orders. I'd imagine being so distant from the effects of his orders was something of a necessity for himself and his own well being.
@@primmakinsofis614 These were the religious soldiers trying not to break God's commandment in the Bible "Thy shall not kill".They were drafted.Many of these religious soldiers here in the United States won Medal of Honors without killing anybody.
The understanding of ptsd wasn't as good as it is today, any nervous breakdown was seen as a deliberate act to look insane to avoid fighting, cowardice with another word. And they thought they had to uphold morale with violence, either you get your shit together or you die, and that chock can take most people out of a temporary breakdown.
OK, this one "hit home" because my Great-Grandfather survived this 1945 raid as he lived in Dresden (all his life 1871-1957). But no worries, I am not triggered (especially not by these number discussions). Bruno Robert Gelbrich, having been a teacher, made handwritten diaries in Old German handscript. I can read it, but many German cannot. It is appalling to read his own witness account on that. But, You may be surprised to hear that he expressed no hate nor anger against the allies; he would always write rather neutral. But and the end of the war, his only single ranting ever in that diary (6 volumes BTW) was about the WINDBAG Goebbels ... TIK, I need to thank You personally for this video because You - of course unwittingly - You brought home to me what I was missing in my own puzzle about it. Guess what: the only two books I have about Dresden were from Irving (a 1964 issue) and McKee (1983). If or not these books were worth reading was not the question for me then in the 80s, when I started reading as a teenager: I was just lucky to find any books at all about it ... and there were many more, but they were beyond my budget ... today I have MANY more books also about Hamburg and Berlin (also where parts of my family come from) on the same topic, of the WW2 air raids. What triggered me 40 years ago was not the "number battles" nor even the cruelty of it all. It was the few stories my relatives told me. And I wanted to know what happened, and why. The What is easiest, the Why is hardest. So over 40 years I was on a private hobby-historian hunting, but what I could never do like You did, was a comparison of all these sources to draw a conclusion. Please continue. Stick to tanks and banks. Thanks
Thank you for a balanced discussion about the Dresden bombing. I've never heard about it in such succinct detail and I appreciate your presentation. I also appreciate your clarification of the differences between a war crime and crimes against humanity- very clear and concise.
I used to walk dogs with a woman about 20 years ago who lived through the raids, she invited me round for tea, she told me how horrific it was, she started shaking and crying, on the sideboard was a photo of her father, an officer on Tirpitz, next to that was a minature replica of the ships bell. it made me realise how recent WW2 was 😞.
And how close World War Three may be if this madness over Ukraine does not end soon, even at the cost of Ukraine's defeat, sorry for being "politically incorrect."
You can still see the bullet holes in buildings in some Polish cities to this day. I lived in one such place. It's thought-provoking, to say the least. I've seen similar in France and could take you to entire districts in British cities that were never rebuilt. It is still recent.
My grampa told me his memory of the bombing night. He was a child, growing up in a village about 50 kilometers to the north east of Dresden. He was about 8 years old. He remembered not being able to sleep that night, because there was a bright light at the horizon - the burning city of Dresden. He watched it for hours with his 6 siblings and his weeping mother.
HaaraaldEriksson my Grandmother told similar stories about the bombing of Coventry. I saw myself what had been done to London and many other English cities. I have little sympathy for Dresden, Hamburg or any other German target consequently I offer no apology.
@@gordonfrickers5592 No sympathy for the civilians at all? That's cold. What did the kids that died do to deserve that? If you say that it was war and such things needed to be done, I'd agree to that... Doesn't mean tragedies didn't happen.
My moms grandma from her mom's side wrote and received letters from family in Dresden. The letters eventually stopped around the bombing. Family members would try and make contact with family in Germany early 2000s, but I am pretty sure they died during bombing
The book Dresden describes the death agony of the city began just after 10pm on the 13th, witnesses stating bombs rained down everywhere without discrimination smashing everything in sight without mercy.
UA-cam. We're you get censored, banned, and ridiculed for shedding light on things that ACTUALLY HAPPENED and are documented in books written decades ago.
I grew up in Dresden. My great grandfather was 6 years old when the city was bombed. He doesent Remmeber all the details about the bombing anymore, but he passionately talked about how he helped rebuild it and that, the night Before the bombing, there was letters falling from the sky warning the population that the bombing will happen. He also told me how he found phosphorous materials next to the river and mistook it for melted candy - which he was hunting down as a child. The Phosphor heated up in his pants, but before anything happened he threw it away. He told me about a neighbours kid giving him porridge but he never saw them again after the bombing. He also told me that he was in the basement with his parents, waiting for the bombing to stop. He wasn't in the center where the firestorm was, but it was bad enough that multiple houses next to his was bombed and one bomb landed on his house, but it didn't explode. He is still alive, holding on but facing big medical issues recently. I hope to talk to him about the city again and gain a little more of his wisdom.
Thanks TIK. Another great video. It's disturbing how a single individuals take on events rapidly becomes the common consensus and then is propagated further by people considered legitimate by the general public. It's also interesting how so many people know about Dresden, or what they believe then know about Dresden but know absolutely nothing about the far more deadly bombings in Tokyo around the same time.
Grandmother said they used to go to a hill side at night and see the glow of Nuremburg burn in the southeast. Her village was about 60km from Nuremburg. You can imagine Dresden and how far away you could see that firestorm in the distance at night.
I couldnt help but notice how ironic the propaganda then and now considering what is happening in Ukraine. this is why historians like you are so valuable.
@@gordonfrickers5592 yes just like in the completly debunked Doumas chemical attack. Its a false flag thats been predicted for weeks. Facts are NATO will fight to the last Ukraninan while Daggling NATO membership they will never have.
My grandfather’s best friend was a native of Dresden. He was 17 years old, wounded and in a hospital. He recalls the bombings very differently to what you described. He saw bodies turned to mush, babies and mother welded together from being cooked alive. The deathly screams of children, women and the elderly. He said the smell was gut wrenching from the burning and liquidation of the human body. This testimony has also been backed up a million times by survivors and witnesses. It really pains me to see when people continuously water down what the allies also subjected innocent men, women and children to during the war because the countrymen can’t bare the thought of their country committing such inhumane acts.
You know what GOOD. Germans were accomplices to mass murder and mass theft. They didn't object to millions of murders. This lot at least paid for their crimes. No innocent German men or women. As to their children, given that they were accomplices or perpetrators to millions of murder of Jewish, Polish, Russia, Italian, French etc. children, who cares.
When I was in my teens in the mid 80s... We had a neighbor who was a an older retired guy. He had been a bomber pilot in WW2. He stored his old wooden fishing boat at Eglin AFB, at a marina used by active military and veterans. He used to pay me $5 an hour to go out fishing with him, as he needed an extra set of hands. We used to head out just before dawn, and get back at sunset. We did some great fishing just of the coast of Ft. Walton Beach/Destin, Fl... He told me that he did bombing runs on Dresden. He hated it. It really wrecked him emotionally. His wife and kids made a big deal about his war service, and hailed him a hero. But he felt terrible about the whole. He couldn't understand why we allied with communist Russia, and felt like Russia was the bigger enemy. And they did indeed become the bigger enemy, five minutes after the war ended. He thought the whole war was backwards. He never talked it before he talked to me about it. I was 14 yrs old at the time, it was heavy conversation. He later worked in the aviation industry, and said the US immediately hired Nazi scientists and engineers...as did much of the world. He said the narrative seemed inverted with WW2.
Your problem with the Russians is because you were fighting your own war against them. American industry could not overnight adapt to peace time production so Hollywood produced another "enemy" for themselves to justify producing and selling arms. Too complicated for your simple american mind ?
this can't be serious. We allied with RUSSIA because RUSSIA didn't attack Britain for 4 months during BATTLE OF BRITAIN , THEN BOMB BRITAIN FOR 8 MONTHS during the BLITZ , THEN send V1 and V2 rockets for last 10 months of war. I could go on but whats the point
My father-in-law was Bombing Leader of 630 Sqn. After the war his research led him to believe that the UK and Germany had signed an agreement, pre-war, that Oxford and Cambridge and Dresden were not to be militarized so they would be safe from bombing. I haven't been able to find any mention of this. Being 'Bomb Leader' my FIL was the first bomber to arrive on Target and recalled seeing the blue flashes of the trams that (believing they were safe from bombing raids) were still running in the city. This was the “raid too many” for FIL and he never forgave Bomber Command for putting him in such an invidious position.
5:22 I have some Soviet info to add to this section-> On 5 January 1945 the Soviet 14 GvBAD sent 2 lend-lease B-25 Mitchell bombers to Dresden and they dropped 300,000 leaflets between around half-past 6 in the afternoon. The leaflets contained the "Appeal of 50 German generals to the German army and people". Source: TsAMO fund 20516, inventory 1, file 34, page 1.
Excellent video. About 15 years ago, I was in a "discussion" with others on this topic. As a result, I visited the National Archives in London a couple of times and was able to read and copy the target information supplied to the RAF before this raid. In various small sketch maps etc factories building things like aero engines and other weapons etc were clearly marked. The railway station was also highlighted as a key target with the explanation of how it was an important junction key to the movement of German troops, munitions etc. In 1991, I went to Germany to work and the first colleague to befriend me told me how he still remembered being pushed in a pram at 4 years of age, by his mother as she fled during the RAF raid and the sight of the city burning as they fled stayed with him. And he never held a grudge and was the kindest of all the German colleagues I had there.
As horrible as is was, it seems that it would be pretty hard to garner sympathy from the British public who had been mercilessly bombed for the previous five years by the Luftwaffe and remote bombs…
It's a shame that UA-cam is almost always mentioned in every video I watch as an obstacle to telling the whole truth. I hate having to use this platform as a mere watcher. I don't even consider being a content creator. I find it interesting that a large percentage of the my favorite historical content creators are British, although I wouldn't care if they weren't. I have read plenty of WW2 history, including some on the raids on Dresden, so UA-cam's idiotic censorship (dumping history into the "memory hole") didn't keep me ignorant of the facts TIK had to gloss over. Even so, I still learned a lot from this video. Nice work, TIK, I hope someday another platform will supplant this platform, and you will be free to make videos as you see fit.
I didn't skip many facts, just some of the most heart-wrenching ones... But yes, UA-cam doesn't want this sort of content on the platform, which is why it appears to be restricting this video right now.
Nobody remembers Pforzheim was obliterated too. The Soviets never let people forget about Dresden. Why? After the war, Dresden was in the DDR, Pforzheim was in West Germany.
There was a lot more to the Dresden raids than was initially apparent,the British government with one eye on the finishing line saw Dresden as a very fortuitous act,all they had to do to extricate themselves from any international outrage was to plant the blame firmly at Arthur Harris's door.That was quite inexcusable as Churchill had been a very firm proponent of Harris's plan to obliterate German cities,when he saw the way in which the wind was blowing,he immediately began his campaign of distancing himself from the activities of bomber command.The ultimate insult by Churchill came at the end of the fighting in Europe where he thanked every branch of the services for their sacrifices,all except bomber command that is.A despicable slight that saw Churchill's popularity take a severe battering which was the least that he deserved.
POLITICS old chap. THe left-Wing press, caused a storm of self righteousness, and the Labour Party took full advantange of it. With the General Election looming, and forcastes not good for Churchill, He put his Politician hat on and fought dirty. Dropping poor old Harris right in it. The USAAF, who hardly get a mench when Dresdon is mentioned, bombed the shit out of the rubble the following day. They were never criticised by the press for it, like the RAF was, and got top medals for their deeds.
@@C02045 Churchill ignored by all Allied members when wanting Euro invasion to incur @ Adriatic,so as to contain the Soviets.🇫🇷&🇺🇲wanted to empower FDR's good buddy Stalin,as well as🇫🇷wanting homeland front
I lived 15 years in Dresden. Thank you for this video! The memory-culture there was a strategic propaganda by the GDR regime to blame the western allies. But in the recent years it evolved to a general peace-movement best symbolized by the Coventry "nail-cross" inside the rebuilt Frauenkirche. Eventhough I would consider the bombing as a war-crime as you did, I have some respect for "the evil Bomber-Harris". He was a butcher - no doubt about that. But he was also a great soldier, who was determent to do, whatever was necessary. In some way he was very like Churchill himself. I can't stand the naive morality for "the good war" and "the good soldier". That's a dangerous myth, dwarving the reality. In war, a good soldier kills his enemy with all his capabilities. Harris did it, Patton did it, Guderian and Shukow did it. If you look for morality in war, ask the politicians who started the mess.
I'm by no means naive about the brutality of war, but I'm still not about to give generals a blank slate to do whatever they want in war and just blaming the politicians alone.
You don't consider yourself a"Woke Snowflake,do you??While Dresden still might have been a legitimate target,the flattening of citys like Würzburg or Stuttgart was done,because the planes needed something to do,and plenty of ordnance needed to get rid off!
The rise of nationalism and statism has lead to the association of all citizens with the their nations ideaolgy. Obviously Historically these ideas existed since before Rome, but not until recent memory has it lead to the total destruction and genocide we saw last century. There was little incentive for feudal lords or kings to kill the conquered as they would become welcome assists. The rise of nationalism shifts the emphasis of the attackers from an attack against the lord to an attack on our vary way of life in other words the collective. No serf gave a damn if they were forced to produce a Bushel of wheat for lord Thomas or for lord hamsberg.
Australian Band Cold Chisel sang about this in the 70's with a powerful, thoughtful song...numerous Australian flight crew took their own lives in the 50's
just finished reading the book, unfortunately found it to be quite underwhelming, more about a billy chap than about the abominations of war and of dresden's bombings in particular.
My Latvian mother-in-law told a similar story of being locked out of an air raid shelter in Hamburg. She was a "guest worker" during the war and during one of the air raids, attempted to get into a shelter but was denied as she was not German so she and other non-Germans took shelter under a bridge. Once the all clear was sounded, she walked past where the shelter once stood. It had taken a direct hit and was completely destroyed with no survivors. She laughed while talking about it.
Well, you need to understand the times and the fact that the Germans had just kicked her out into the bombing only to get bombed themselves. So yes, a big Nelson "ha ha" to them.
@@kylephilipe8347 which bit? She was in Hamburg during the war and I have no reason to believe she lied. And hearing TIK's video, it would seem this was not an isolated case.
Dresden bombing was horrific but the Tokyo bombing (Operation Meetinghouse) in March 1945 was just off-the-charts _insane._ Excellent video from TIK who hits it out of the park, as usual.
Now that you mention it, yeah, I would like see TIK make a video out of that, it made the Horoshima and Nagasaki bombings look like a Bar fight by comparison
I don’t have much sympathy for the Germans that burned in Dresden. They could have prevented this by more vocally opposing Nazism in the late days of Weimar, when they still had an alright country. They needed to be taught a lesson about what happens when you oppose progress.
@@sirridesalot6652 Why would the winners rewrite history to damage their own image LMFAO. If anything, it would be played down as a legitimite target when it really was not, which is exactly what has happened.
I was in Dresden (on my way back to Berlin from Chemnitz (K.M.Stdt)) in December of 1981. Many of the buildings were still in rubble with work progressing slowly to restore them. Bricks that had spilled out into the street had little foot-high fences around the perimeter and people left the rubble where it lay knowing that eventually the city would be restored. After the fall of the wall a decade later that work sped up and (from google street view) I can see that the down town has been largely restored. It was quite an eye-opener. I had heard about the bombing of Dresden but I did not expect to see the rubble so many years later. But, that's how it was in the DDR in the post war period.
Another UA-cam channel stated the initial attack targeted roads and bridges to prevent escape. Given the poor accuracy of the bombers, I always found this suspect. Thank you for this well cited report.
My uncle told me he used flamethrowers to burn bodies in the aftermath. He was convalescing from wounds near Dresden at the time. Transylvanian Saxon Waffen SS soldier.
@@davidgreene6976 It is in the Stories, and it is a real Region in Romania. Count Dracula is based on a local Ruler there, who was exceptionally brutal, even by 15th Century Standards.
I was first exposed to the bombing of Dresden in Kurt Vonnegut Jr's novel Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut who was a POW on Dresden had helped recovering the bodies. He originally accepted the 25 000 figuer but by the time of his book believed the 135 000 figure which I accepted as fact until now. You have changed my mind but even 25 000 is still a horrifying number.
I'd add a substantial comment, but it would be redundant with @Chris Vickers's comment. Well done both to TIK and to Chris Vickers. Thank you for stating your positions so well.
If 100,000 people were killed in a Tokyo bombing during a single night on March 9th - 10th, it seems likely that more than 25,000 were killed during the Dresden bombing that lasted from the 13th of February to the 15th of February. Vonnegut was there and his description is horrific.
I have been saying something similar to the people who claim that the city was not a legit target. There were 125 factories producing war material for the Reich. Three major raillines went through the city as well.
The most important fact was that the high casualty total at Dresden was the result of a firestorm. Absent that firestorm, the Dresden raid would be but a footnote in the history of the bombing campaign. Contrary to what some think, firestorms could not be created on command. If they could, Bomber Command would have done so in the summer of 1943 and quite possibly have won the war.
By your logic the civilian population of any city in a country with a war economy is a legitimate target. But if you feel threatened by German soldiers with a bolt and a paper clip and you want to burn children and women to death with White Phosphorus then that is your decision.
Wo standen im Stadtzentrum Fabriken ich lade sie ein wir können die bombardierte Fläche ablaufen die karsernen die nicht im Stadtzentrum waren haben nicht eine Bombe gesehen die stehen heute noch es ging nur um die Bevölkerung und nichts anderes
I did a paper on this fire bombing, back in high school. I was shocked when I learned Curtis lemay purposely went for the civilians, changed my whole outlook of how I viewed certain generals from the war
this is the issue I have with history, an official narrative and the inconvenient truth of a situation. Civilians can be labeled a "war resource" depending on the situation. Winners don't seem to have to worry about war crimes so you better win if you do it.
I don't know why Lemay leaned into that. This video seems to make it clear that the original target was legitimate manufacturing, then when the 2nd wave came and saw that everything was already on fire, just decided to set things on fire that weren't. That wasn't the plan. If civilians live near war targets, then they are likely to be hit incidentally. I can't imagine why he couldn't keep his "civilians are targets" thoughts to himself.
If civilians provide material support to an enemy military force they are a legitimate target. End of story. Any actions that make it easier for the brave young men fighting on your behalf should be taken and that includes using weapons of mass destruction on cities to soften up a ground invasion. People from allied countries that criticize the attacks on Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima ad Nagasaki to me seem to not give a shit about the American and British military casualties. They see these fighting men as a disposable resource like it doesnt matter if thousands of them die so long as some stupid women and children are spared being roasted alive. The allies were sick of sending their young men to die its much better to just annihilate your enemies from the relative safety of the air especially since they had total control of the skies. Maybe the Germans and the Japanese should have surrendered sooner or not have started the war at all if they didnt want to see their civilian populations burn to ashes.
@@joshuaortiz2031 the military views the soldiers as fodder anyways. I don't have issue with anything else but it's not just the citizens that view em that way
@@joshuaortiz2031 I don't view it that way. I don't "want" soldiers to die either, but your view seems to presume that there's no such thing as an innocent or civilian. So what, if a mother sends her son in the army a cooked meal, it's now morally licit to blow her to pieces? Sure, some people are unfairly harsh and don't acknowledge the realities of war, but you sound unfairly harsh and bloodthirsty. "They're our enemies, so blow them the fuck up and feel no remorse! The fact that they're women and children makes no difference!"
Random tip- firefighters now are told NOT to wet cloth over their mouth, as the humidity created transmits more heat than dry air. I heard it most recently from wildfire (burn over) instructions, maybe the only situation that even comes close to the ferocity of the Dresden fire.
An American best selling author Kurt Kurt Vonnegut was one of the POW's that was forced by the Germans to retrieve the dead in Dresden. In 1969 he wrote a semi- biography of his experiences in the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. A eye witness to the horror of Dresden.
My father was born in Dresden in 1902. His whole family was from Dresden. The day of the bombing he was in Berlin. One of his aunts left town the day before to take care of a friend. The rest of my father’s family died that day.
@@patriciabrenner9216Jesus christ Patricia, Germans literally talk about the 40s and acknowledged it. Civilians shouldn't be murdered because they live in a dictatorship. Also you know the Hitler youth recruited children? You think that "German people= all evil barbarians" but "brits=all perfect saints"?
As always a very good work. Thank you. We here in Germany often hear about this particular war crime, when those who want to paint a different picture about our history try to blame others.
Hit ler on 1 September 1940: "And should the Royal Air Force drop two thousand or three thousand or four thousand kilograms of bo mbs, then we will now drop 150,000; 180,000; 300,000; 400,000; yes one million kilograms in a single night. And should they declare they will greatly increase their attacks on our cities, then we will erase their cities! " His intent was clear, what he lacked was capability. The Allies did not lack the capability.
I read three entire books in less than a week for this video, so I'd appreciate if you give the video a thumbs up 👍 (it's the reason I look so tired in the video)
In addition, you know full well that the National Socialists will be in the comments spouting nonsense about this topic, so be careful not to believe everything you read down there.
The reason the targets for most of the heavy bombers was changed from factories etc. 6:43 was because the primary purpose of strategic bombing was to draw up the German fighter planes so they could be destroyed. This strategy was so the Allies would have air supremacy on D-Day and the Normandy breakout.
Thumbs up! 👍
I’ve read the Taylor Dresden book. Good read.
@@ZER0ZER0SE7EN, they bombed Dresden in 1945 to have air superiority in 1944?
So anyone who does not agree with you is automatically a Nazi? 😄 A bit naïve, is it not?
Once the ammunition trains lose their priorities and get sidelined, the craven, offside pamphleteers can then grind their axes, sell their biased views mostly unmolested,
and be very much noticed in the popular press.
Thanks for another great definitive item.
I am living in Dresden and I talked to actual witnesses of the bombing who were children at the time wandering through the firestorm and seeing burning people all around them while searching for their parents. It is said that people were running into the water of the river but then the water was burning too. Unimaginable for me.
Now there are almost no eye witnesses alive to talk about it. I am afraid that we might loose touch with how devastating war can be.
There aren't many eyewitnesses to the concentration camps or the brutalities of the Eastern Front remaining either.
That’s horrible.
To make matters worse, they had refugees there as the city was a safe haven as it didn't even have any war-related targets of value
To reduce public outrage, it was later claimed by Britain that they did (history is written by the victors) - but ironically, historical accounts concluded that these so-called targets weren't even hit
What was hit was the city center and other residential areas and the use of explosives followed by incinerary bombs, proved that the point was to kill the civilian population
The firestorm that ensued melted the roads and people fleeing had their feet burnt alive.
To summarise, over 200k people died (Allies claimed only 20k) and it took two weeks for the Germans just to burn the bodies of the dead due to the sheer number of them.
It was a war crime and Holocaust of epic proportions that lasted two days.
As a Brit and American I apologize to the Germans profusely. As bad as the Nazis were, innocent Germans didn't deserve this atrocity.
The writer Kurt Vonnegut was in Desden as a Prisoner of War when the bombarbment happend. There is book by him: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse-Five
War is awful, and still there are a few demented NATO leaders now willing to risk a far worse war with Russia.
My wife's grandfather (from Belgium) was a forced laborer in Germany when he became 18 years old.
He made searchlights not that far from Dresden. He tells that night turned into day and that he could feel the wind sucked towards Dresden.
He was forced to help with the "cleanup". When he talks about this (the men is 97) tears come in his eays and he stops talking.
The images he saw are to difficult to talk about.
Thank you TIK for a great and balanced video.
Forced labour...paid slavery
Why did it bother him seeing dead Germans? He should have rejoiced in their deaths.
Like the Civil war in the USA, I can't imagine having to deal with all the dead bodies left in the aftermath. That would do a number on your brain.
@@kfl611 The NAZIs had to deal with the dead bodies. There were not enough of them. The Germans didn't have a problem gassing millions, so we shouldn't have a problem killing them. General Harris was correct, all the people killed in Dresden weren't worth the life of one British Grenadier. It was the generals that took the NAZI bait and didn't fire back in the press that helped push those men to suicide. Most generals are spineless politicians not warriors.
@@kfl611 Very interesting you mention The American Civil War , War Btwn: The States , where nearly 720000 men died ;it was Union General William Tecumseh Sherman that said "War Is Hell " as he laid a wasteland of Georgia marching toward the sea late 1864- up til Appamaddox Va. ( Pretty sure General Lee surrendered in Va.).
The American Civil War brought death and destruction, civilian displacement , including the displacement of slaves , and trench warfare, the introduction of the battling gun , and machine gun
It was a harbinger of what was to come later by 1914. In fact quite a few European powers looked how the USA hah mobilized in the North , and South , and warrily looked @ the potential military prowess the USA might exert down the road.
As someone living in Dresden: the city hasnt recovered completely even now in 2022. still every few months there is a WW2 bomb being found on construction sites. There are still quite a few areas/properties that just stand vacant since the buildings there were destroyed in the bombings now nearly 80 years ago.
Did the Soviets just ignore it?
Now imagine an entire country, Vietnam
@@zopEnglandzip they didn’t care enough to help the germans like the allies did. They despised them.
Ah yes, something which is a common occurence in Rotterdam as well
@@zopEnglandzip Just like everybody else... same happens in the former West Germany. If I interpret the DW report correctly, most bombs these days are found in Nordrhein-Westfalen that took the bulk of allied bombings in WW2. It is practically impossible to detect a buried bomb in the urban environment. We ("the Soviets") still excavate unexploded ordinance in midtown Moscow, every year. There were no wartime bombings in the affected areas, just some warehouses and WW1-period infantry training range.
Seventy years ago, my mother and I visited a family on a tranquil farm in New England after Church services.
The father of the family remained at home and seldom spoke as he shuffled between the family home and a separate workshop where he made briar pipes.
In fact, I can't recall ever hearing his voice during our many visits.
A half century later, I met the daughter who was my age and she explained why her father never spoke.
Before the war, he'd studied at Dresden and knew the people, places, and cultural richness of that city. His name was Gettsinger.
During WW2 he flew a B-24 during bombing raids over Germany. He knew what he was destroying at Dresden and couldn't bear to ever hear any mention of that city.
Despite the passage of many years, he would spontaneously burst into tears at any mention of Dresden.
He was a pilot, or co-pilot, and had no choice. He had to fly and knew what he was destroying. A court-marshal awaited if he refused.
He was not alone. During the VietNam era, I heard of pilots from that war who had similar experiences of after having had to bomb Hue.
How was it that politicians could declare who should bear the blame other than themselves.
Ask Joe Biden & Company...
The last 3 years should have proven, once and for all, that politicians can never be trusted.
I think ... we all like to blame the other guy's politicians. Never blame ours, it's never our own fault. Fair enough, too.
If there was/were any justice then the nice folks who start wars should be the first casualties of those wars ... and the last.
We allow our politicians immunity from the consequences of their actions no matter how bad the consequences are. We've done that throughout history. What's even worse, we usually reward them for it.
If you do the killing, you have to learn to live with it. If you order somebody else to do the killing, you feel fine. I don't know why that happens but it's the way people work.
@@neilreynolds3858 Sometimes it's a case of the lesser of two evils. Clue, hee hoo time again-
-hee hoo has the biggest gun writes the rules.
My aunt was a member of forced labor in Dresden as a part of all kids born in 1924 in Bohemia. After the first wave she was told by the German supervisor : "Leave, as a Czech you don't deserve this, go home to Prague, this is not your doing , it's our war!", thus saving her life. So she run with other Czech laborers to the hills a watched in horror from above Dresden the inferno staged by the second wave. ....I'm sure it was a long walk home but the war was for her over.
that supervisor made a very honorable decision
I hope the supervisor survived somehow. I also hope your aunt lived a happy life after the war.
The 55 million deaths caused by the Nazi nation are shocking and the consequence of the Nazi nation's barbarism. By the way, this bombing of Dresden would not have happened without the barbarism of the Nazi nation before it. The first German attack on Poland in 1939 was just the beginning of German bomb terror! The Nazi nation actually started this war with the Air Force bomb terror. The bombing of Wieluń comprised air raids on the Polish town of Wieluń by German air force on 1 September 1939. Germany's air force began bombing Wieluń in the early morning on the first day of World War II. The bombing has been described by several historians as the first act of World War II. The city had neither air defenses nor any apparent military targets. Germany's air force bombed also such nearby towns as Działoszyn, Radomsko, and Sulejów, which also had no military targets. The Wieluń bombing destroyed at least 70 percent of the town's buildings (as much as 90 percent, in the city center). There were many civilian casualties and that was intentional. One of the first places hit was the hospital, which likely had Red Cross markings. 32 persons in the hospital were killed. After the hospital began burning, German pilots shot at patients trying to escape the building. The German pilots were actually chasing civilians throughout the town. Targets destroyed by German bombing included: Farna Church, built in the 13th-14th centuries A mid-19th-century synagogue The Augustinian cloister. Parts of the 19th-century Royal Castle. The 15th-century city walls, severely damaged Over a dozen historic 18th- and early-19th-century houses. The city hall, with its 14th-century Kraków Gate, survived when a bomb got stuck in the city hall's roof and failed to explode. That was the first bombing of many German bombings against civilians in Poland! But bombing was just one of the many methods of them to killing civilians! Most were gassed and shot! Tens of Millions have been murdered by all means including bombs. Including millions of children.
So no pity for the Nazi Nation!
I'm sure this was real and actually happened..
@@legendary7957yahoo ...THAT'S THE TRUTH-!!!
We had a family friend- who survived the raid- he was Lithuanian and was fleeing the Soviet advance. My mother said he was the most unhappy man she had ever met- he was in a cellar and somehow survived but his mother and sister did not. I assume he felt guilty about this but I never ever discussed Dresden with him and he never mentioned it. His life was changed when he met and married a German woman who was originally from Konigsberg but had come to Nottingham to work in the lace factories after WW2 and his life changed- they were an incredibly happy couple. .
We said it would never happen again. Then it did. Then we said it would happen again. Then it did. Then we said it would never happen again. Now we're receiving unconfirmed reports of chemical weapons used in ukraine
I'm glad he found happiness. Living through something like Dresden would be awful beyond belief.
Glad to hear it.
Grateful dead said it best... every cloud has a silver lining. Nice to hear a positive out of so much negative
I hate you. I wish you hadn't shared this story. I am so sad. I don't want to be alive anymore.
Victor Gregg was another POW in Dresden as was the American Kurt Vonnegut, when the bombardment occured.... Victor Gregg wrote several books and had numerous interviews and speaking engagements discussing his experience during the Dresden firestorm.... He was a 25 year old British paratrooper when he got captured at Arnhem (aka: Operation Market Garden) and was sent to Dresden as a POW. He sabotaged a soap factory machine and was sentenced to death the following day. That evening, while him and large group of condemned men awaited death, incendiaries crashed through the glass cupola ceiling in the building they were held. This killed many by both falling glass and incendiaries burning into their bodies and nothing could be done to put the incendiaries out. Shortly afterwards, a large high explosive bomb blew the wall out killing many more including his POW friend. As he exited the building in danger of collapse, he seen horrific scenes of fire everywhere with explosives and incendiaries still falling and detonating. He seen many people of all ages, dead, on fire and horribly burnt and injured. Only a combination of keeping calm from years of combat experience (he was in North Africa including the Alamein battle, and the Arnhem battle), and lots of luck, allowed him to escape to safety in the outskirts of the city. He passed by many who didn't make it, as explosions, falling buildings, heat and incendiaries took many.....Days later, him and other prisoners were taken in to search for survivors in the rubble. One day he was able to escape and made it to the Russian lines..... Sadly, Victor Gregg passed away on October 12, 2021, just 3 days shy of his 101 birthday. R.I.P..... Many of his interviews are on UA-cam.
Victor Gregg stated in those interviews that it was the most evil thing he ever witnessed. Mr. Gregg said he was ashamed that his country committed this atrocity, but claimed he never blamed the pilots because they were just following orders!
Wow .....speechless
@Rodger Dennan Well least finally people are starting to talk about war crimes allies committed. Till now i have seen only positive coverage of allies as heroes and angels and Germans as unspeakable evil who exterminated quadtrillion billion gorillion, literally satan and demons. When in reality war is hell and there is no good side in war, just different shades of warcrimes, but its the victors who write the history and can push their propaganda supreme upon rest of us for century until truth starts to come out.
@Rodger Dennan All I've ever heard ( .. I'm 66 ) .. is spelled horror. My shop in Las Vegas, Nevada was adjacent to the old Basic Magnesium plant, circa WW II, which manufactured the magnesium, ( the continuously burning ingredient) my native leaselord informed me, to " burn down Germany & Japan. "
Now that is quite a story! That would be a great movie! :)
My Aunt Hikie was born in Dresden and as a young girl survived both the bombing and firestorm. She was 8 years old and today is 85. Her sister and mother also survived but are both passed on now. She told me when the bombing stopped they came up from the celler and tried to run out the front door but stopped because their neighbors were all sucked down the street into part of the firestorm. So they turned ahd ran out the backdoor and this saved their lives. Their neighbors were a family of 5. Mother and 4 children. They were physically sucked off their feet and straight into a massive firestorm at the end of the street. Scary.
I really appreciate that you put your references at the bottom of the screen as you make each point. I haven't seen any other essay-style youtuber do this and I think it's a really good practice.
It is a good practice. However the problem with referencing some history books is if you were to check they referenced other history books who referenced other history books who referenced other history books who referenced other history books. Zero original sources. Or the first book bases it's facts on estimates. Then people reference this, but stop saying it is an estimate. It would be like If I made a video about Dresden and referenced other UA-cam videos as proof. Things get reworded in every rewriting. Adjectives change, synonyms are used, until the "facts" sometimes bare little resemblance to the original facts. That is why some history books say completely different facts about the same thing. This is why some history books say only 10,000 died, others say 300,000 died.
The father of a German friend survived the Dresden bombing at the age of 5. His mother had, at the last minute, chosen to go to a different shelter. The first one ended up being destroyed. Since this raid, the survivor has considered the raid to be his "second birthday".
To all here KPPO200 is a so-called fact-checker! Fact-checkers delete comments they do not like! Be careful! I see here German democracy at work!
My uncle Clyde stover from Tennessee was captured at Normandy on jun.7th 1944.He was taken to a P.O.W. camp outside Dresden.He told my mom that they had to come to the city and drag out dead bodies and bury them.He suffered from PTSD and took his own life 6 months after coming home in the winter of 45.
Sad in the extreme, Mr. Paul.
@@steffenritter7497 Yes it was Stephen .He was about 30 miles from Dresden and in early apr was liberated by the Russian steam rollers.He told my mother they captured the camp,and made the German SS strip naked.The Russians got drunk and broke all these bottles on this dirt road leading into the camp.Thry made the Germans run up and down this road naked with broken glass on it until they bled to death or the first one that stopped running was shot in the head!After that they would not deter from their line of attack and would not take American POWS to American lines but did tell them the direction to walk in whereas the lines were 30 miles away.My uncle walked and got there to tell others where the guys were.They rescued the Americans a few hours later.I don't remember the name of the camp.
In that moment he probably realized maybe he wasnt fighting for the good guys. So sad. His brain probably melted down seeing all that and trying to reconcile it with american war propaganda
Kurt Vonnegut wrote about this experience.
Sad story! It would not have bothered me to bury members of the Nazi nation! I probably would have enjoyed seeing so many of them dead. The reason is obvious! To think what crimes this Nazi nation committed. By the way, if your uncle Clyde would have been a Polish prisoner of war (POW) after the fights of 1939 or a Soviet soldier, he probably wouldn't have come home. The Nazi soldiers or the like would very likely have murdered him as POW. Polish prisoners of war were beaten, sent to perform slave labour or shot. Commanders of units which had put up a stiff fight were penalised for their ‘impudence’ by being shot when they eventually surrendered or, in a few instances, incinerated with flame-throwers. According to their racial views resistance by Polish ‘sub-humans’ was not considered military virtue, just insolence which was very inhumanly punished. There were many massacres of Polish POWs committed by Nazi Wehrmacht soldiers. (For those who don't know what the Wehrmacht is. That's what the German army was called back then.) The Wehrmacht and their generals were willing tools of the German Nazi government! Polish civilians were murdered by the Wehrmacht but also Polish Prisoners of war were murdered by the Wehrmacht. During the German raid on Poland, soldiers of the Wehrmacht carried out about 60 percent of the mass murders of Polish civilians. These were not just a few massacres by the Wehrmacht on Polish POWs and civilians. That had a method and was part of the war of extermination against the Slavs wich Poles are too. Because according to the genocidal German "General Plan East", the majority of the Slavic Poles, like all Slavs, were to be murdered.
In many cases large groups of Polish soldiers were murdered after capture. For example Massacre of Ciepielów: Ciepielów massacre that took place on 8 September 1939 was one of best documented war crimes of the Wehrmacht during its raid of Poland. The number of the murdered Polish soldiers was 300. The murder of the Slavic Polish soldiers was part of the genocide against the Poles, because according to the genocidal German "General Plan East".
The same genocidal German "General Plan East" applied to Polish civilians. As already mentioned, the Wehrmacht soldiers also murdered civilians! For example after the Warsaw uprising in Wola a suburb of Poland's capital city, Warsaw there was a systematic murdering in various massacres of between 70,000 and 90,000 Polish civilians by German Wehrmacht, SS and other special murder units! So units of the Wehrmacht and the SS and other special murder units massacred in Wola captured Polish resistance fighters, men, women, children and the elderly. Not even nuns or hospital staff and hospital patients were spared. In terms of the number of victims, the Wola massacre was the largest war crime on European soil in World War II. During and after the Warsaw uprising there were also other various massacres in which the Wehrmacht was also involved. After the uprising, Warsaw was almost systematic completely destroyed, taking part in this destruction as well Units of the Wehrmacht. There were also many rapes committed by soldiers of the Wehrmacht contrary to the legend that is spread that the Wehrmacht did not rape. Soldiers who murder also rape. Rapes were also committed against Polish women and girls before shooting the female captives in massacres carried out by the Wehrmacht soldiers, SS and other special murder units like Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz.
Otherwise, the Polish POWs, who were captured in combat together with the western allies in western allied uniforms, had the same luck as the American uncle Clyde and were treated somewhat according to the rules of the Geneva Convention.The Soviet POWs didn't have such luck like uncle Clyde and Polish POWs, who were captured in combat together with the western allies in western allied uniforms. Because they were murdered just like the Slavic Polish POWs in 1939 according to the same genocidal racist "General Plan East". For according to this plan, the Slavic peoples of the Soviet Union were to be exterminated. All in all a total of 3.5 million Soviet POWs were murdered with 2 million murdered by starvation. Incidentally, the German government was very generous to the survivors of the death camps for soviet POWs and paid the last ones still alive the one-off sum of 2,500 euros in compensation 70 years after the end of the war.
By the way, since 1936 the vast majority of German followers and supporters of the German Nazi government were thus they were Nazis. So civilians of the Nazi nation also were often murderers, because not only the Wehrmacht and the SS and other special murder units murdered! For example, my grandpa was hit by a German civilian to death. This German civilian was the watchdog for the Polish workers in a factory seized by the Germans in Poland. My grandpa worked there. By the way, it was impossible to quit the job. The Germans had the list of employees. And besides, my grandfather had to work to feed the family. The German overseer got angry with my grandpa! He hit him in his anger until he died. This happened more often in Poland. By the way, even their children murdered! One can read about these murderous children in this link! Unfortunately I can't post the link because this will delete the comment, but one can find the link by entering that as a google search term: "death-marches-book-details-german-citizens-role-in-end-of-war-killings" Quote from the link: "A genocidal mentality that had systematically dehumanized the Jews and the Slavs, led to the collective hunt...More than 250,000 concentration camp prisoners died in death marches shortly before the end of World War II." The link reports that Civilians participated in the hunt for hundreds of concentration camp prisoners who, during an American bombing attack on the city and its train station, had fled from the freight wagons, some of them in flames, in which they were being transported. Local police officers, guards and members of the Volkssturm national militia and the Hitler Youth executed their victims in a nearby forest." Hitler Youth were children! Civilians participated in the hunt for hundreds of concentration camp prisoners who, during an American bombing attack on the city and its train station, had fled from the freight wagons, some of them in flames, in which they were being transported. Local police officers, guards and members of the Volkssturm national militia and the Hitler Youth executed their victims in a nearby forest." Hitler Youth were children! I further quote: "The prisoners were killed like animals, according to a British military report. Up to 300 people died in the massacre, with the leader of a Hitler Youth group in Celle killing more than 20 alone. Government and local officials and the Hitler Youth, as well as local residents abused or killed large numbers of those who, in the last stage of their lives filled with suffering, were forced on marches or had spent days being transported across Germany in overfilled freight cars. The Allies captured the city four days later. At least 250,000 prisoners lost their lives on death marches between January and May 1945." This Nazi nation was completely megalomaniac, mad, criminal, amoral and degenerated!
Uncle Clyde probably didn't know all that because then he wouldn't have any mercy and no pity for the Nazi nation!
One of your best videos TIK.
You made it feel like I was there. I could almost feel the fear, the heat and the fire.
No glory in war for sure, but sometimes people can be very brave.
One ma dicks was there it was huge even in the firestorm everyone seen say so it like a real dick tower silhouetted in the night just like Godzilla but for nazis anyway it was a long time ago (1944) so everyone forgot but I inherited it from grampa
Thank you. This is one of the better, perhaps one of the best videos I have seen on the bombing of Dresden. Thank you for your great effort.
My grandma was evacuated from Ukraine through Dresden. She worked in a shoe factory for a few weeks and then she was sent to work in Austria.
She still has her German citizenship papers. Half my family was sent back to the Soviet Union after the war and were never heard from again.
They were Trawniki or 14th SS :P ?
I thought only I knew about Trawniki.....
My Latvian in-laws were given the option to leave Europe or return to Latvia, now under Soviet control. One brother went to Canada, the rest came to Australia. My father-in-law still thought the Russians were after him in the 1970's.
Good
They were mennonites. non-combatant.
Volga Germans
You always upload in time for my lunch break, so thank you tik!
Hope you enjoy!
For me it's during my dinner time. ✌️
One messed up thing I read about Dresden bombing is they piled up hundreds of civilian bodies after the bombing.
It was so much that it created two massive piles on each street, and you had to walk in between on a "path".
Many of those bodies were children or women because all the men were in the army at the front.
Oh they cremated the women and children in Sobidor, Auschwitz, Treblinka etc.
So I really couldn't care less.
It's sad. But it had to be done. My great garbdfather, who was there during the time told me that it was necessary to prevent sickness and plagues.
My mother-in-law, as a young woman of 20, watched Dresden burning from a nearby hilltop, just lucky to be away from town.
To all here KPPO200 is a so-called fact-checker! Fact-checkers delete comments they do not like! Be careful! I see here German democracy at work!
My uncle was in that 2nd raid as a navigator he said he didn't have to do much because he could see the glow at 20.000 feet. He never got over the shock off the death toll and took his own life in 1948.
My Grandfather was a navigator in 187 squadron - He cried if he remembered that event.
After the war he would ride his motorcycle at dangerous speeds hoping it would take his life.
apparently the smells were unmistakeable at even 20,000 ft.
@@StihlmaddArborist he probably didn't need to smell anything. Common sense would have told him just how bad the fires were. I would imagine he probably had either first hand or at least second hand knowledge of the terror and loss suffered by the inhabitants of cities like London, York or Manchester. Putting 2 and 2 together was probably easy from that point. I don't envy him.
One of my greats was a pow in a camp near Dresden. Sorry to hear about your family member; but remember there were massive forces labour camps near Dresden.
@@fredjohnson9833 York was not sytematically bombed!
@@marypetrie930 my point is he probably knew how devastating bombs could be.
My great-grandparents lived in Radebeul at the time of the bombing. Radebeul is about 11km outside Dresden. She wrote to my grandfather (he was a Namibian farmer interned in South Africa during the war), that the light from the fires was sufficient enough that one could read a newspaper.
didn't think I would hear about Radebeul here but well my home doesn't seem to be that unknown
So der Stürmer was read without light?
What a pleasure to known of 🙏😁
Hopefully you remember what else those days Nazis were responsible for... ☠️
@@OmmerSyssel They try to forget and whine they were victims.
My grandmother lived in Radeberg during the firestorm. They saw the light too on the horizon.
@@OmmerSysselIt's a nasty comment from you. Many people really lived a normal life. My grandparents told me their parents were threatened by Nazis if you all but had a different opinion. When you have kids you think twice about what to say to those people. You didn't have to live through those times...
Outstanding presentation, I have seen several mentions of this incident and read a book decades ago. Yours is by far the best discussion 👍
My grandmother's family was in a group of Latvian refugees hiding on a train heading toward Dresden when the bombs fell. The train stopped when they saw the flames on the horizon. According to my great grandfather, "It was like a hell."
Cold Chisel...Dresden Blues
The bombing saved the lives of the few surviving Jews in Dresden, a small moral note to add to Dresden's tragedy.
@@RicardoMartinez-oh9sq How do you suppose that was the case?
@@dantallionmccrews3822 ...DID YOU WATCH THE VIDEO?!!
@@daleburrell6273 Yes, and?
My Grandfather told me last year, that the burning skyline over Dresden is his oldest memory. He grew up a few km south-west of Dresden and the airplanes flew over his village. He was almost 4 years old.
Thank you for showing us this video. Esp for mentioning Leipzig and Chemnitz too.
PS: As a Leipzig citizen who grew up in Saxony, I can tell you there is no week whithout a news about neutralizing some bombs in that cities.
So what? There is not a DAY in your victims memory which isn't haunted by your insane ancestors deliberately chosen evilness!
50 million victims should calm you down?
You deserved every single bomb.
Regards from a peaceful neighbour who decided rescuing their entire fellow Jewish population...
Thank you so much for sharing your memories.
My grandmother's immediate family was killed in the blitz.
I'm glad your loser grandfather knows some of the pain.
Expect no sympathy you hund
Running to my safe space led me here. Learning doesn't start until you're uncomfortable.
I only saw my father cry once. He was a waist gunner in a B17, and was in one of the bombers that destroyed Dresden. After the war, when I was only 4 years old, we traveled to Germany to visit my uncle, who had married a German girl, and was living in Leipzig. We took a day trip to Dresden, and as soon as we were in sight of the city my father broke down hysterically. It scared us all. He was inconsolable for several hours. We never talked about it.
Interestingly you have 88 likes .
Your American grandfather travelled into the Soviet zone to see a city he bombed? And he was upset about killing the enemy who was trying to kill him? Your story sounds implausible on the face of it.
@@georgemiller151Yeah I’m sure the german women and children in dresden were very keen on killing him, idiot.
Man, could you imagine being in the flames and looking up and realizing another wave was dropping it's bombs? Holy hell that's scary!
As it turns out, I think your narrative sufficiently, and poignantly, conveys the horrific nature of the raid without the need for graphic images (which are widely available elsewhere). We are able to better focus on the humanity, and tragedy, of those involved. Thanks for another outstanding discussion.
Great *research* AND *narrative* by TIK indeed.
Has me as turned upside down and emptied as after reading the actions orchestrated by the German personnel & friends in Kiev, Warsaw, or towards then in Treblinka.
This is an interesting subject that deserves some recognition (especially this video, given your tired state in it). Someone having to discuss this in such detail deserves so much respect.
Your high quality work is very much appreciated !
Detailed documentarys that are done with striving to produce the best and with pride in your work in mind is very much evident . 👍 Second to none !
Hearing people getting their feet stuck in tar and dying is heartbreaking
Excellent analysis. I have an ancestor who carried on a long correspondence with the German philosopher Leibniz. This entire correspondence was destroyed in the Dresden bombing. I would very much like to have studied this exchange of letters and ideas, as I am a philosopher, also, who has taught in a university setting. So much is destroyed in war. That ... besides the deaths of so many people ... is a real human tragedy.
To all here KPPO200 is a so-called fact-checker! Fact-checkers delete comments they do not like! Be careful! I see here German democracy at work!
I work for a small company. One day I came to work and they were busy putting up fencing all the way around the place. The boss says don't worry. Next there was a gate post with a guard. The boss says don't worry about it. Much later on I found out we were making lenses for the Department of Defense. That little company had become a strategic Target and I had no idea. Isn't that interesting a sweet simple job can become dangerous and War is why
I remember when my Grandparents told me about the endless formations of Allied Bombers in 1944/45 over our little village in Czechoslovakia.. they said when they flew over to germany, they were pretty low, full of bombs.. and when they flew back, they were higher than before... They said you could actually watch the citites burning in the distance.. in the middle of the night..
Many people in the twin towers during 911 suffered the same fate as the people of Dresden because they listened to the "authorities" and returned to their offices.
Note to self; during an emergency, follow your gut instinct. It's no guarantee you'll survive but at least you live or die by your own decision rather than someone elses.
How about all those kids and their teachers on the South Korean ferry MV Sewol… the idiots masquerading as “authorities” kept them in their cabins even as the ship was flipping over and filling up with water. Oh but the Captain and other “authorities” got up on deck where the Coast Guard could rescue them,
same thing with Pompei and other volcanic eruptions. its ALLLLL about MONEY by the way.
The 50 million deaths caused by the Nazi nation are shocking and certainly not the consequence of the Nazi nation's barbarism like the bombing of Dresden. The first German attack on Poland in 1939 was just the beginning of German bomb terror! The Nazi nation actually started this war with the Air Force bomb terror. The bombing of Wieluń comprised air raids on the Polish town of Wieluń by German air force on 1 September 1939. Germany's air force began bombing Wieluń in the early morning on the first day of World War II. The bombing has been described by several historians as the first act of World War II. The city had neither air defenses nor any apparent military targets. Germany's air force bombed also such nearby towns as Działoszyn, Radomsko, and Sulejów, which also had no military targets. The Wieluń bombing destroyed at least 70 percent of the town's buildings (as much as 90 percent, in the city center). There were many civilian casualties and that was intentional. One of the first places hit was the hospital, which likely had Red Cross markings. 32 persons in the hospital were killed. After the hospital began burning, German pilots shot at patients trying to escape the building. The German pilots were actually chasing civilians throughout the town. Targets destroyed by German bombing included: Farna Church, built in the 13th-14th centuries A mid-19th-century synagogue The Augustinian cloister. Parts of the 19th-century Royal Castle. The 15th-century city walls, severely damaged Over a dozen historic 18th- and early-19th-century houses. The city hall, with its 14th-century Kraków Gate, survived when a bomb got stuck in the city hall's roof and failed to explode. That was the first bombing of many German bombings against civilians in Poland! After Poland, they then murdered civilians with their warplanes in other countries as well. But bombing was just one of the many methods of them to killing civilians! Most were gassed and shot! Tens of Millions have been murdered by all means including bombs. Including millions of children.
So no pity for the Nazi Nation
@@GreatPolishWingedHussars I totally understand your anger. The Nazi atrocities were bad are unforgivable. Wanting to inflict horror and misery on them is understandable. Unfortunately, there were undoubtedly many German civilians living in Dresden who despised the Nazis and did whatever they could to stop them. The indiscriminate devastation of the fire bombing was unfortunate. And I say it again: I don’t blame you for your anger.
@@jelliebird37 This sentence of you is wrong: "The Nazi atrocities were bad are unforgivable." In the sentence, the word Nazis must be replaced by Germans, then the sentence is correct! This sentence is also a lie: "Undoubtedly many German civilians living in Dresden who despised the Nazis and did whatever they could to stop them." Because there was hardly any resistance in the German population because since 1936 the vast majority of German followers and supporters of the German Nazi government were thus they were Nazis. The women were Germans too! No pity for followers and supporters of the Nazis because they were Nazis themselves! Women have also participated in crimes. Such as murdering, guarding and torment of slave labourers. A total of twenty million slave laborers were maltreated by millions! The range of their crimes was wide. Even their children murdered! One can read about these murderous children in this link! Unfortunately I can't post the link because this will delete the comment, but one can find the link by entering that as a google search term: "death-marches-book-details-german-citizens-role-in-end-of-war-killings" Quote from the link: "A genocidal mentality that had systematically dehumanized the Jews and the Slavs, led to the collective hunt...More than 250,000 concentration camp prisoners died in death marches shortly before the end of World War II.
Many of them were murdered by civilians... For example they participated in the hunt for hundreds of concentration camp prisoners who, during an American bombing attack on the city and its train station, had fled from the freight cars, some of them in flames, in which they were being transported. Local police officers, guards and members of the Volkssturm national militia and the Hitler Youth executed their victims in a nearby forest." Hitler Youth were children! I further quote: "The prisoners were killed like animals, according to a British military report. Up to 300 people died in the massacre, with the leader of a Hitler Youth group in Celle killing more than 20 alone. The Allies captured the city four days later...The more the war approached its end, and the more obvious the prisoners' presence in the midst of the German population became, the more regularly German civilians participated. Those civilians included government and local officials, members of the Nazi Party and the Hitler Youth, as well as local residents. They abused or killed large numbers of those who, in the last stage of their lives filled with suffering, were forced on marches or had spent days being transported across Germany in overfilled freight cars. At least 250,000 prisoners lost their lives on death marches between January and May 1945." This Nazi nation was completely megalomaniac, mad, criminal, amoral and degenerated!
The indiscriminate devastation of the fire bombing was not an unfortunate but the just punishment of the Nazi nation! No mercy and no pity for the Nazi nation!
When I was a young boy my neighbor that was a German WW2 veteran told me stories about the war from his perspective. If I remember correctly he said he thought it was "near 30,000" burned to death. I wish I would have asked him to write all of his stories down, 3rd and 4th grade me thought they were fascinating.
I feel you, my great-uncle Clarence was a combat engineer in George Pattons 3rd army and fought from d+12 to just after Market Garden. It's only now 20 odd years since he passed that I kick myself for never getting them on audio or any other form of documentation. Now all I have are stories, papers and a box of medals. He claimed to have recovered the medals from dead U-boat men that washed up on the East Coast of the U.S.
Dang!
I remember seeing in a documentary that what’s-his-face in charge of German propaganda took the 10,000 death toll and added a zero to make the Allies look bad….er, worse. Views from both sides of a conflict are valuable but the German side especially was being lied to more often than not.
One of my best friends father, Mr. Frank Glover I believe flew in the 2 RAF raids as a Lancaster tail gunner.
I recall he'd tried to join the RCAF but they realized he was under age. He went to England where I assume they needed people more and over looked his age. I understand he survived 2 tours.
My Grandfather was an ethnic German living in Yougoslavia during the war. From what I understand he disliked both Hitler and Tito. His brother wrote down his experiences but my family has yet to get it translated into readable English. The one time sombody tried to translate it the result was low quality
Those 25,000 corpses were the ones that were found. How many thousands simply incinerated into smoke without a trace?
I remember a witness saying there were crepes of ashes on the floor. He only realised what it was months after
learn to listen! Fcking illiterate jerks! Read anf listen what was said! The Germans themselves estated 35thousands. What the f. are you now? The brainbug knowing things thatbeven the authorities, the order police didnt know? Pathetic little fckers
We can follow TIK’s deeply researched, highly intelligent commentary that corresponds to other recent reports, or we can pay attention to your worthless comment.
It depends on a lot of things. If the Hamburg firestorm raids were anything to go by then yes, there probably were a number of people who were incinerated and never found or identified. But the casualty figures for Dresden have always been ‘in play’. The truth is that nobody knows. Do you count the victims in the city and stop there? Or do you include the refugees on the roads outside the city in the days following? The figures over 100,000 are almost certainly not accurate and yes, some of that was Nazi propaganda but with books from the likes of Frederick Taylor, I think there has been a bit of a tendency to swing back the other way, perhaps to the extent of underestimating. I didn’t like Taylor’s book. I didn’t like his book on the Berlin Wall either, for much the same reason. Not because his version of events didn’t tally with mine - in fact, he did succeed in changing my view. But Taylor seems to be trying to erase that sense of guilt felt by many a bomber crew on this operation and so many others like it and he’s just a bit too strident in his characterisations for me to be comfortable with what he’s saying. I will never know how those men felt and yes, everyone knows there was a war on. But adopting the, ‘Oh well, the Germans bombed Coventry’, line as a central tenet for thinking it only right and proper that Dresden should suffer as it did doesn’t quite cut it. Sure feelings ran high at the time but trying to take us back to thinking the same way isn’t a particularly noble position fifty or sixty years later.
I was in Dresden a bit over 30 years ago and it was still in ruins but with a large amount of realestate occupied by DDR-era monoliths. In fact I stayed in one of them, a former youth training facility to the south west of the city centre. The cobblestone streets still spoke, even then, of the city’s tragic history.
This is the commentary and thoughtful response I did not expect here. Thank you, I position this with what Howard Zinn talks about in a people's history about how bombers actually felt.
Damn do I love this channel. In detail going through all the evidence and then at the end concluding that it was a war crime, I was not expecting that.
Couldn't imagine how terrifying raids like this are in general; especially for families trying to protect their children.
Terrible
A professional connection of mine was a teenager in Vienna during the last years of the war. While we rarely discussed the war, she did mention once that her most vivid memory of the bombing raids was the aftermath...when they came out of the shelters in the morning the were greeted with a surreal sight...."Everything was covered in tinsel"...
Of course she was referring to "window" (chaff) that the Allies were using to fox German radars. I must admit that I was taken aback when she first described it, neither of us realized what it was until I had a bit of time to think about precisely what it was.
*Try uKRAINE in 2022 !*
That's the point n why it's done
@@GrrMeister Try looking at Armenia's Artsakh Sronghold too. Stepanakert pounded non-stop (for 6 weeks), in the 2020 Karabakh War. But, it got very little got media attention, and what was discussed was infiltrated by a poisoned well, from Azerbaijan's Propaganda Machine.
Growing up in Dresden I heard the story, that we were actually lucky that the war ended before a Nuclear Bombs were ready. The story goes that they wanted to try one on a city in flat terrain and one on a city in a valley. And Dresden was the candidate
I would say Berlin deserved the nukes
They never wanted to stop a bomb on Europe . No need they knew war was over. I’ve heard that it was destroyed so Soviet’s couldn’t use it. All depends on where you live and what you read. Either way it was an ugly awful affair. Dresden was hiroshima without radiation in some ways
@@misterbaker9728 Both had to be stopped and the bombings saved allied lines after years of German and Japanese invasions
I reckon that Dresden, or Hamburg for that matter, showed that you don't need a nuclear bomb to destroy a city. As it stands the atomic bomb wasn't ready to be used until August, and its usage against Japan was clearly a case of a hail mary attempt to end the war without having to invade the Japanese mainland. Which was projected to cost more American lives then the US had lost in the war up till then. Whereas the war against Germany was clearly regarded to be over within a couple of months, even in february 1945. The Allies were nearing the Rhine, projected to cross it in march and then fan out into Germany. And the Red Army was already at the Oder. There might be some costly battles ahead, but nowhere near enough as projected in Japan. Also it can be argued that the cities to be nuked would be in Eastern Germany, the intended Soviet occupation zone. Which would allow for the Soviets to sift through the rubble and collect all the data. Which would make nuking Dresden as an experiment kinda worthless. And also also, the US had no infrastructure in Europe that could handle the atomic bomb. The only plane that was designed to carry and drop the atomic bomb was the B-29, and those were all deployed against Japan. There were no B-29's in the European theater. Even though I reckon plenty of 8th Air Force crews wouldn't mind having had that aircraft instead of the B-17 or B-24, as it meant flying in air pressurized comfort instead of freezing their nads off in the open B-17 or B-24.
@@freefall9832 it still does
By far the best account of this raid I've seen - thanks!
I've been fascinated with Dresden ever since reading Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Video is well documented and footnoted. Well done!
That was an asinine book and completely ignores the terror raids conducted by the Germans on places like Rotterdam.
Gratulations to this very balanced and objective analysis. My grandmother was witnessing this as a refugee and told me the horrific stories like you mentioned it. It was just an lucky incident that she survived and, following this, I’m able to write this.
Did your grandmother tell you that Germans tortured, gassed and killed 6 million Jews, 4 million Poles, 27 million Russian civilians not to mention handicapped people, Gypsies, Jehovah Witnesses......? Some Germans just love playing the victim card and expect the rest of the world to forget about their atrocities.
What an excellent work TIK. Very impressive breakdown.
Congratulations on this video. It’s excellent in every way. The subject is grim, but it’s a balanced account that shows all of the statements on both sides for what they were. Well done!
Thank you! Really glad to hear that you enjoyed it
I also agree, this was a very balanced summary. Keep in mind both sides used propaganda and disinformation to keep their populations supporting their respective causes. The truth is always the first to suffer in war.
"balanced"??? You must have read only three books in English too.
I appreciate you citing your references throughout the duration of your video. Definitely a different way to approach historic narration. Cheers!
The RAF found that if you keep dropping incendiary bombs in one place you can start a firestorm. The hot air goes up through the center of the fire. This creates a partial vacuum that creates a strong wind that goes from the perimeter to the center of the fire. Sometimes people who were too close to the fire would get blown off their feet and sucked into the center of the fire.
The British did not have atomic bombs, but if you can do a firestorm you don't need an A-Bomb.
End result is the same, just takes different resources to deliver.
The Americans dropping napalm on Tokyo killed more civilians than the two atomic bombs dropped.
@@tonyclough9844 So what is your point? It achieved its goal . Kill your enemy and end the war. Stop moralizing 77 years after a world war in which you did not fight. Do you honestly think given the Japanese record for depravity and torture that they would have acted any better if they had gained the upper hand?
The sooner you hand wringers get over yourselves the better. Killing evil is neither pretty or fun.
Both sides had their "efficiency experts," didn't they...
The Americans knew about firestorms since they studied a massive 'natural' firestorm that occurred in the 1870's killing some 2500 men, women, and children in one night.
A friend of mine, Eric (Scottish) , had a wife Erika (German), whose mother was in MI6 during the war. She was married to the mayor of Dresden. He managed to lead his family to the river, then they escaped along the bank during the raid.
my dad was a prisoner of war in that city when it was bombed his camp was hit also he had to repair the railway tracks he also sayed that the prisoners thought it was the end of the world
To all here KPPO200 is a so-called fact-checker! Fact-checkers delete comments they do not like! Be careful! I see here German democracy at work!
Great video, have not seen as deep of a video covering Dresden in WWII
The first victim of war is the truth.
To all here KPPO200 is a so-called fact-checker! Fact-checkers delete comments they do not like! Be careful! I see here German democracy at work!
I never understood why Harris and other Brit officers had such a brutal attitude towards those who suffered nervous breakdowns of various types. Always thank you for your comprehensive presentations
I've no idea - I'm not trained or anything near qualified to say. But, I'd imagine if he had to think about what those with PTSD were going through, he might be forced to contemplate the consequences of his orders. I'd imagine being so distant from the effects of his orders was something of a necessity for himself and his own well being.
Harris was an ideologue, and a throwback to previous eras. He basically viewed refusing to fight as cowardice.
@@primmakinsofis614 These were the religious soldiers trying not to break God's commandment in the Bible "Thy shall not kill".They were drafted.Many of these religious soldiers here in the United States won Medal of Honors without killing anybody.
London May have had something to do with their mood! War is hell and best not to start it, right Germany!
The understanding of ptsd wasn't as good as it is today, any nervous breakdown was seen as a deliberate act to look insane to avoid fighting, cowardice with another word. And they thought they had to uphold morale with violence, either you get your shit together or you die, and that chock can take most people out of a temporary breakdown.
OK, this one "hit home" because my Great-Grandfather survived this 1945 raid as he lived in Dresden (all his life 1871-1957). But no worries, I am not triggered (especially not by these number discussions). Bruno Robert Gelbrich, having been a teacher, made handwritten diaries in Old German handscript. I can read it, but many German cannot. It is appalling to read his own witness account on that. But, You may be surprised to hear that he expressed no hate nor anger against the allies; he would always write rather neutral. But and the end of the war, his only single ranting ever in that diary (6 volumes BTW) was about the WINDBAG Goebbels ...
TIK, I need to thank You personally for this video because You - of course unwittingly - You brought home to me what I was missing in my own puzzle about it. Guess what: the only two books I have about Dresden were from Irving (a 1964 issue) and McKee (1983). If or not these books were worth reading was not the question for me then in the 80s, when I started reading as a teenager: I was just lucky to find any books at all about it ... and there were many more, but they were beyond my budget ... today I have MANY more books also about Hamburg and Berlin (also where parts of my family come from) on the same topic, of the WW2 air raids. What triggered me 40 years ago was not the "number battles" nor even the cruelty of it all. It was the few stories my relatives told me. And I wanted to know what happened, and why. The What is easiest, the Why is hardest. So over 40 years I was on a private hobby-historian hunting, but what I could never do like You did, was a comparison of all these sources to draw a conclusion.
Please continue. Stick to tanks and banks. Thanks
Thank you for a balanced discussion about the Dresden bombing. I've never heard about it in such succinct detail and I appreciate your presentation. I also appreciate your clarification of the differences between a war crime and crimes against humanity- very clear and concise.
I used to walk dogs with a woman about 20 years ago who lived through the raids, she invited me round for tea, she told me how horrific it was, she started shaking and crying, on the sideboard was a photo of her father, an officer on Tirpitz, next to that was a minature replica of the ships bell.
it made me realise how recent WW2 was 😞.
Comparatively yes. My mom will soon be 90, and she says when FDR died, people acted like it was the end of the world here in America.
And how close World War Three may be if this madness over Ukraine does not end soon, even at the cost of Ukraine's defeat, sorry for being "politically incorrect."
You can still see the bullet holes in buildings in some Polish cities to this day. I lived in one such place. It's thought-provoking, to say the least. I've seen similar in France and could take you to entire districts in British cities that were never rebuilt. It is still recent.
"....real historians are saying that." TIK, you ARE a real historian. Thank you.
My grampa told me his memory of the bombing night. He was a child, growing up in a village about 50 kilometers to the north east of Dresden. He was about 8 years old. He remembered not being able to sleep that night, because there was a bright light at the horizon - the burning city of Dresden. He watched it for hours with his 6 siblings and his weeping mother.
HaaraaldEriksson my Grandmother told similar stories about the bombing of Coventry.
I saw myself what had been done to London and many other English cities.
I have little sympathy for Dresden, Hamburg or any other German target consequently I offer no apology.
@@gordonfrickers5592 No sympathy for the civilians at all? That's cold. What did the kids that died do to deserve that?
If you say that it was war and such things needed to be done, I'd agree to that... Doesn't mean tragedies didn't happen.
@@gordonfrickers5592 Yea me eitherr durrr the TV told me da germans were da bag guys duuhhhrrrr...
@@winstonsmith8482 You shouldn't need a TV to tell you that the Germans were the bad guys bud...
@@gordonfrickers5592 I can understand that point of view even though I don't share it. An eye for an eye just leaves everyone blind...
My moms grandma from her mom's side wrote and received letters from family in Dresden. The letters eventually stopped around the bombing. Family members would try and make contact with family in Germany early 2000s, but I am pretty sure they died during bombing
Cry me a river. Nazi criminals died.
The book Dresden describes the death agony of the city began just after 10pm on the 13th, witnesses stating bombs rained down everywhere without discrimination smashing everything in sight without mercy.
You think there was discrimination in the Blitz? ALL bombing was indiscriminate in those days.
UA-cam.
We're you get censored, banned, and ridiculed for shedding light on things that ACTUALLY HAPPENED and are documented in books written decades ago.
It's commie here.UA-cam is litew8
What an excellent presentation!!!
I grew up in Dresden. My great grandfather was 6 years old when the city was bombed. He doesent Remmeber all the details about the bombing anymore, but he passionately talked about how he helped rebuild it and that, the night Before the bombing, there was letters falling from the sky warning the population that the bombing will happen.
He also told me how he found phosphorous materials next to the river and mistook it for melted candy - which he was hunting down as a child.
The Phosphor heated up in his pants, but before anything happened he threw it away.
He told me about a neighbours kid giving him porridge but he never saw them again after the bombing.
He also told me that he was in the basement with his parents, waiting for the bombing to stop. He wasn't in the center where the firestorm was, but it was bad enough that multiple houses next to his was bombed and one bomb landed on his house, but it didn't explode.
He is still alive, holding on but facing big medical issues recently. I hope to talk to him about the city again and gain a little more of his wisdom.
Ironic German weapons are raining down on civilians now in gaza
Let's not forget Dresden not only was mainly a civilian target, most victims were woman, children and elderly.
Women and elderly who voted the Nazis in and cheered their crimes. Guilty. As to their whelps, they paiud fopr their parents' crimes. GOOD!
Civilian target with major transportation infrastructure that connected Berlin with Bavaria, which is why it was targeted in the first place.
did you not watch the video?
As were most european cities bombed by the luftwaffe.
What a disgusting war crime. (Obviously not lessening the other terrible war crimes of ww2)
Thanks TIK. Another great video. It's disturbing how a single individuals take on events rapidly becomes the common consensus and then is propagated further by people considered legitimate by the general public. It's also interesting how so many people know about Dresden, or what they believe then know about Dresden but know absolutely nothing about the far more deadly bombings in Tokyo around the same time.
Thanks for your effort everyone on TIK. I really enjoy this channel.
Grandmother said they used to go to a hill side at night and see the glow of Nuremburg burn in the southeast.
Her village was about 60km from Nuremburg.
You can imagine Dresden and how far away you could see that firestorm in the distance at night.
I couldnt help but notice how ironic the propaganda then and now considering what is happening in Ukraine. this is why historians like you are so valuable.
The problem is nobody seems to care about the Civilians in Ukraine in the Warmongering Western media.
Does sound rather like Maripol, Ukraine, were the Russians as of yesterday (10.04.22) have started using chemical weapons.
@@gordonfrickers5592 yes just like in the completly debunked Doumas chemical attack. Its a false flag thats been predicted for weeks. Facts are NATO will fight to the last Ukraninan while Daggling NATO membership they will never have.
@@gordonfrickers5592 Complete and utter media-fiction based on what 'darling' Zelensky has stated.
No proof of chemical weapon use whatsoever.
@@gordonfrickers5592
Just like in Syria, right?
My grandfather’s best friend was a native of Dresden. He was 17 years old, wounded and in a hospital. He recalls the bombings very differently to what you described. He saw bodies turned to mush, babies and mother welded together from being cooked alive. The deathly screams of children, women and the elderly. He said the smell was gut wrenching from the burning and liquidation of the human body.
This testimony has also been backed up a million times by survivors and witnesses. It really pains me to see when people continuously water down what the allies also subjected innocent men, women and children to during the war because the countrymen can’t bare the thought of their country committing such inhumane acts.
You know what GOOD. Germans were accomplices to mass murder and mass theft. They didn't object to millions of murders. This lot at least paid for their crimes. No innocent German men or women. As to their children, given that they were accomplices or perpetrators to millions of murder of Jewish, Polish, Russia, Italian, French etc. children, who cares.
Yes..a discusting Allied War Crime...
@@chriscooperkris2780 Not at all. Glorious retribution for crimes and a justifirf target.
@@patriciabrenner9216 attitude of the victor is not always the truth.
@@Con_Koumis In this case, it is
When I was in my teens in the mid 80s... We had a neighbor who was a an older retired guy. He had been a bomber pilot in WW2.
He stored his old wooden fishing boat at Eglin AFB, at a marina used by active military and veterans.
He used to pay me $5 an hour to go out fishing with him, as he needed an extra set of hands. We used to head out just before dawn, and get back at sunset. We did some great fishing just of the coast of Ft. Walton Beach/Destin, Fl...
He told me that he did bombing runs on Dresden. He hated it. It really wrecked him emotionally. His wife and kids made a big deal about his war service, and hailed him a hero. But he felt terrible about the whole. He couldn't understand why we allied with communist Russia, and felt like Russia was the bigger enemy. And they did indeed become the bigger enemy, five minutes after the war ended. He thought the whole war was backwards. He never talked it before he talked to me about it. I was 14 yrs old at the time, it was heavy conversation. He later worked in the aviation industry, and said the US immediately hired Nazi scientists and engineers...as did much of the world. He said the narrative seemed inverted with WW2.
Europa, The last battle is a decent documentary that tells a different story about the war.
He wasn't wrong. Thank you for your comment.
Your problem with the Russians is because you were fighting your own war against them. American industry could not overnight adapt to peace time production so Hollywood produced another "enemy" for themselves to justify producing and selling arms. Too complicated for your simple american mind ?
No, it's a hive of lies. Go outside. @@meetshield2461
this can't be serious. We allied with RUSSIA because RUSSIA didn't attack Britain for 4 months during BATTLE OF BRITAIN , THEN BOMB BRITAIN FOR 8 MONTHS during the BLITZ , THEN send V1 and V2 rockets for last 10 months of war. I could go on but whats the point
My father-in-law was Bombing Leader of 630 Sqn. After the war his research led him to believe that the UK and Germany had signed an agreement, pre-war, that Oxford and Cambridge and Dresden were not to be militarized so they would be safe from bombing. I haven't been able to find any mention of this. Being 'Bomb Leader' my FIL was the first bomber to arrive on Target and recalled seeing the blue flashes of the trams that (believing they were safe from bombing raids) were still running in the city.
This was the “raid too many” for FIL and he never forgave Bomber Command for putting him in such an invidious position.
Sadly all is fair in love & war.
Contrary to what is sometimes stated, Dresden did have military production within the city.
Why would your fil care so much even if there was an agreement considering how Hitler broke every treaty he put his name on
@@irabrook ....but he didn't bomb either Cambridge or Oxford, even though Oxford had a large motor factory just outside the city.
@@macoooos9204 unless you are on the losing side
So 6 lost bombers divided by 1173 total bombers equals 0.51% not a 0.0085% loss rate. Or am I missing something?
The bombers didn't miss
You're correct. I must have miss-typed when I was feeding the numbers into a percentage calculator
Glad someone noticed this, it was the only thing that triggered me in the video. If you sow the wind, you will reap the whirlwind.
The other commentor said same
5:22 I have some Soviet info to add to this section-> On 5 January 1945 the Soviet 14 GvBAD sent 2 lend-lease B-25 Mitchell bombers to Dresden and they dropped 300,000 leaflets between around half-past 6 in the afternoon. The leaflets contained the "Appeal of 50 German generals to the German army and people". Source: TsAMO fund 20516, inventory 1, file 34, page 1.
Excellent video. About 15 years ago, I was in a "discussion" with others on this topic. As a result, I visited the National Archives in London a couple of times and was able to read and copy the target information supplied to the RAF before this raid. In various small sketch maps etc factories building things like aero engines and other weapons etc were clearly marked. The railway station was also highlighted as a key target with the explanation of how it was an important junction key to the movement of German troops, munitions etc. In 1991, I went to Germany to work and the first colleague to befriend me told me how he still remembered being pushed in a pram at 4 years of age, by his mother as she fled during the RAF raid and the sight of the city burning as they fled stayed with him. And he never held a grudge and was the kindest of all the German colleagues I had there.
The smashed train station that you show as "Dresden´s Central Train Station" at 33:30 and 42:29 is actually the former Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin.
As horrible as is was, it seems that it would be pretty hard to garner sympathy from the British public who had been mercilessly bombed for the previous five years by the Luftwaffe and remote bombs…
Britain started the terror bombing of Germany first though
Oh what crap! Comparing a few hundreds to a few hundred thousands. What kind of fool are you?
It's a shame that UA-cam is almost always mentioned in every video I watch as an obstacle to telling the whole truth. I hate having to use this platform as a mere watcher. I don't even consider being a content creator.
I find it interesting that a large percentage of the my favorite historical content creators are British, although I wouldn't care if they weren't.
I have read plenty of WW2 history, including some on the raids on Dresden, so UA-cam's idiotic censorship (dumping history into the "memory hole") didn't keep me ignorant of the facts TIK had to gloss over. Even so, I still learned a lot from this video.
Nice work, TIK, I hope someday another platform will supplant this platform, and you will be free to make videos as you see fit.
I didn't skip many facts, just some of the most heart-wrenching ones... But yes, UA-cam doesn't want this sort of content on the platform, which is why it appears to be restricting this video right now.
Well said!!!
Nobody remembers Pforzheim was obliterated too. The Soviets never let people forget about Dresden. Why? After the war, Dresden was in the DDR, Pforzheim was in West Germany.
There was a lot more to the Dresden raids than was initially apparent,the British government with one eye on the finishing line saw Dresden as a very fortuitous act,all they had to do to extricate themselves from any international outrage was to plant the blame firmly at Arthur Harris's door.That was quite inexcusable as Churchill had been a very firm proponent of Harris's plan to obliterate German cities,when he saw the way in which the wind was blowing,he immediately began his campaign of distancing himself from the activities of bomber command.The ultimate insult by Churchill came at the end of the fighting in Europe where he thanked every branch of the services for their sacrifices,all except bomber command that is.A despicable slight that saw Churchill's popularity take a severe battering which was the least that he deserved.
POLITICS old chap. THe left-Wing press, caused a storm of self righteousness, and the Labour Party took full advantange of it. With the General Election looming, and forcastes not good for Churchill, He put his Politician hat on and fought dirty. Dropping poor old Harris right in it. The USAAF, who hardly get a mench when Dresdon is mentioned, bombed the shit out of the rubble the following day. They were never criticised by the press for it, like the RAF was, and got top medals for their deeds.
And ignoring the Polish forces at wars end.
@@C02045 Yes,and giving the Soviets a free hand in Poland after the war.
@@darkknight1340 election '44;Atlee replaces Churchill
@@C02045 Churchill ignored by all Allied members when wanting Euro invasion to incur @ Adriatic,so as to contain the Soviets.🇫🇷&🇺🇲wanted to empower FDR's good buddy Stalin,as well as🇫🇷wanting homeland front
I lived 15 years in Dresden. Thank you for this video! The memory-culture there was a strategic propaganda by the GDR regime to blame the western allies. But in the recent years it evolved to a general peace-movement best symbolized by the Coventry "nail-cross" inside the rebuilt Frauenkirche.
Eventhough I would consider the bombing as a war-crime as you did, I have some respect for "the evil Bomber-Harris". He was a butcher - no doubt about that. But he was also a great soldier, who was determent to do, whatever was necessary. In some way he was very like Churchill himself. I can't stand the naive morality for "the good war" and "the good soldier". That's a dangerous myth, dwarving the reality. In war, a good soldier kills his enemy with all his capabilities. Harris did it, Patton did it, Guderian and Shukow did it. If you look for morality in war, ask the politicians who started the mess.
I'm by no means naive about the brutality of war, but I'm still not about to give generals a blank slate to do whatever they want in war and just blaming the politicians alone.
You don't consider yourself a"Woke Snowflake,do you??While Dresden still might have been a legitimate target,the flattening of citys like Würzburg or Stuttgart was done,because the planes needed something to do,and plenty of ordnance needed to get rid off!
The rise of nationalism and statism has lead to the association of all citizens with the their nations ideaolgy. Obviously Historically these ideas existed since before Rome, but not until recent memory has it lead to the total destruction and genocide we saw last century. There was little incentive for feudal lords or kings to kill the conquered as they would become welcome assists. The rise of nationalism shifts the emphasis of the attackers from an attack against the lord to an attack on our vary way of life in other words the collective. No serf gave a damn if they were forced to produce a Bushel of wheat for lord Thomas or for lord hamsberg.
Yes, ask the Germans and Austrians. I agree.
Australian Band Cold Chisel sang about this in the 70's with a powerful, thoughtful song...numerous Australian flight crew took their own lives in the 50's
The bombing of Dresden is described in detail in the Slaughterhouse 5, by Kurt Vonnegut, published in 1969. The film was released in 1972.
The Vonnegut novel was very good. The 1972 film...not too good.
So?
just finished reading the book, unfortunately found it to be quite underwhelming, more about a billy chap than about the abominations of war and of dresden's bombings in particular.
I’ve heard the book is a propaganda book.
Pure propaganda
My Latvian mother-in-law told a similar story of being locked out of an air raid shelter in Hamburg. She was a "guest worker" during the war and during one of the air raids, attempted to get into a shelter but was denied as she was not German so she and other non-Germans took shelter under a bridge. Once the all clear was sounded, she walked past where the shelter once stood. It had taken a direct hit and was completely destroyed with no survivors. She laughed while talking about it.
Yikes, someone out there has a sick sense of humor.
Well, you need to understand the times and the fact that the Germans had just kicked her out into the bombing only to get bombed themselves. So yes, a big Nelson "ha ha" to them.
@@snookums01 sounds kind of like a sick fantasy more than anything else
@@kylephilipe8347 which bit? She was in Hamburg during the war and I have no reason to believe she lied. And hearing TIK's video, it would seem this was not an isolated case.
@@snookums01 This woman was psychotic
Dresden bombing was horrific but the Tokyo bombing (Operation Meetinghouse) in March 1945 was just off-the-charts _insane._
Excellent video from TIK who hits it out of the park, as usual.
Now that you mention it, yeah, I would like see TIK make a video out of that, it made the Horoshima and Nagasaki bombings look like a Bar fight by comparison
Well....everything the Americans do...is "off-the charts"!---Just to be fair,German cities where/are a lot more solid built,than Japanese!
Also,against German nightfighters,B-29 would have been blasted to smithereens!
I don’t have much sympathy for the Germans that burned in Dresden. They could have prevented this by more vocally opposing Nazism in the late days of Weimar, when they still had an alright country. They needed to be taught a lesson about what happens when you oppose progress.
@@pebo8306 Irrelevant.
1,650 tons of E-46 cluster bombs containing M-69 incendiary napalm sticks...is going to ruin _anyone's_ night.
killing civilians is a crime whether they are German, French, Russian, Ukrainian, Iraqi, Yemeni etc
And English ?
@@bertiewooster3326 the English did not commit any crimes or the British.
That's what war IS. Man's inhumanity to man. To say "" war crimes"" is laughable oxymoronic and is a )wish construct
Murdering people for apostasy is a crime too.
@@johnsmith-ce2tq Certainly not in regards to Dresden
Very well done. Actual factual history is not as common as I'd like. Thank you
I‘be been to Dresden. Germany has rebuilt much of the destruction which was left by the Soviets. Excellent experience especially the Frauenkirche.
Dresden is a fantastic example of what Total War looks like.
WEll the Germans should have considered that before waging a murderous total war.
@garyjenkinson7189 Nope. Dresden was a legitimate target but post war it was played up as an attack against civilians.
Because being a civilian doesn't make you less vulnerable when a target you live in is bombed.@garyjenkinson7189
To all here KPPO200 is a so-called fact-checker! Fact-checkers delete comments they do not like! Be careful! I see here German democracy at work!
@@sirridesalot6652 Why would the winners rewrite history to damage their own image LMFAO. If anything, it would be played down as a legitimite target when it really was not, which is exactly what has happened.
I was in Dresden (on my way back to Berlin from Chemnitz (K.M.Stdt)) in December of 1981. Many of the buildings were still in rubble with work progressing slowly to restore them. Bricks that had spilled out into the street had little foot-high fences around the perimeter and people left the rubble where it lay knowing that eventually the city would be restored. After the fall of the wall a decade later that work sped up and (from google street view) I can see that the down town has been largely restored. It was quite an eye-opener. I had heard about the bombing of Dresden but I did not expect to see the rubble so many years later. But, that's how it was in the DDR in the post war period.
Let it be a warning to Germany to stop starting world wars. Twice is more than enough.
@@Dr.Pepper001 Right. America's turn now.
@@kob8634 -- Let Washington, DC be ground zero.
Another UA-cam channel stated the initial attack targeted roads and bridges to prevent escape. Given the poor accuracy of the bombers, I always found this suspect. Thank you for this well cited report.
Kurt Vonnegut (sp?) was a POW in Dresden at the time. His novel, "Slaughterhouse Five" is based on his experiences there.
Surprised Vonnegut's book didn't get a mention, it's how many Americans (and scifi lovers...) learned about the event...
@@Hoosier84 I was the opposite. I heard about his book from my reading about Dresden.
@@Hoosier84 I'd recommend reading it. It bridged the gap between WWII and the Vietnam War.
My uncle told me he used flamethrowers to burn bodies in the aftermath. He was convalescing from wounds near Dresden at the time. Transylvanian Saxon Waffen SS soldier.
I though Transylyvania was the home of Count Dracula's Castle? I'm totally confused.
@@davidgreene6976 It is in the Stories, and it is a real Region in Romania. Count Dracula is based on a local Ruler there, who was exceptionally brutal, even by 15th Century Standards.
@@Genius_at_Work Thank you,you are a true genius at work.God bless your genius.
I was first exposed to the bombing of Dresden in Kurt Vonnegut Jr's novel Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut who was a POW on Dresden had helped recovering the bodies. He originally accepted the 25 000 figuer but by the time of his book believed the 135 000 figure which I accepted as fact until now. You have changed my mind but even 25 000 is still a horrifying number.
Slaughterhouse 5 is literally why I clicked on this video lol
I'd add a substantial comment, but it would be redundant with @Chris Vickers's comment. Well done both to TIK and to Chris Vickers. Thank you for stating your positions so well.
If 100,000 people were killed in a Tokyo bombing during a single night on March 9th - 10th, it seems likely that more than 25,000 were killed during the Dresden bombing that lasted from the 13th of February to the 15th of February. Vonnegut was there and his description is horrific.
Kurt Vonnegut was a soldier in WW-2. His book (and film based on it) 'Slaughterhouse Five' really got to me, about Dresden.
I have been saying something similar to the people who claim that the city was not a legit target. There were 125 factories producing war material for the Reich. Three major raillines went through the city as well.
Nope...
The most important fact was that the high casualty total at Dresden was the result of a firestorm. Absent that firestorm, the Dresden raid would be but a footnote in the history of the bombing campaign.
Contrary to what some think, firestorms could not be created on command. If they could, Bomber Command would have done so in the summer of 1943 and quite possibly have won the war.
By your logic the civilian population of any city in a country with a war economy is a legitimate target. But if you feel threatened by German soldiers with a bolt and a paper clip and you want to burn children and women to death with White Phosphorus then that is your decision.
Wo standen im Stadtzentrum Fabriken ich lade sie ein wir können die bombardierte Fläche ablaufen die karsernen die nicht im Stadtzentrum waren haben nicht eine Bombe gesehen die stehen heute noch es ging nur um die Bevölkerung und nichts anderes
I did a paper on this fire bombing, back in high school. I was shocked when I learned Curtis lemay purposely went for the civilians, changed my whole outlook of how I viewed certain generals from the war
this is the issue I have with history, an official narrative and the inconvenient truth of a situation. Civilians can be labeled a "war resource" depending on the situation. Winners don't seem to have to worry about war crimes so you better win if you do it.
I don't know why Lemay leaned into that. This video seems to make it clear that the original target was legitimate manufacturing, then when the 2nd wave came and saw that everything was already on fire, just decided to set things on fire that weren't. That wasn't the plan.
If civilians live near war targets, then they are likely to be hit incidentally. I can't imagine why he couldn't keep his "civilians are targets" thoughts to himself.
If civilians provide material support to an enemy military force they are a legitimate target. End of story. Any actions that make it easier for the brave young men fighting on your behalf should be taken and that includes using weapons of mass destruction on cities to soften up a ground invasion. People from allied countries that criticize the attacks on Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima ad Nagasaki to me seem to not give a shit about the American and British military casualties. They see these fighting men as a disposable resource like it doesnt matter if thousands of them die so long as some stupid women and children are spared being roasted alive. The allies were sick of sending their young men to die its much better to just annihilate your enemies from the relative safety of the air especially since they had total control of the skies. Maybe the Germans and the Japanese should have surrendered sooner or not have started the war at all if they didnt want to see their civilian populations burn to ashes.
@@joshuaortiz2031 the military views the soldiers as fodder anyways. I don't have issue with anything else but it's not just the citizens that view em that way
@@joshuaortiz2031 I don't view it that way. I don't "want" soldiers to die either, but your view seems to presume that there's no such thing as an innocent or civilian. So what, if a mother sends her son in the army a cooked meal, it's now morally licit to blow her to pieces? Sure, some people are unfairly harsh and don't acknowledge the realities of war, but you sound unfairly harsh and bloodthirsty. "They're our enemies, so blow them the fuck up and feel no remorse! The fact that they're women and children makes no difference!"
Random tip- firefighters now are told NOT to wet cloth over their mouth, as the humidity created transmits more heat than dry air.
I heard it most recently from wildfire (burn over) instructions, maybe the only situation that even comes close to the ferocity of the Dresden fire.
That's not done to cool down, it's to avoid inhaling smoke, something that modern firefighters have other protections against
An American best selling author Kurt Kurt Vonnegut was one of the POW's that was forced by the Germans to retrieve the dead in Dresden. In 1969 he wrote a semi- biography of his experiences in the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. A eye witness to the horror of Dresden.
My father was born in Dresden in 1902. His whole family was from Dresden. The day of the bombing he was in Berlin. One of his aunts left town the day before to take care of a friend. The rest of my father’s family died that day.
So? Maybe you should learn about Auschwitz, Dachau, Sobibor etc. I for one am sorry of any German that escaped retribution.
^((( )))
@@patriciabrenner9216
Thank You, Good Lady.
Research what the Luftwaffe did to London earlier in the war. Hitler and his cohorts brought this down upon Dresden. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
@@patriciabrenner9216Jesus christ Patricia, Germans literally talk about the 40s and acknowledged it. Civilians shouldn't be murdered because they live in a dictatorship. Also you know the Hitler youth recruited children? You think that "German people= all evil barbarians" but "brits=all perfect saints"?
As always a very good work. Thank you. We here in Germany often hear about this particular war crime, when those who want to paint a different picture about our history try to blame others.
Not a war crime lets get that straight.
Might have been a good idea not to start a war then?
@@bertiewooster3326 I would call it a crime against humanity.
@@bertiewooster3326 this is a war crime. Targeting civilians is a warcrime.
@@CozySER Wrong the target was the infrastructure not the civilians they just Got on the way as they had not left the city as advised.
Hit ler on 1 September 1940: "And should the Royal Air Force drop two thousand or three thousand or four thousand kilograms of bo mbs, then we will now drop 150,000; 180,000; 300,000; 400,000; yes one million kilograms in a single night. And should they declare they will greatly increase their attacks on our cities, then we will erase their cities! "
His intent was clear, what he lacked was capability. The Allies did not lack the capability.