Sunic - Dresden: Death from Above

What follows below is the English translation of my speech in German which I was scheduled to deliver on February 13, 2013, around 7:00 PM in downtown Dresden. 

The commemoration of the Dresden February 13, 1945 victims was organized by “Aktionsbündnis gegen das Vergessen” (action committee against oblivion), NPD deputies and officials from the local state assembly in Dresden. There were 3,000 leftist antifa demonstrators. The city was under siege, cordoned off into sections by 4,000 riot policemen. The bulk of the nationalist participants, approximately 1,000, who had previously arrived at the central station, were split up and prevented from joining with our group at the original place of gathering. Toward 11:00 PM, when the event was practically over, the riot police did allow our small group of organizers and speakers to march past the barricades down to the central station. There were approximately 40 of us—mostly local NPD officials. On February 14, while still in Dresden, I provided more information as a guest on the Deanna Spingola’s RBN radio show: Hour 1, Hour 2.

Human Improvement by Terror Bombardment

Dresden is only one single symbol of the Allied crime, a symbol unwillingly discussed by establishment politicians. The destruction of Dresden and its casualties are trivialized in the mainstream historiography and depicted as “collateral damage in the fight against the absolute evil — fascism.” The problem, however, lies in the fact that there was not just one bombing of one Dresden, but also many bombings of countless other Dresdens in all corners of Germany and in all parts of Europe. The topography of death, marked by the antifascists, is a very problematic issue for their descendants, indeed.

In today’s “struggle for historical memory,” not all victims are entitled to the same rights. Some victimhoods must be first on the list, whereas others are slated for oblivion. Our establishment politicians are up in arms when it comes to erecting monuments to peoples and tribes, especially those who were once the victims of the Europeans. An increasing number of commemoration days, an increasing number of financial compensation days show up in our wall calendars. Over and over again European and American establishment politicians pay tribute to non-European victims. Rarely, almost never, do they commemorate the victims of their own peoples who suffered under communist and liberal world improvers. Europeans and especially Germans are viewed as evil perpetrators, who are therefore obliged to perpetual atonement rituals.

Dresden is not only a German city, or the symbol of a German destiny. Dresden is also the universal symbol of countless German and countless European, Croatian, Hungarian, Italian, Belgian and French cities that were bombed by the Western Allies, or for that matter that were fully bombed out. What connects me to Dresden connects me also to Lisieux, a place of pilgrimage in France, bombed by the Allies in June 1944; also to Monte Cassino, an Italian place of pilgrimage, bombed by the Allies in February 1944. On 10 June 1944, at Lisieux, a small town that had been dedicated to Saint Theresa, 1.200 people were killed, the Benedictine monastery was completely burnt out, with 20 nuns therein. To enumerate a list of the bombed-out European cultural cities would require an entire library — provided that this library would not be again bombed out by the world improvers. Provided that the books and the documents inside are not confiscated.

In France, during the Second World War, about 70,000 civilians found death under the Anglo-American democratic bombs, the figure reluctantly mentioned by establishment historians.  From 1941 to 1944, 600,000 tons of bombs were dropped on France; 90,000 buildings and houses were destroyed.

The establishment politicians often use the word “culture” and “multi-culture.” But their military predecessors distinguished themselves in the destruction of different European cultural sites.  European churches and museums had to be destroyed, in view of the fact that these places could not be ascribed to the category of human culture. Further south, in Vienna, in March 1945, the Burgtheater was hit by the American bombers; further to the West in northern Italy, the opera house La Scala in Milan was bombed, as were hundreds of libraries throughout Central Europe. Further south in Croatia the ancient cities of Zadar and Split were bombed in 1944 by the Western world improvers and this panorama of horror knew no end. The Croatian culture town Zadar, on the Adriatic coast, was bombed by the Allies in 1943 and 1944.  German politicians and German tourists often make holiday on the Croatian coast; yet along the coast there are many mass graves of German soldiers. On the Croatian island of Rab, where the German nudists like to have fun, there is a huge mass grave containing the bones of hundreds of Germans who were murdered by the Yugo-communists. German diplomats in Croatia have shown no effort to build monuments for those martyred soldiers.

Recently, the so called democratic community put on display a big concern about the ethnic cleansing and the destruction in the former Yugoslavia. It was also quite busy in bringing the Yugoslav and Serbian perpetrators to justice at the Hague tribunal. But those Serbian and Yugoslav perpetrators had already had a perfect role model in Communist predecessors and in their Anglo-American allies. By the late 1944 and early 1945, there were massive ethnic cleansings of Germans in the Yugoslav communist areas. In May 1945, hundreds of thousands of fleeing Croats, mostly civilians, surrendered to the English Allied authorities near Klagenfurt, in southern Carinthia, only to be handed over in the following days to the Yugoslav Communist thugs.

I could talk for hours about the millions of displaced Germans from Silesia, Pomerania, the Sudetenland and the Danube region. In view of the fact that those victims do not fall into the category of communist perpetrators, for the time being I’m not going to ascribe them to the Western world improvers. In hindsight, though, we can observe that the Western world improvers would have never been able to complete their world improvement job without the aid of the Communist thugs, the so-called anti-fascists. Clearly, the largest mass migration in European history, from Central and Eastern Europe, was the work of the Communists and the Red Army, but never would have their gigantic crimes against the German civilians and other Central European nations taken place without deliberate help of the Western world improvers.  Well, we are still dealing with double standards when commemorating the WWII dead.

What was crossing the minds of those world improvers during the bombing raids of European cities? Those democratic pilots had good conscience because they sincerely felt that they had to carry out a God-ordained democratic mission. Their missions of destruction were conducted in the name of human rights, tolerance and world peace.  Pursuant to their messianic attitudes, down under and below in Central Europe — not to mention down here in Dresden — lived no human beings, but a peculiar variety of monsters without culture. Accordingly, in order to remain faithful to their democratic dogma, those airborne Samaritans had always good conscience to bomb out the monsters below.

As the great German scholar of international law, Carl Schmitt, taught us, there is a dangerous problem with modern international law and the ideology of human rights. As soon as one declares his military opponent a “monster” or “an insect,” human rights cease to apply to him. This is the main component of the modern System. Likewise, as soon as some European intellectual, or an academic, or a journalist critically voices doubts about the myths of the System, he runs the risk of being branded as a “rightwing radical,” “a fascist,” or “a monster.” As a monster he is no longer human, and cannot be therefore legally entitled to protection from the ideology of human rights. He is ostracized and professionally shut up. The System boasts today about its tolerance toward all people and all the nations on Earth, but not toward those that are initially labeled as monsters or right-wing extremists, or fundamentalists. In the eyes of the world improvers the German civilians standing on this spot in February 1945, were not humans, but a bizarre type of insect that needed to be annihilated along with their material culture. Such a mindset we encounter today among world do-gooders, especially in their military engagement in Iraq or Afghanistan.

We are often criticized for playing up the Dresden victims in order to trivialize the fascist crimes. This is nonsense. This thesis can be easily reversed. The establishment historians and opinion-makers, 70 years after the war, are in need of forever renewing the fascist danger in order to cover up their own catastrophic economic failures and their own war crimes.

Moreover, establishment historians do not wish to tell us that that each victimhood in the multicultural System is conflict prone; each victimhood harps on its own uniqueness and thrives at the expense of other victimhoods. This only points to the weakness of the multicultural System, ultimately leading up to the balkanization, civil war and the collapse of the System. An example: The current victimological atmosphere in today’s multicultural System prompts every tribe, every community, and every non-European immigrant to believe that only his victimhood is important and unique. This is a dangerous phenomenon because each victimhood stands in the competition with the victimhood of the Other. Such victimhood mentality is not conducive to peace. It leads to multiethnic violence and makes future conflict inevitable.

With today’s trivialization and denial of the liberal-communist crimes against the German people, inflicted before, during, and after the Second World War, there can be no climate of mutual understanding and reconciliation, but only an atmosphere of false myths and conflicting victimhoods, whereby each person and each tribe conceives of himself as a victim of his respective neighbor.

The classic example is again the collapse of the former state of Yugoslavia, an artificial state in which for fifty years different peoples were the victims of Communist historians and propaganda, with the Croatian people being demonized as a “Nazi nation.” In 1991, after the end of communism, the result was not mutual interethnic understanding, but mutual hatred and a terrible war in which each side called the other “fascist.” What awaits us soon here in the EU, is not some exotic and multicultural utopia, but a balkanesque cycle of violence and civil wars.

Dear ladies and gentlemen, dear friends. Let us not fall prey to illusions.  Dresden must serve as a warning sign against all wars, as well as a place for commemorating the innocent victims. But Dresden can become tomorrow a symbol of titanic catastrophes. What awaits us in the coming years, one can already imagine. Some of you, some of us, with a longer historical memory, know well that a world has come to an end. The age of liberalism has been dead for a long time. The incoming times will be bad. But these incoming and approaching times offer us all a chance.

Tomislav Sunic

Fire storm

As the swathe of smoke drifted down the River Elbe toward Czechoslovakia, the people in the towns and cities over which it passed must have guessed that here were the results of no ordinary raid, that these were in fact the last mortal remains of a city which twelve hours earlier had sheltered a million people and their property.

As the smoke pall was driven ever further from the burning city, the air cooled; as the air cooled, the damp clouds, heavy with dust and smoke, broke. The rains fell along the length of the Elbe valley.

Not only rain descended from the sky: the countryside to the leeward of Dresden was drenched with a steady shower of wet and sooty ash. British prisoners of war working in the large parcels sorting dump at Stalag IVB over twenty-five miles south-east of Dresden noticed that the smoke pall lasted three days and that partiples of smouldering clothing and charred paper were still floating down over the camp for many days after that.1 The owner of a house in Mockethal, some fifteen miles from Dresden, found his garden littered with prescriptions and pill-boxes from a chemist’s shop; the labels showed them to have come from the heart of the Dresden inner city.2 Papers and documents from the gutted Land Registry in the inner city likewise showered down in the village of Lohmen, near Pirna, some eighteen miles away; schoolchildren had to spend several days scouring the fi elds for them.3 These were the manifestations of the most terrible fire storm in the history of the R.A.F.’s area offensive against German cities. According to the police report the fire-storm appears to have erupted between half an hour and forty-five minutes after the first attack began, and to have subsided only gradually until, with the fall of a light rain toward three A.M., it could be said to have worked itself out and lost its fury; but it had itself caused the deaths of thousands of frail and elderly people who otherwise would have been able to fight their way out of the encircling ring of fire.

* * * * *
The Battle of Hamburg in July 1943 had brought Germany’s first such fire storm: eight square miles of the city had burnt as one single bonfire. The air raid on Pforzheim, a little jewellery-manufacturing town in Württemberg, ten days after the destruction of Dresden would create the last fire-storm of the war, killing 17 600 people—almost one in four of the town’s population—in the space of twenty minutes.

So horrific was the phenomenon in Hamburg that the police president had ordered a scientific investigation of the causes of such fire-storms, so that other cities might be warned. ‘An appreciation of the force of this fire-storm,’ reported Hamburg’s police president, ‘could be obtained only by analysing it soberly as a meteorological phenomenon: as the result of the sudden linking of a number of fires, the air above was heated to such an extent that a violent updraught occurred which, in turn, caused the surrounding fresh air to be drawn in from all sides to the seat of the fire. This tremendous suction caused movements of air of far greater force than normal winds.’ In meteorology [he continued] the differences of temperature involved are of the order of 20° to 30° Celsius. In this fire-storm they were of the order of 600°, 800° or even one thousand degrees Celsius. This explained the colossal violence of the fire-storm winds.

The Hamburg police president’s gloomy forecast was that no kind of civil defence precautions could ever contain a fire-storm once it had begun.4 The fire-storm was a man made monster which no man would ever tame.

In Dresden the fire-storm appears by examination of the area more than seventy-five percent destroyed to have engulfed some eight square miles: some of the city’s authorities after the war put the area as high as eleven square miles. It was unquestionably the most devastating fire-storm that Germany had experienced. All the signs observed in Hamburg were repeated in Dresden, multiplied in scale many times. Giant trees were uprooted or snapped in half. Individuals were flung over and bowled like tumbleweed along the streets as the hurricane ripped all the clothes from their bodies. Crowds of people fleeing for safety were seized by the tornado, hurled into the flames and burned alive—a holocaust in the truest sense of the word. The rapacious moloch found constant nourishment to feed its furious appetite. Gables of roofs, and furniture that had been stacked on the streets after the first raid were plucked up by the violent winds and tossed into the centre of the burning inner city.

The fire-storm reached the peak of its strength in the three-hour interval between the raids. This was the very period in which those sheltering in the cellars and vaulted corridors of the inner city should have been fl eeing to the safer surrounding suburbs.

As one S.S. officer reached the Post-Platz—formerly a hub of Dresden’s traffic, but soon to become a desolate wasteland of ruins, weeds, and shrubs—the brilliant ‘Christmas trees’ appeared in the sky heralding the start of the second raid. Without further thought he clawed his way feet first into a sewer shaft which opened onto the pavement’s edge. From here he had an eerie peephole onto the infernal scene all around. The fire-typhoon was thundering through all the streets and alleys with such strength that it was feeding human beings into the grasp of the fires like dry leaves.

‘Their clothes literally flew off their bodies,’ he described. ‘Then they slithered, slipped and rolled a hundred yards into the flames as though drawn by an invisible but mighty magnet.’5 A railroad worker also sheltering near the Post-Platz observed how the hurricane seized a woman with a perambulator and tossed her brutally into the flafes.6 Other people, running for their lives along the railway embankments which were the only escape routes not badly cratered or blocked by rubble, reported how railway trucks on exposed portions of the lines had been blown over by the gale.7 Even the open spaces of the large squares and great parks were no protection against this unnatural hurricane. Several thousand people had fled into the rectangular Grosser Garten, the one mile long park in the heart of the southern city, where surrounded by lakes, shrubs, wooded groves and ornamental palaces they had felt some measure of security. ‘We were running across one of the lawns of the Grosser Garten,’ reported one man, ‘when something white flew through the air toward me. I grabbed at it, and my hand closed on a large feather eiderdown. At the same time we heard some hundred yards away a giant oak tree crashing down. We pulled the branches aside and crawled beneath the trunk.’8

 * * * * *

Once the fire-storm had erupted there was nothing that the fire fighting forces could do to contain it. In all the great German fire-storm raids the swift and unhindered emergence of the storm had been prospered by the early disruption of telephone communications between civil defence control rooms and external reinforcements.

In Germany, as in England, the fire brigades had been reorganised during the war on nationwide, paramilitary lines, one feature of which was the constant mobile reserve of fire fighting regiments held outside the danger zones.

Most of the major cities had at this stage of the war been equipped with alternative telephone communications and with radio links between important control posts. But invariably these were unreliable when it came to the test, and the civil defence authorities had to fall back on the standard Post Office telephone network. Much therefore depended on how long this system functioned in an emergency before it was overwhelmed. In the Battle of Hamburg in July 1943 the telephone communications had very soon broken down, and when the fire-storm broke out on the third night the service had still not been adequately restored. Added to this, as we have seen, the burning down of the police headquarters which housed the civil defence control room had for a while seriously hampered fire  fighting. In Kassel in October 1943, the telephone exchange had been hit twenty minutes after the start of the attack, and the motorcycle dispatch rider service had proven inadequate for this emer-gency. For this reason fire brigades arriving in Kassel from nearby cities had waited for several hours without any definite orders for action.

David Irving
Apocalypse 1945: The Destruction of Dresden

Thomas Goodrich, "Dresden, 1945"

The following account of the destruction of Dresden on the night of February 13–14, 1945, is an excerpt from chapter 10 of Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944–1947(Sheridan, Colorado: Aberdeen Books, 2010), which deals primarily with the fate of innocent Germans, primarily women, children, the old, and infirm in the last year and aftermath of World War II.

Fashing is an annual German event similar to the Latin celebration of Mardi Gras. On this particular evening of “Shrove Tuesday,” normally staid, reserved Teutons don outlandish costumes, join friends or complete strangers, swarm into bars, restaurants and theaters, then partake for several hours in pointless, yet harmless, merry-making. Because of the exigencies of war, however, the celebration, like most else in the devastated Reich, had been all but abandoned. In only one city did the Fashing tradition continue much in the manner it always had, and on the night of February 13, women and children, along with the few remaining men, flooded its streets to celebrate.

Dresden was truly one of the world’s great cultural treasures. Known as the “Florence on the Elbe,” the ancient showcase in the heart of Saxony was a virtual time-capsule of Gothic architecture and medieval culture. At every turn on every narrow, cobbled street of the old town was an ornate palace, a museum, an art gallery, or a towering, centuries-old cathedral. Like Paris, Rome and Venice, Dresden was both beautiful, romantic and enduring. For decades, the city had been one of the “must stops” for continental travelers, especially those from Britain and America.

Welcome as it was, the fact that a city the size of Dresden had survived when all else was destroyed, mystified some residents and troubled others. Since only two tiny daylight raids had occurred during five years of war, many assumed Dresden’s salvation was due to its reputation as an “art city”; that as a priceless, irreplaceable gem of Western culture even “terror-bombers” lacked hatred sufficient to efface such beauty. Others surmised that since Dresden had almost no heavy industry—and what little it did have had no bearing on the war—the enemy simply did not deem the city a viable target. When skeptics pointed out that many other beautiful German towns with little or no industry had been systematically obliterated, rumors invented new reasons for Dresden’s miraculous survival.

The Frauenkirche, Dresden, after the bombing

One belief embraced by many stated that an aunt of Churchill’s lived in Dresden. Another hinted that the town was spared because of huge American investments. The fact that Dresden had become a “hospital city” with numerous medical facilities seemed a rational explanation to others. To some, the twenty-six thousand Allied POWs interred in the town appeared a more logical answer. Among many Dresdeners, however, perhaps the greatest explanation as to why their city lived when all else died was that undoubtedly a spark of mercy yet burned in the hearts of British and American flyers. Of all the many names it was known by, nothing better described Dresden in February 1945, than “refugee city.”

Since the Soviet invasion in January, millions of terrified trekkers, desperate to put as much space between themselves and the Red Army as possible, had fled through Dresden in trains, cars, wagons, or afoot. Hundreds of thousands more, though—injured, wounded, starving, or simply separated from their families—washed up in Dresden like castaways on an island. At the main train station, a city within a city had sprang up wherein thousands of people, many of them lost or orphaned children, lived a semi-permanent existence. A seventeen-year-old Red Cross worker, Eva Beyer, offers a glimpse at the heart-rending agony:

Children were searching for their parents, parents were searching for their children, there was constant calling and asking. A boy of about nine years of age,

holding his little four-year-old sister by the hand, asked me for food. When I asked him where his parents were, the boy said to me: “Grandma and grandpa are lying dead in the carriage and Mummy is lost.” The children had no tears any more…. In one compartment we found a woman. She had twenty-three children with her, and not one of them was her own. She had buried her own child three weeks ago. Her child had died of cold and tonsillitis. I asked her where all those other children came from, and she told me that all these were children whose parents were lost or dead. “After all, somebody has got to take care of them,” she said. . . . [T]hose children’s faces were not the faces of children any more. They were the faces of people who have gone through hell. Starving, wounded, lice-ridden, in rags. And the most treasured thing they had, security and the love of their parents, they had lost.

As truly appalling as the situation at the railroad station was, conditions were little better in the surrounding city. From a normal population of 600,000, Dresden had swollen by the night of February 13 to perhaps double that figure. Every which way residents turned they found frightened, ragged refugees.

“[E]ach restaurant, cafe, pub, and bar . . . was crammed full of people with suitcases, rucksacks and bundles,” a woman wrote. “You literally fell over these people and their possessions. It was so bad that you did not like to watch it, and it spoiled all the usual happy atmosphere of the Fashing.”

Nevertheless, in spite of the crowds and the fact that the Russians were a mere seventy miles away, thousands of Dresdeners were determined to take to the streets and celebrate what was certain to be the last Fashing of the war.

Just before ten p.m. the Dresden sirens sounded. There was no panic. Most residents simply ignored the sounds. Even had there been any public air raid shelters few would have fled to them for there seemed little doubt on this cold, yet cheery night, that like the 171 false alarms that preceded it, this warning too would end in nothing. Instead of the “All Clear” siren, however, seconds later Dresden heard another sound.

“Suddenly,” said one startled woman, “a thundering and roaring which made the whole earth tremble. An earthquake?”

Almost before this lady and others could guess the answer, the black sky above Dresden turned brilliant. Many spectators were dazzled by the colored lights and stared in awe. “It’s getting light, it’s getting light, it’s bright as day outside!” shouted an incredulous friend to young Gotz Bergander who was indoors listening to his radio.

Weary Red Cross worker, Eva Beyer, had just awakened moments earlier and paid a visit to the restroom:

I saw a green light shine through the window. What was this? When I opened the door, I could see what it was. The “Christmas Trees” were in the sky….I went to warn the other people in the building….I ran through the whole house, calling out: “Alarm! Alarm!” and waking everyone up…. Another five families lived in this building and together we totaled eleven women, six children, and one man—Kurt, the wounded ex-soldier. Then I went back to the flat and fetched the children from their beds…. [T]hey started to scream because they didn’t know what was happening and there was no time to explain anything to them. We all went down into the cellar and I put just a blanket round each child, because there was no time for anything else. I myself was only in my nightgown, but I didn’t even feel the cold.

At the railroad station, Gisela-Alexandra Moeltgen was standing at the window of an idle train talking to her husband on the platform when the chilling lights showered down.

Many optimists stayed in order to secure a good seat, but I broke the win dow—it was only made of cardboard—grabbed the handbag in which I carried my jewelry, grabbed my fur, too, and got through the window. The others followed suit. We ran along the completely blacked-out platform in the dark and found that all the barriers were closed. Over the barriers, then! The police wanted us to go into the already overcrowded air raid shelter at the station, but we had only one urge—out, and away from the station! . . .

We ran across the road to the Technical High School where, it was claimed, there was a good cellar. And above us—very low—the planes. Masses of people were already in the cellar when we arrived, and I collapsed then. It was my heart.

I was still very weak and all the running had exhausted me completely. Somebody asked us to move on, further into the crush in the cellar, and we did so.

“Air raid warning!” grumbled an indignant SS officer, Claus von Fehrentheil, as he lay in a military hospital with half his hip shot away. “After all, we understood we were in an open city, world-famous for its art, undefended, declared a ‘hospital town.’ ”

Only after very intensive efforts urging us to shelter, did we concede to go into the cellar. . . . For one thing, we regarded the whole affair as probably a mistake at this time. Then also, a soldier who had been on the Front felt too restricted in a cellar, a place where he could not dodge any threatening dangers. . . . So we stood in the passages and on the staircases outside the air raid shelter.

“Get dressed, get dressed! Quickly, get down to the cellar,” cried nuns in the hospital where twenty-year-old Annemarie Waehmann was a patient. “Bedridden patients were put into push-chairs, and there was nothing but hurrying and rushing about. We had hardly been in the cellar for five minutes when [the bombs fell]…. This is the end, we thought…. Many screamed in fear, and prayed, and we crept trembling under the beds.”

“All hell broke loose over us so suddenly that no one really had a chance to perceive what was actually going to happen,” recalled Erika Simon, whose parents had only seconds before whisked the little girl and her brother and sister to the cellar. “I remember I had my head in my mother’s lap under a blanket and was putting both hands over my ears in an attempt to blot out the horrific noise.”

As wave after wave of RAF bombers appeared overhead, ton upon ton of bombs tumbled down. “It was as if a huge noisy conveyor belt was rolling over us,” Gotz Bergander thought when he heard the strange, terrifying noise, “a noise punctuated with detonations and tremors.”

Added to the normal payload of high explosives, hundreds of two- and four-ton “Block-busters” slammed into Dresden, effacing entire neighborhoods. Centuries-old cathedrals, palaces, museums, and homes were reduced to rubble in seconds. At the railroad station, those hundreds of individuals on the trains who had refused to leave their coveted seats were blown to bits. At the huge indoor circus, spectators, performers and animals were slaughtered by blast and hissing shrapnel. In the streets, on the sidewalks, atop the bridges over the Elbe, costumed revelers with nowhere to run were slain by the thousands. Without let-up, the massacre continued.

Because Dresden lacked any sort of anti-aircraft weapons, enemy planes were able to fly so low that victims could be seen running through the streets. Despite this, and the fact that night was “as bright as day,” the numerous hospitals were not spared.

“We patients,” Claus von Fehrentheil recalled, “had been reassured that even the smallest hospital had the distinctive red cross on a white background painted on its roof. It seemed to us as the night went on that these served as excellent markers for the bombs of the English.”

Said Annemarie Waehmann from her own hospital: “There was crashing and thundering, whistling and howling. The walls trembled, swayed by the impact of the bombs. This is the end, we thought.

… Then some of the doctors screamed: ‘Everyone out of the cellar, the whole building is going to collapse!’ …I too ran for my life into the next building. . . . Everyone was in such a panic that all we wanted was to save our naked lives.”

Elsewhere, as the bombing rose in fury, horror-struck Dresdeners huddled against the onslaught. “Time and again I gazed at the ceiling, expecting everything to collapse on us,” confessed Margret Freyer from a cellar containing forty-three women. “Somehow I had switched off and was expecting the final catastrophe; it must have been for this reason that I did not join in the weeping and praying of the totally terrified women, but tried to calm them down as best I could.”

“The attack continued and the mood among us reached panic pitch,” remembered Gisela-Alexandra Moeltgen from the crowded high school basement. “Then a shout—‘At once, everyone leave, there is danger of collapse!’ Out through the narrow cellar windows we went, flames whipping down the staircase, the whole building alight. . . . Flames, flames wherever one looked.”

“I can see my father leaning against this wall,” reminisced Erika Simon, “and I felt that the walls were coming towards us and that my father was trying to stop them from falling down on us.”

“And then,” said the surprised little girl, “suddenly, the noise ceased.”

“There was absolute quiet,” another listener added.

Several minutes later, the welcome silence was broken by the even more welcome sound of the “All Clear” signal. Those who had clocks or watches and thought to look were stunned—what had seemed an all night trial by fire had actually occurred in just under half an hour. In those thirty minutes, however, one of the world’s most beautiful treasures had all but vanished. As the people stumbled from their holes they were stunned at the strange sight that greeted them.

“[C]oming out of the cellar was unforgettable,” wrote teenager Gotz Bergander. “[T]he night sky was illuminated with pink and red. The houses were black silhouettes, and a red cloud of smoke hovered over everything…. People ran toward us totally distraught, smeared with ash, and with wet blankets wrapped around their heads. . . . All we heard was, ‘Everything’s gone, everything’s on fire.’ ”

“I saw only burning houses and screaming people . . . ,” added Margret Freyer when she entered the street. “It was frightening—I found myself completely alone, and all I could hear was the roaring of the fires. I could hardly see, due to the flying sparks, the flames and the smoke.”

Those who managed to reach the streets found their way almost entirely blocked by fallen trees, poles, wires, and collapsed buildings.

As the dazed survivors scrambled for safety, fire brigades arrived from outlying communities to battle the blaze. Red Cross workers also appeared and began pulling victims from the rubble.

Meanwhile, at the great city park in the center of town, another type of rescue was in progress. Like everything else in Dresden, the magnificent zoo had been heavily damaged. Remembered Otto Sailer-Jackson, the sixty-year-old zoo inspector:

The elephants gave spine-chilling screams. Their house was still standing but an explosive bomb of terrific force had landed behind it, lifted the dome of the house, turned it around, and put it back again. The heavy iron doors had been completely bent and the huge iron sliding doors which shut off the house from the terraces had been lifted off their hinges. When I and some of the other men . . . managed to break in to the elephant house, we found the stable empty. For a moment we stood helpless, but then the elephants told us where they were by their heart-breaking trumpeting. We rushed out on to the terrace again. The baby cow elephant was lying in the narrow barrier-moat on her back, her legs up to the sky. She had suffered severe stomach injuries and could not move. A … cow elephant had been flung clear across the barrier moat and the fence by some terrific blast wave, and just stood there trembling. We had no choice but to leave those animals to their fate for the moment.

In other areas of the zoo, cages had been blown open and frantic animals had escaped to the park. When Sailer-Jackson approached a mon key, the terrified little animal reached to him for help. To the old man’s horror, he saw that the monkey had only bloody stumps for arms. Drawing his pistol, Sailor-Jackson sadly put the poor creature out of its misery.

As rescue work continued into the early morning of February 14, those in Dresden whose homes had escaped the flames began to mechanically sweep the glass and plaster from their beds and floors or fasten cardboard over windows to keep out the returning cold. “My God, the work was pointless!” admitted one woman, “but it calmed their nerves and their conscience.”

As shattering as the destruction of their beautiful city had been, no one in the stricken town was emotionally prepared for what came next. At 1:30 a.m., the earth began to shake again.

“[S]omeone yelled, ‘They’re coming back, they’re coming back,’ ” young Gotz Bergander recalled:

Sure enough, through the general confusion we heard the alarm sirens go off again. The alarm system in the city had ceased to function, but we could hear the sirens from the neighboring villages warning of a second attack. That’s when I was overcome with panic, and I’m also speaking for the rest of my family and those who lived in our house. It was sheer panic! We thought this couldn’t be possible, that they wouldn’t do such a thing. They wouldn’t drop more bombs on a city that was already an inferno…. We rushed into the cellar.

Margret Freyer was equally stunned: “[M]y friend and I looked at each other, terrified—surely it wasn’t possible? Are they coming a second time? I just caught the radio announcer’s message: ‘Several bomber units are approaching Dresden.’ The voice of the announcer was anything but steady. I felt sick—so they were coming a second time. Knees shaking, we went down into the cellar.”

Once more, the pathetic patients at Claus von Fehrentheil’s military hospital hobbled, crawled or were carried to shelter below. “From the sound of the engines,” noted the SS officer, “we could hear that this time a very large number of aircraft were taking part, definitely more than in the first wave.”

Yet again, as more than a thousand bombers roared overhead, a veritable rain of death showered down on Dresden. In addition to the usual payload of explosives, the second wave brought thousands of incendiary bombs. “[A] non-stop hail of bombs … ,” thought a terrified Margret Freyer. “The walls shook, the ground shook, the light went out and our heavy iron door was forced open by [a] blast. In the cellar now, there were the same scenes as had occurred before . . . a crowd of crying, screaming, or praying women, throwing themselves on top of each other.”

“This was hell, hell itself … ,” said Gisela-Alexandra Moeltgen. “I thought: ‘Surely this will have to stop some time.’ ”

I had the feeling that each individual plane tried to hit our house, because it was not on fire yet but brilliantly lit up by the burning house next to it. The planes flew just across the roofs, or at least, that is what it sounded like. I kept shouting: “Open your mouths!” The sound of the bombs—“bschi-bum, bschi-bum”—came wave after wave. There was no end to it. . . . The house seemed to come crashing down and shook continuously. When the direct hit came, no one noticed it, for the whistling noise of the bombs drowned all other noises. In any case, it was the others who confirmed that the house was on fire. From that moment on I felt a little calmer. My feeling was: “Thank God they have hit it at last and yet we are still alive.”

Unbeknownst to Gisela-Alexandra and thousands more, many of the bombs they heard hitting their homes were phosphorous. While Eva Beyer and the other women and children in her cellar huddled in terror, the wounded ex-soldier, Kurt, disappeared briefly.

Suddenly Kurt was beside me as I crouched. He whispered very quietly into my ear: “We have fire bombs in the coal cellar, come quick and help me throw the things out!” I gathered all my courage and went with him. Three incendiaries lay there, and we managed to throw out two. The third one we could only throw sand over because it had already started to smoke, and then there was supposed to be only thirty seconds before the thing would explode like a firework.

In a matter of minutes, the thousands of fire bombs ignited the debris in Dresden and a racing furnace of flame erupted. Unfamiliar with bombing raids and fire storms, most Dresdeners reacted slowly. Erika Simon and the nuns at a military hospital stood frozen in terror.

So there we were, paralyzed by horror and fear, clinging to the Sister in a corridor amongst the dead, the wounded, and soldiers who had just had their legs amputated and were now lying on stretchers, helpless amongst the chaos. Gruesome … [were] the Catholic Sisters constantly saying their prayers, murmur ing over their rosaries. I am sure nobody bothered to save the screaming soldiers.

One patient who had no intention of being broiled alive was the severely wounded officer, Claus von Fehrentheil.

Now I was in the open, no longer surrounded by walls, but by flames instead.

… No path was recognizable between the buildings, no obvious path of escape, because walls were collapsing and adding to the heaps of rubble. The suction of the flames was … strong…. Even the pieces of clothing which I had hurriedly picked up and thrown over myself began to smolder. Because of the flying sparks my eyes became useless. I was blind. Small holes must have been burnt into the cornea, which were incredibly painful. They made it impossible for me to open my eyes even briefly, just to see where I was.

Another person determined to escape was Margret Freyer:

Out of here—nothing but out! Three women went up the stairs in front of us, only to come rushing down again, wringing their hands. “We can’t get out of here! Everything outside is burning!” they cried…. Then we tried the “Break-through” which had been installed in each cellar, so people could exit from one cellar to the other. But here we met only thick smoke which made it impossible to breathe. So we went upstairs. The back door, which opened on to the back yard and was made partly of glass, was completely on fire. It would have been madness to touch it. And at the front entrance, flames a metre and a half high came licking at short intervals into the hall.

In spite of this, it was clear that we could not stay in the building unless we wanted to suffocate. So we went downstairs again and picked up our suitcases. I put two handfuls of handkerchiefs into a water tub and stuffed them soaking wet into my coat pocket….I made a last attempt to convince everyone in the cellar to leave, because they would suffocate if they did not; but they didn’t want to. And so I left alone….

I stood by the entrance and waited until no flames came licking in, then I quickly slipped through and out into the street.

“[S]omebody screamed: ‘Everyone out of here, the place is on fire!’ ” Maria Rosenberger recalled. “When we arrived upstairs we saw that the street was on fire…. Burning curtain material was flying towards us and glowing pieces of wood came flying down on us from above. … Now everyone started to make a run for the outskirts in order to reach some open space.”

As with Maria and her companions, once in the streets victims did everything they could to escape the ancient inner city where the fire storm seemed centered. Here, in the heart of old Dresden, temperatures reached upwards of 3,000 degrees.65 Metal roofs, copper cupolas, glass, even sandstone, liquefied in the furious heat and poured down like lava. A hurricane of smoke, flame and dust roared toward the vortex from all directions as the cold air beyond Dresden was drawn in by the fire ball. Many disoriented victims, especially the thousands of refugees, took wrong turns on strange streets and were swept like feathers into the furnace.

“The whole of Dresden was an inferno,” said one teenage boy. “In the street below people were wandering about helplessly. I saw my aunt there. She had wrapped herself in a damp blanket and, seeing me, called out…. The sound of the rising fire-storm strangled her last words. A house wall collapsed with a roar, burying several people in the debris. A thick cloud of dust arose and mingling with the smoke made it impossible for me to see.”

“[I]t was like ‘The Last Days of Pompeii,’ ” remembered Eva Beyer. “People came crawling on their hands and knees, so as to be near the ground and be able to breathe better, but not knowing, as they crawled, whether they were really getting away from the fire-storm or merely heading into other burning areas of the city.”

As he groped blindly through the holocaust, Claus von Fehrentheil well knew he was only seconds from death:

One could forecast what must happen next: the oxygen in the air becomes completely burnt away, so one becomes unconscious and hardly notices that one is burning to death. Blind, I accepted that this must happen. Suddenly, someone touched my shoulder and asked me to come along. He had found a way through the rubble to the outside. And so, holding on to the arm of a comrade, I was led through burning Dresden.

Like von Fehrentheil and his timely guide, others were desperately trying to reach the huge city park or the open spaces along the Elbe River. The trials of twenty-four-year-old Margret Freyer were the trials of many:

Because of flying sparks and the fire-storm I couldn’t see anything at first…. no street, only rubble nearly a metre high, glass, girders, stones, craters. I tried to get rid of the sparks by constantly patting them off my coat. It was useless….I took off the coat and dropped it. Next to me a woman was screaming continually: “My den’s burning down, my den’s burning down,” and dancing in the street. As I go on I can still hear her screaming but I don’t see her again. I run, I stumble, anywhere. I don’t even know where I am any more. I’ve lost all sense of direction because all I can see is three steps ahead.

Suddenly I fall into a big hole—a bomb crater, about six metres wide and two metres deep, and I end up down there lying on top of three women. I shake them by their clothes and start to scream at them, telling them that they must get out of here—but they don’t move any more. . . . Quickly, I climbed across the women, pulled my suitcase after me, and crawled on all fours out of the crater. To my left I suddenly see a woman…. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire. It’s only my eyes which take this in; I myself feel nothing. The woman remains lying on the ground, completely still….

[T]here are calls for help and screams from somewhere but all around is one single inferno. I hold another wet handkerchief in front of my mouth, my hands and my face are burning; it feels as if the skin is hanging down in strips. On my right I see a big, burnt-out shop where lots of people are standing. I join them, but think: “No, I can’t stay here either, this place is completely surrounded by fire.” I leave all these people behind, and stumble on…. In front of me is something that might be a street, filled with a hellish rain of sparks which look like enormous rings of fire when they hit the ground. I have no choice. I must go through. I press another wet handkerchief to my mouth and almost get through, but I fall and am convinced that I cannot go on. It’s hot. Hot! My hands are burning like fire….I am past caring, and too weak….

Suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream and gesticulate with their hands, and then—to my utter horror and amazement—I see how one after the other they simply seem to let themselves drop to the ground.

…I fall then, stumbling over a fallen woman and as I lie right next to her I see how her clothes are burning away. Insane fear grips me and from then on I repeat one simple sentence to myself continuously: “I don’t want to burn to death— no, no burning—I don’t want to burn!” Once more I fall down and feel that I am not going to be able to get up again, but the fear of being burnt pulls me to my feet. Crawling, stumbling, my last handkerchief pressed to my mouth . . . I do not know how many people I fell over. I knew only one feeling: that I must not burn….

I try once more to get up on my feet, but I can only manage to crawl forward on all fours. I can still feel my body, I know I’m still alive. Suddenly, I’m standing up, but there’s something wrong, everything seems so far away and I can’t hear or see properly any more….I was suffering from lack of oxygen. I must have stumbled forwards roughly ten paces when I all at once inhaled fresh air. There’s a breeze! I take another breath, inhale deeply, and my senses clear.

Through sheer will, some, like Margret, did succeed in reaching safety—but most did not. Standing alone on the far hills outside Dresden, one viewer stared in silent awe at the fiery massacre.

I did not understand what my eyes were seeing. I stood in the darkness, paralyzed, numbed, with my eardrums aching from the hellish uproar. . . . It was simply beyond comprehension, beyond the wildest imagination. It seemed actually unreal….I saw the rising of a flaming sea which … inundated the entire city in one huge glowing wave. . . .[T]he entire area was in flames. Huge red and yellow tongues of fire were roaring toward the sky. Streaming, trembling, madly onrushing clouds . . . intermingled with brilliant white, red, and yellow explosions out of which the big bombers seemed to rise like flocks of giant birds.

. . . Without ever having been through a big air raid before, I knew at once that here something quite different was happening.

The view from above was even more compelling. “Dresden was a city with every street etched in fire,” said one RAF navigator.

“At 20,000 feet,” a comrade added, “we could see details in the unearthly blaze that had never been visible before.”

For those planes which ventured down, the view quickly became more personal. “I saw people in the streets,” admitted one crewman. “I saw a dog run across a road—and felt sorry for it.”

“Oh God,” one airman muttered over and over again, “those poor people.”

After half an hour or so, the bombers broke off the attack and banked for home. Equipped with a movie camera, a single aircraft remained to record the drama:

There was a sea of fire covering in my estimation some 40 square miles. The heat striking up from the furnace below could be felt in my cockpit. The sky was vivid in hues of scarlet and white, and the light inside the aircraft was that of an eerie autumn sunset. We were so aghast at the awesome blaze that although alone over the city we flew around in a stand-off position for many minutes before turning for home, quite subdued by our imagination of the horror that must be below. We could still see the glare of the holocaust thirty minutes after leaving.

It was on that dark return flight home, when crewmen had a chance to ponder, that some first came to realize that the war had gone “a step too far.”

“[F]or the first time in many operations,” a Jewish pilot confessed, “I felt sorry for the population below.”

“I was sickened,” echoed a comrade simply.

With the merciful departure of the planes, rescue teams soon began inching toward the center of town. “Because of the fire-storm, at first it was possible to give help only at the periphery of the fires,” explained one worker. “I had to look on, helpless, as people who were clinging to iron railings were seized mercilessly by the suction and plucked off into the flames. And not human beings only, but all sorts of things, even prams, were seized by this force and sucked into the sea of fire.”

When the inferno finally abated later that morning, rescuers and relatives entered the still flaming city to search for survivors.

What we saw . . . was indescribable, horrible. Thick smoke everywhere. As we climbed with great effort over large pieces of walls and roofs which had collapsed and fallen into the street, we could hear behind us, beside us, and in front of us, burnt ruins collapsing with dull crashes. The nearer we came to the town center, the worse it became. It looked like a crater landscape, and then we saw the dead.

“Dead, dead, dead everywhere,” gasped Margret Freyer as she stumbled through the ruins.

Some completely black like charcoal. Others completely untouched. . . . Women in aprons, women with children sitting in the trams as if they had just nodded off. Many women, many young girls, many small children, soldiers who were only identifiable as such by the metal buckles on their belts, almost all of them naked. Some clinging to each other in groups as if they were clawing at each other. From some of the debris poked arms, heads, legs, shattered skulls…. Most people looked as if they had been inflated, with large yellow and brown stains on their bodies…. [T]here were also so many little babies, terribly mutilated.

“Never would I have thought that death could come to so many people in so many different ways … ,” noted a stunned rescue worker.

[S]ome times the victims looked like ordinary people apparently peacefully sleeping; the faces of others were racked with pain, the bodies stripped almost naked by the tornado; there were wretched refugees from the East clad only in rags, and people from the Opera in all their finery; here the victim was a shapeless slab, there a layer of ashes…. Across the city, along the streets wafted the unmistakable stench of decaying flesh.

Indeed, of all the hideous scents wafting through Dresden—sulfur, gas, sewage—the heavy, sweet stench of cooked flesh blanketed all. “There is nothing like it; nothing smells so,” one nauseous woman wrote.82 What were at first mistaken to be thousands of burnt, blackened logs scattered about the streets were soon found to be charred corpses, each reduced to roughly three feet. “All the way across the city,” said a horrified rescuer, “we could see [these] victims lying face down, literally glued to the tarmac, which had softened and melted in the enormous heat.”

“The thin and elderly victims took longer to catch fire than the fat or young ones,” observed another witness.

Horribly, many frantic relatives were compelled to examine countless such bodies in hopes of identifying loved ones. “I can still see my mother,” remembered eleven-year-old Erika Simon, “bending down and turning over dead children, or bits of dead children, for she was still desperately searching for my little brother.”

“One shape I will never forget,” a rescue worker recalled, “was the remains of what had apparently been a mother and child. They had shriveled and charred into one piece, and had been stuck rigidly to the asphalt. They had just been prised up. The child must have been underneath the mother, because you could still clearly see its shape, with its mother’s arms clasped around it.”

At every turn, a new nightmare awaited. When she kicked from her path what seemed a burnt piece of wood and discovered it was not, young Eva Beyer ran screaming round a corner. Once there, she froze in horror: Hanging with claw-like hands from a metal fence, like so many blackened rats, were those—men, women and children—who had vainly tried to scale the barrier to safety. The sight was too much; Eva vomited on the spot.

Wrote another witness:

In the middle of the square lay an old man, with two dead horses. Hundreds of corpses, completely naked, were scattered round him…. Next to the tram-shelter was a public lavatory of corrugated iron. At the entrance to this was a woman, about thirty years old, completely nude, lying face-down on a fur-coat…. A few yards further on lay two young boys aged about eight and ten clinging tightly to each other; their faces were buried in the ground. They too were stark naked. Their legs were stiff and twisted into the air.

Curiously, while most victims had been burned to cinders in the streets, others, according to one viewer, “sat stiff in the streetcars, bags in hand, open eyes, dead, with but a slight trickle of blood having run down their noses or coming from their closed lips.”

“One woman was still sitting in a destroyed tramcar as if she had merely forgotten to get out,” recorded Maria Rosenberger. Another victim, she continued, was a completely shriveled corpse of a man, naked, his skin like brown leather, but with his beard and hair in tact.

Adding even more horror to the scene, terribly burned and mutilated zoo animals screamed in pain amid the rubble.

At the main railroad station, where thousands upon thousands were sheltered prior to the attack, few escaped. In the vast basement under the station, no one survived. Unlike those above, victims below died from smoke and carbon monoxide poisoning. “What I saw,” said one who entered the tomb, “was a nightmare, lit as it was only by the dim light of the railwayman’s lantern. The whole of the basement was covered with several layers of people, all very dead.” Added another who witnessed the scene: “What we noticed . . . were not so much dead bodies as people who had apparently fallen asleep, slumped against the station walls.”

Aware that those in the old city would flee the flames to the open spaces, the RAF had hurled tons of high explosive bombs into the huge central park. Here, the slaughter was ghastly. “I could see torn-off arms and legs, mutilated torsos, and heads which had been wrenched off their bodies and rolled away,” commented a Swiss visitor who attempted to cross the park. “In places the corpses were still lying so densely that I had to clear a path through them in order not to tread on arms and legs.”

At the numerous hospitals in Dresden, the survival rate was naturally much lower and many wretched victims could only lay helpless as they slowly burned to death. When Eva Beyer passed a women’s clinic she made the mistake of glancing over as clean-up crews brought out victims.

“I went down on my knees, trembled and cried . . . ,” the young Red Cross worker recounted. “Several women lay there with their bellies burst open . . . and one could see the babies for they were hanging half outside. Many of the babies were mutilated…. Scenes like that one saw everywhere and very slowly one became numbed. One acted like a zombie.”

Later that morning, recalled Erika Simon,

the news spread in a most mysterious way, that all those people who were walking about lost and helpless should assemble in the [city park]. Thus a gray mass of people began to move along in a line. One had ceased to be an individual and was only part of a suffering mass. The gray line of people climbed over debris and over the dead. One’s feet stepped on burnt corpses and one didn’t even think about it.

As the stunned survivors assembled at the park and along the grassy banks of the Elbe, some found missing loved ones. Most, however, did not. Absorbed as they were with the hell all about, few were aware of their own condition. When Margret Freyer asked for a mirror, she was staggered by what she saw: “I . . . did not recognize myself any more. My face was a mass of blisters and so were my hands. My eyes were narrow slits and puffed up, my whole body was covered in little black, pitted marks.” Others suddenly realized that they themselves were seriously injured, or that their hair and much of their clothing had been burned away.

By noon, February 14, a strange silence settled over what once was Dresden. “The city was absolutely quiet,” Gotz Bergander remembered. “The sound of the fires had died out. The rising smoke created a dirty, gray pall which hung over the entire city. The wind had calmed, but a slight breeze was blowing westward, away from us.”

And then, shattering the calm, came the sounds. “I suddenly thought I could hear sirens again,” continues Bergander. “And sure enough, there they were. I shouted, and by then we could already hear the distant whine of engines. . . . The roar of the engines grew louder and louder.”

As US bombers began blasting the rubble to dust, American fighter planes zeroed in on the thousands of refugees at the park, along the river and in other open spaces. Recalled Annemarie Waehmann:

We looked up and saw how they flew lower and lower. “They’re coming here … ,” we screamed. A few men took over and gave commands: “Split up! Scatter! Run into the fields! Down on your faces!” While we were lying in the dirt, our hands clawing at the earth as if we wanted to crawl inside it, they came after us, wave after wave, circling, flying low, shooting with their machine-guns into the defenseless people. Popping noises right and left, clods of earth flying up, screams. Like everyone else, I expect, I prayed: Dear God, please protect me. A few seconds’ pause, as the planes circled in order to come back at us again. The men screamed: “Up, up! Run on! Run towards the trees!” … But again that popping noise as they fired without mercy into the people, and screams and clods of earth flying around….I took Hilde by the hand and without turning round once, without even looking to see how many people did not get up again, we ran.

“[P]anic broke out,” said fifteen-year-old Gerhard Kuhnemund. “Women and children were massacred with cannon and bombs. It was mass murder…. While we literally clawed ourselves into the grass, I personally saw at least five American fighter-bombers, which from an altitude of approximately 120–150 metres opened fire with their cannon on the masses of civilians. My companion . . . was killed beside me in this attack. There was a hole in his back the size of a palm.”

Near the park, zoo-keeper Otto Sailer-Jackson watched in stunned disbelief as one American pilot mowed down people running in the street. “He attacked several times, flying very low, firing from cannon and machine-guns into the refugees. Then he flew low over the Zoo and made several firing runs at anything he could see that was still alive. In this way our last giraffe met her death. Many stags and other animals which we had managed to save, became the victims of this hero.”

Although the raid lasted only ten minutes, the Americans returned the next day, and the next, and the next, seemingly determined that not a single living thing should survive in Dresden. “There seemed to be no end to the horror,” said Eva Beyer.

Desperate to prevent epidemics, the survivors of Dresden scurried between raids to dispose of the corpses. With thousands of bodies littering the streets and parks, the task initially seemed simple. “They had to pitchfork shriveled bodies onto trucks and wagons and cart them to shallow graves on the outskirts of the city,” a British POW engaged in the cleanup observed. As the ghastly work continued, however, it soon became clear that in no way could such a slow process handle the enormous amount of bodies. Hence, huge grills were fashioned from girders in various parts of town and corpses were stacked on them like logs. When the piles reached roughly ten feet high and thirty feet wide, flame throwers were used to ignite the mass. Elsewhere, workers simply built great mounds. Eva Beyer watched in horror as men poured gasoline over a large pile composed entirely of heads, legs and other body parts. While that mound was ablaze trucks arrived and dumped more such loads.

As the recovery continued and workers entered the ruins, even greater horrors were in store. Acting like vast ovens, super-heated cellars had rendered their victims into liquid fat.

“[R]escuers were walking about up to their ankles in sludge,” recounted Margret Freyer.

With his father, ten-year-old Thomas Weyersberg entered the basement of his family’s business to salvage from the ruins. In spite of the horror already experienced, neither father or son was prepared for what they found. “We literally waded into the pit of hell,” the boy said, “carrying out fat-soaked documents, company books, stationery[,] even some typewriters. . . . The walls . . . were still warm when we progressed … wading ankle-deep in the fried human drippings.”

Despite Dresden’s frenzied efforts to recover the dead, ten days after the raids, “mountains of bodies” still awaited disposal and for weeks workers with carts and trucks hauled thousands of corpses through the streets. Clearly, the dead in Dresden outnumbered the living.

One month after the massacre, the Dresden Chief of Police reported that over 200,000 bodies had been recovered from the ruins. The official added that the toll might possibly reach 250,000. Later, the International Red Cross estimated that 275,000 had died in the raids. Because of the incredible density of Dresden’s population on the night of February 13–14, because thousands of victims were refugees with no records, because many bodies either lay buried forever in the ruins or had simply melted like wax, other estimates that place the death toll at 300,000 to 400,000 may well be closer to the mark.

As news from Dresden spread slowly throughout the rest of the Reich, there was shock and horror, but mostly their was anguish. “Dresden was a glorious city … ,” wrote Ruth Andreas-Friedrich in her diary. “It’s a little hard getting used to the idea that Dresden, too, no longer exists. I almost feel like crying.” And Rudolf Semmler, aide to the propaganda minister, also took note that public facades of strength and courage could easily crumble in private: “For the first time I saw Goebbels lose control of himself when two days ago, he was given the stark reports of the disaster in Dresden. The tears came into his eyes with grief and rage and shock. Twenty minutes later I saw him again. He was still crying and looked a broken man.”

When word of the Dresden bombing first reached Great Britain there was initial joy. That the seventh largest city in Germany should be scorched from the map was “wondrous news,” trumpeted the British press; that hundreds of thousands of women and children should be burnt to cinders in the process was also “an unexpected and fortunate bonus.” Cabinet minister, Sir Archibald Sinclair, heartily agreed with this attitude and lyrically termed the firestorm a “crescendo of destruction.”

As more facts and information from neutral Swiss and Swedish sources began to arrive, however, many throughout the world were horrified. For the first time in the war, those in England, America and elsewhere learned what Germans had known for three years—the Allies were engaged in “deliberate terror-bombing.” Angered and shamed by such a course when the war was clearly on its last leg, Richard Stokes lashed out in the House of Commons: “What happened on the evening of 13th February? There were a million people in Dresden, including 600,000 bombed-out evacuees and refugees from the East…. When I heard the Minister speak of the ‘crescendo of destruction,’ I thought: What a magnificent expression for a Cabinet Minister of Great Britain at this stage of the war.”

Most outrage, high and low, was directed at Arthur Harris, Chief of Bomber Command.

“[W]e were told at the briefing that there were many thousands of Panzer troops in the streets [of Dresden], either going to or coming back from the Russian Front,” one angry RAF crewman later explained. “My personal feeling is, that if we’d been told the truth at the briefing, some of us wouldn’t have gone.”

“To just fly over it without opposition felt like murder,” added a comrade. “I felt it was a cowardly war.”

Once known affectionately by many of his men as “Bomber” Harris, after Dresden the air marshal earned a new nickname—“Butcher.” “Butcher Harris didn’t give a damn how many men he lost as long as he was pounding the shit out of German civilians,” growled one British airman.

Meanwhile, the man directly responsible for the Dresden massacre began to publicly distance himself from both Harris and terror bombing. Winston Churchill:

It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. . . . I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives … rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction.

Public pronouncements to the contrary, the air terror continued unabated. Lost almost entirely in the furor over Dresden was the February 23 leveling of Pforzheim in western Germany. Although much smaller than Dresden, in nineteen minutes the city was utterly destroyed with nearly 20,000 dead. A short time later, the “hospital city” of Wurzburg was likewise incinerated. Additionally, in what appeared an attempt to broaden the war, American planes struck neutral Switzerland, raiding Schaffhausen in late February and striking Basel and Zurich on March 4.

Michael McLaughlin Death of a city

And everybody praised the Duke Who this great fight did win. ‘But what good came of it at last?’ Quoth little Peterkin. ‘Why, that I cannot tell,’ said he, ‘But ’twas a famous victory.’ Southey, after Blenheim

“In terms of personal success, there has been no career more fortunate than that of Winston Churchill. In terms of human suffering to millions of people and destruction of the noble edifice of mankind there has been no career more disastrous.” The European and English Journal. Source: American Manifest Destiny and the Holocausts, p. 176.

“One closes these volumes feeling, uneasily, that the true heroes of the story they tell are neither the contending air marshal’s, nor even the 55,888 officers and men of Bomber Command who were killed in action. They were the inhabitants of the German cities under attack; the men, women and children who stoically endured and worked on among the flaming ruins of their homes and factories, up till the moment when the allied armies overran them.” London Times reviewer on the British Official History of the Strategic Air Offensive.

A CITY MUST DIE

Woven into the tapestry of the Second World War, the air blitz is a stark reminder that this war, perhaps more so than any other affecting the European continent, provided for the deliberate destruction of civilians as an instrument of policy. Most of us are familiar with the major events of World War Two and of these, the blitz on such major cities as London and Liverpool stand out as beacons of devastation. The blitz on Coventry was equally tragic and the horror is increased as we subsequently learn that civilian losses could have been reduced enormously but for the fact that Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of the time, refused to warn Coventry’s inhabitants that their city was to be raided lest the enemy realise their code had been broken.

Sir Basil Liddell Hart, Britain’s foremost historian, described the policy of bombing civilian targets as being: “The most uncivilised method of warfare the world has known since the Mongol invasions.” It is a sad reflection on Britain that it was a British Government which initiated this war crime which by its nature would needlessly destroy so many European lives, not to speak of British lives lost in raids of retaliation.

On the 10 May 1940, just one day after his appointment as Prime Minister, Winston Churchill announced that the bombing of Germany’s civilian population would commence. J. M. Spaight, C.B., C.B.E., who was the Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry, admitted that: “Hitler only undertook the bombing of British civilian targets reluctantly three months after the R.A.F. had commenced bombing German civilian targets.”¹

He went on to say that: “Hitler would have been willing at any time to stop the slaughter. Hitler was genuinely anxious to reach with Britain an agreement confining the action of aircraft to battle zones.”²

Churchill’s decision to bomb Germany’s civilian targets was to cost Britain dearly in terms of lives lost. The smouldering blackened ruins of London, Liverpool, Coventry and many other British cities bore silent testimony to this. The blitz on Coventry stands out as an example of such retaliatory raids and the British people in their innocence, unaware of the true reasons for their suffering, grew to hate and gave their all to strike back at the German barbarians. When the war ended in 1945, Coventry mourned 380 of her citizens who had died as a result of German bombing raids, and 100 acres of their city lay in ruins. A tragedy of enormous proportions which was nevertheless to pale into relative insignificance when compared with the results of bombing raids on German cities by allied bombers.

For every Briton killed by German bombs, no less than nine Germans were killed by allied bombs. In the demilitarised city of Dresden, an estimated 135,000 people, mostly civilian refugees, were slaughtered in allied bombing raids in just 24 hours. And for no purpose other than sheer bloodlust. That beautiful city which contributed very little to the German war effort was virtually removed from the face of the earth. It was a crime of such magnitude that one of Great Britain’s most eminent Socialists, R.H.S. Crossman, described it as: “The long-suppressed story of the worst massacre in the history of the world.”

He went on to say: “The devastation of Dresden in February 1945 was one of those crimes against humanity whose authors would have been arraigned at Nuremberg if that court had not been perverted.”³

Equally horrendous were the earlier attacks on Hamburg. In ten terrible days from 24 July to 3 August 1943 British bombers reduced to rubble more than 6,000 acres of Hamburg. During those ten awesome days, an estimated 100,000 people lost their lives. When a thousand-year-old city of 2,000,000 souls is incinerated in just a few days with the loss of so many lives, what affect does it have on survivors? An official German document states: “For weeks afterwards, eyewitnesses were unable to report without succumbing to their nerves and weeping hysterically. They would try to speak, then would break down and cry: ‘I can’t stand seeing it again; I can’t stand it!’”

Many weeks later, a woman who did survive was interviewed. She had still not recovered from the experience: “I saw people killed by falling bricks and heard the screams of others dying in the fire. I dragged my best friend from a burning building and she died in my arms. I saw others who went stark mad. The shock to the nerves and the soul, one can never erase.” The Police President of Hamburg reported: “Its horror is revealed in the howling and raging of the firestorms, the hellish noise of exploding bombs and the death cries of martyred human beings as well as the big silence after the raids. Speech is impotent to portray the measure of the horror, which shook the people for ten days and nights and the traces of which were written indelibly on the face of the city and its inhabitants.

“No flight of imagination will ever succeed in measuring and describing the gruesome scenes of horror in the many buried air raid shelters. Posterity can only bow its head in honour of the fate of these innocents, sacrificed by the murderous lust of a sadistic enemy.”

Martin Caidin, one of the world’s leading authorities on military science subjects, who was a high-ranking U.S. Government official expert on bombing effects and author of many related books, described the bombing of Hamburg as: “Standing out as the worst of the disasters visited upon civilisation during the insanity of the Second World War.”⁴

As National Socialist Germany’s second largest city, Hamburg was a natural target for allied bombing raids. The shame attached to ‘Operation Gomorrah’ was that it far exceeded that which was necessary to paralyse the city’s contribution to Germany’s war effort. ‘Gomorrah’ was the code name given to the plan to incinerate Hamburg in 1943.

Hamburg was a Hanseatic city that straddled the beautiful River Alster immortalised by many songs and ballads and in particular, by the ‘Moonlight on the Alster’ waltz. Perhaps its most endearing feature was its medieval half-timbered Elizabethan-style houses that attracted tourists from all over the world. Sadly, this feature made it also attractive to the allied war lords who reasoned that such a city would burn easier and offer more potential victims per square mile. The method devised for the total destruction of Hamburg was simple, and as we shall see, was extremely effective. The first waves of bombers would release thousands of high-explosive bombs on the city which would keep the population, and especially the fire service, in their shelters. Then, the subsequent raids would rain down magnesium bombs. It has been conservatively estimated that during those ten days, Hamburg was struck by 1,200 landmines, 30,000 heavy high-explosive bombs, and 3,000,000 stick incendiary bombs. In addition to this, perhaps the most macabre weapon devised by mankind, the phosphorous bomb, was deemed suitable for dropping on a city’s civilian population. Eighty thousand of these 100-pound phosphorous bombs were dropped, plus 500 phosphorous canisters, and 500 phosphorous incendiaries. The affect that this type of weapon had on civilians is one of the worst nightmares to emerge from the 2nd World War, as we shall later see.

A CITY DIGS IN

As might be expected of a German National Socialist city, no effort was spared to make the city as safe as possible from air attack. It was perhaps the best protected city in Europe from an air attack point of view. The Police President of Hamburg wrote: “The fate of our cities in the Ruhr district and on the Rhine was a warning. None of the experience gained there was disregarded. The plainly increasing intensity of the war in the air led to an acceleration of tempo in the constant development of air protection measures which finally reached the limit of possibility.” There was total mobilisation of all resources and there was no shortage of volunteers. Men, women, and even children worked ceaselessly to make their city safe. Equipment was kept in tip-top condition and always at hand. A massive air raid shelter construction program was begun and the authorities assisted civilians in building air raid shelters in homes and factories. The same authorities saw to it that the city’s hospitals, government buildings, schools, administrative and police buildings were likewise catered for.

Predicting conditions in which every drop of water would be more precious than gold itself, a program was started that would revolutionise the entire water system in and around the city. All open waters were requisitioned. At the city’s harbour and canal systems were built special ramps, approaches and platforms to enable easy access. Wherever possible, water storage systems were built. Streams and rivers were dammed and all lakes and ponds in the area were cleaned out, enlarged and made deeper. Even sewers were used for the piping of water to those areas in need.

Nothing was overlooked. Swimming pools, rain water tanks, industrial cooling tanks, wells, empty oil storage tanks; even the water tanks in the laboratory of Hamburg’s Experimental Ship Construction Institute were used. If it is true that necessity is the father of invention, Hamburg’s preparation was the proof of it. When all such measures had been taken, the mobilised city looked to other ways and means by which water could be stored. The cellars of two wrecked buildings were cleaned out and the shells used as reservoirs. Seven thousand private wells were catalogued and 52 private wells on industrial premises were linked to the general system. Firms like oil companies, breweries which used especially constructed fluid carrying vehicles were also utilised. Rarely in the history of mankind has an entire population mobilised to defend itself better than Hamburg’s did. No matter how small and seemingly insignificant, nothing was overlooked. All vital targets were camouflaged, smoke-screen generators were placed where needed. All inflammable material was removed unless it was absolutely necessary. All attics were cleared of any material of an inflammable nature by lawful edict and all homes were liable to spot checks to ensure that defensive measures were being complied with.

By the time that all possible defensive measures had been completed, it was impossible to improve upon them. Hardly a single person, regardless of age or sex, wasn’t involved in some aspect of defence. Caidin wrote that civil defence training and activities in the city of Hamburg attained an almost unbelievable level of co-ordination and efficiency.

The people were totally mobilised as fire-watchers, air raid wardens, rescue teams and voluntary firemen, labour gangs, evacuation crews, medical teams and messengers. In addition to those measures, neighbourhood assistance programs were started as were self-help groups. When the holocaust was to be visited upon these people, it could never be said that their idleness had contributed to their tragedy.

In his official report, the Police President of Hamburg wrote: “A greater state of readiness in the Air Protection Service was not possible. On the material side – bearing in mind existing conditions – the limit had been reached. On the side of personnel and organisation, not only had the legal regulations been fulfilled and even surpassed, but among the entire Hamburg population there was a readiness for defence and a spirit that was bound to surmount any test. Difficulties of a bureaucratic nature, which in a modern state, with a mass of necessary authorities as a rule unavoidable, practically did not arise in Hamburg. Collaboration on all sides, in the spirit of a true National Socialist community was so exemplary that at least one prerequisite for successfully meeting the severest ordeal by fire was assured.”⁵

Throughout June of 1943, and halfway through July, Hitler’s Germany withstood ceaseless and relentless waves of bombers, both American and British. During the day, the skies over Germany were darkened by U.S. Airforce bombers and the night skies were filled with Britain’s R.A.F. bombers. Little regard was paid to the likely victims of bombs dropped indiscriminately. Indeed. the allies had already decided that civilians, even refugees, were not only legitimate targets but in some cases, preferable targets.

Prime Minister Chamberlain, before he was ousted by the Churchill clique, had been quite adamant on the matter of bombing civilians. He had said that such a policy “was absolutely contrary to international law.” And he had given the assurance that: “The British Government would never resort to the deliberate attack on women and children for purposes of mere terrorism.”

Winston Churchill had no such scruples and was a principal party to the most appalling acts of mass murder which included the strafing of women and children refugees as they fled from their burning cities, or before the Red Army’s raping Asiatic hordes.⁶

Churchill’s premiership was accompanied by a new war policy in which it was decided that at whatever cost, Hitler’s National Socialist Germany must be unconditionally and totally destroyed and the means used must have little or no regard for long-established rules of warfare. Indeed, it could be safely said that in this, Churchill overturned rules of war that had endured for more than 1,000 years of European history.

What was to take place was carefully hidden from the British and American public. Even making allowance for propaganda-fed wartime hysteria, the iniquitous conspirators knew that ordinary folk would never stand for mass murder on such a scale. Outrage and revulsion would curb excessive bloodlust. The Labour M.P. Richard Crossman, who in 1964 became Minister for Housing in Harold Wilson’s government, spoke severely of the screen of lies that was set up to deceive the public on the terror-bombing of Germany. “One of the most unhealthy features of the bombing offensive was that the War Cabinet – and in particular the Secretary for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, felt it necessary to repudiate publicly the orders which they themselves had given to Bomber Command.”

Nothing illustrates the cover up more than events which resulted from questions raised by Richard Stokes M.P. in the House of Commons on 6 March 1945. He had demanded to know the truth about a report that originated at Supreme Allied Headquarters in Paris which had gloatingly described the terror-bombing of the refugee-crowded city of Dresden. This particular report had been widely published in the United States, and broadcast on Paris Radio. But the official censor in Britain had suppressed its publication presumably as a result of the indignant protests it had already aroused.

Mr Stokes had insisted on being told, “Is terror-bombing now part of our policy? Why is it that the people of this country who are supposed to be responsible for what is going on, are the only people who may not know what is being done in their name? On the other hand, if terror-bombing be not part of our policy, why was this statement put out at all? I think we shall live to rue the day we did this, and that it [the raid on Dresden] will stand for all time as a blot on our escutcheon.”⁷

It is interesting to note also that whilst Members of Parliament of all political persuasions – including Government Ministers, were extolling the virtues of Britain’s working class, Professor Frederick Lindemann, Churchill’s closest advisor, was getting his own way in demanding that Bomber Command’s saturation bombing raids be concentrated on working-class areas of Germany because this would yield a much higher kill-rate per ton of explosives. Working-class houses were built much closer together. British High Command reasoned that if German workers were kept busy burying their wives and children, industrial output would drop.⁸ It would be difficult if not downright impossible to imagine a more monstrous inhuman callousness than this. And it is the most dreadful irony that Churchill’s first scientific advisor and his bloodthirsty sycophants were proved wrong in the end. One can only imagine why Churchill selected Lindemann to be his first advisor when scientifically his record was of persistent failure.

Who can know the state of mind of those who were by now directing the British war machine? Although it is beyond the comprehension of rational human beings, hindsight and hitherto unknown facts suggest that Churchill and the other War Lords were caught up in a vortex of satanic bloodshed. In 1953, H.M. Stationary Office published the first volume of a work entitled The Royal Air Force, 1939-1945. In the relevant volume, The Fight at Odds, which was officially commissioned and based throughout on official documents which had been approved by the Air Ministry Historical Branch, the author Mr Dennis Richards stated: “The primary purpose of these raids was to goad the Germans into undertaking reprisal raids of a similar character on Britain. Such raids would arouse intense indignation in Britain against Germany and so create a war psychosis without which it is impossible to carry on a modern war.”⁹

It would appear that the British people were beginning to tire of what was clearly a European civil war over matters which were of no interest or concern of Britain’s, and that Churchill’s War Cabinet was determined to goad the Germans into attacking Britain’s civilian population to put some fight into them.

At this time also, Stalin’s Communist Russia was reeling from the Wehrmacht’s onslaught as Hitler’s Germany sought to remove the menace of world communism once and for all. Stalin was in a blind panic which was increased by the knowledge that he could no longer count on the Red Army to defend his slave empire. Wherever the victorious German Army appeared, they were regarded as saviours liberating Russia and its vassal states from their Communist rulers. Tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers were joining Hitler’s legions and the counter-revolution was sweeping all before it. Russian cities, largely undefended by cowed populations, fell to the German Armies and Stalin, Churchill’s comrade-in-arms loudly condemned Winston for not doing enough to draw the Germans off. With Georgian cunning, Stalin reasoned that German bombers could not attack Kiev while they were attacking Coventry. German bombers and fighter planes could not be in two places at the same time. In Stalin’s twisted mind, Russia was making all the sacrifices and Churchill had to be leaned on to draw the German armed forces off.

J. M. Spaight, the Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry, later wrote in his book Bombing Vindicated: “It gave Coventry and Birmingham, Sheffield and Southampton, the right to look Kiev and Kharkov, Stalingrad and Sebastopol, in the face. Our Soviet allies would have been less critical of our inactivity if they had understood what we had done.”

The facts are beyond dispute. German bombers were, in the words of this authoritative official source, invited to bomb Britain’s cities to relieve pressure on Russia’s cities. A British housewife’s life in exchange for a Russian woman’s life. It is true and fair to say that a further reason for the Germans being goaded into attacking British cities was to relieve pressure on British airfields but in general, the Luftwaffe’s bombers that attacked British cities had not been used to a great extent for attacking British airfields.

The air attacks on German cities increased and had become a regular feature of German life. But abruptly on the morning of 15 July 1943, the skies over Germany became clear of bombers. An eerie silence settled over the entire German nation. The absence of the incessant drone from the sky was unfamiliar and Germans looked wonderingly at each other as they emerged from their cellars and air raid shelters. There was even talk that a secret peace agreement had been signed. This profound silence was to last ten days and there was good reason for it. The allies were preparing for ‘Operation Gomorrah.’

THE HOLOCAUST BEGINS

As 24 July 1943 came to an end and the sun slipped down behind the western horizon, the scents and sounds of another English summer’s day were submerged by the activities surrounding events as nearly 800 heavy bombers were made ready for declaring war on a great city. Over 5,000 British airmen, pilots, co-pilots, bombardiers and navigators, radio operators and gunners were preparing to take part in the first assault wave of an air armada that in ten days would erase from the face of the earth one of European oldest and loveliest cities.

As darkness descended, English airfields vibrated to the roar of nearly 4,000 of the most powerful air engines devised by man. Each bomber was being positioned for a long nose-to-tail lumbering take-off. The engines screamed on full throttle while pilots checked their instruments. Their brakes stayed firmly on while the pilots waited for the signal to go. Finally it was given and the brakes were released. The bombers; Lancasters and Halifaxes sluggishly moved down the runways trying to pick up speed yet handicapped by huge bomb loads.

In each, everything had been sacrificed to enable them to carry the heaviest possible bomb load and incendiary devices. The Lancaster could carry a bomb load of seven tons. In weight, that is the equivalent of a double-decker bus. It could carry monstrous bombs weighing several tons each. The Halifax likewise could carry a bomb load of seven tons and cruise at a speed of 230 miles per hour. On the ground the bombers were cumbersome, although the sense of their power was overwhelming as these monster aircraft lurched awkwardly down the runways. It was an awesome spectacle. Each of the aircraft’s four propellers chewed hungrily at the air, dragging the reluctant fuselage along and slowly increasing its speed until 60 to 70 miles per hour was reached. Then, each tail slowly started to lift as the pressure of air increased beneath the aircraft. Finally, the wheels grudgingly left the tarmac and became airborne, and the bombers clawed to increase their height.

This air armada of nearly 1,000 bombers took their bearings from English coasts and then as one they headed out over the North Sea towards Germany. Leading the pack were the Pathfinders – a corps d’elite made up of the most experienced and skilled crews. In the armada itself were 51 bombers that would not take part in the attack on Hamburg. They were decoys. They were to break off from the main body to swing towards other coastal areas as a ploy to confuse the German defences. As they did so, these bombers and others too would release thousands of strips of tinfoil called ‘window’ and these would appear on German radar screens as enemy aircraft to cause further confusion. German fighter planes directed by ground control units would search the skies vainly for a non-existent enemy. By the time they realised that the British are attacking Hamburg, it would be too late for them to do anything about it. They would find that the earth beneath the air armada had been torn apart and that a large section of their homeland had become a sea of flames.

During the day, Hamburg’s citizens had already been inconvenienced by two false air raid alarms but when the sirens start screaming again at 24 minutes past midnight, they dutifully went once more to their air raid shelters. The silence of the night was broken again at 33 minutes past midnight and moments later, the urgent shrieking of the warnings was drowned out by the roar of nearly 1,000 bombers. Already the first deadly rain of landmines, high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices was falling on the city. All hell broke loose and no words can adequately convey the awesome spectacle that unfolded before the eyes of people watching from the safety of small towns beyond Hamburg itself.

The clean night air of summer was broken by countless flickering, wavering searchlights as they stabbed at the darkness seeking an airborne enemy for the flak guns to aim at. The combined noise of the air armada, air raid sirens, and anti-aircraft guns firing made speech impossible. The din on the ears was enough to make some people lose their senses. The darkness of the night sky, now broken by the searchlights and the jogged bursts of flak was lightened by a more ominous glow as bombs struck the city and incendiaries thudded through houses and buildings setting them ablaze.

The flames spread through the city as the very air itself throbbed to the drumming roar of hundreds and hundreds of heavy bombers overhead. Smoke started to rise from the city; first as many hundreds of individual columns but soon to become one column of cloying, choking gases. Beneath this black shroud, flames danced. Some were hundreds of feet high, swirling from building to building. Shock waves from the falling bombs could be felt running through the ground several miles away. As onlookers watched from a safe distance and the horizon became a sea of flickering flames, they were mesmerised by the awesome sight. Their minds became numbed by the horror that unfolded before them for they knew that in those flames, thousands of their fellow countrymen, including women and children, were being done to death.

For the city’s German defenders, the misery was increased, for against the swirling clouds of tinfoil being dropped by the bombers, their searchlights and their anti-aircraft guns were virtually useless. Ground defences were thrown into turmoil for both searchlights and anti-aircraft guns were radar controlled. The apparatus which normally guides the searchlight beams and gun sights to their targets had seemingly become deranged. The apparatus reported bombers where there weren’t any. The beams of light wandered aimlessly, stabbing uselessly in all directions. Far above the confusion, a bomber’s pilot reported exultantly: “They waved aimlessly in every direction. It was a beautiful sight to see.”

WHEN SATAN RULED, GOD WEPT

In Hamburg itself, the fire defences were completely overwhelmed. Bomber Harris’s prediction was coming true and the old dry timbered medieval sections of the city were ablaze from one end of the city to the other. High-explosive bombs had smashed water mains and firemen looked on helplessly as the flames leapt from building to building. The noise was beyond all previous experience. Every explosive device known to man was pouring down on the city. The sound smashed the ears, it stunned the brain. People, terrified out of their wits, succumbed to violent spasms and shaking. From all quarters could be heard shouts; and above the shouts, the shrieks of pain, madness, agony, terror, anguish and horror. It was not until twelve hours after the Lancasters and Halifaxes had left that the full horror was gauged. The city’s officials were appalled at the numbers killed for during that two and a half hours attack, 1,500 citizens of Hamburg had been killed and many times that number mutilated and maimed beyond all practical help.

All gas, water, electricity mains had been destroyed. Devastation was everywhere. The world famous Hagenbeck Zoo had been totally destroyed and pieces of animals were scattered in the area.

The radio operators in the Lancasters and Halifaxes were beside themselves with glee as they listened on their radios to the confused shouts on the German radio waves as for two and a half hours, their bombers poured 2,396 tons of bombs onto the stricken city below. The first air raid was terrifying in the extreme to the people of Hamburg. Large parts of their city were in flames and the suburb of Barbeck on the left bank of the Alster was almost completely destroyed. The suburbs of Hoheluft, Elmsbuttel and Altona, and the inner city too were likewise desolated. They had no way of knowing that pro-Zionist Winston Churchill had embarked on a coldly calculated policy of wiping Hamburg and as many of its citizens as possible off the face of the earth, that the night’s horrifying event was just an appetiser for Bomber Command and that in ten days time, their city would be no more, that it would resemble nothing more or less than a desert of bomb craters and crumbling shells of burned out buildings.

That night’s bombing was just a grim foretaste of what was yet to come. For perhaps the first time in the history of mankind, one European nation was to utilise technological advantage to raze to the ground whole cities without any thought of sparing the inhabitants, innocent or otherwise. This is terror-bombing designed for no other purpose but to instil in a population a boundless fear, a mindless terror. What the Red Army could do with barbaric Asiatic hordes, the Western allies could do with bomber armadas.

When the dawn came a nightmare was revealed. A thick yellow mantle of chemical dust overhung the city and fires bellowed smoke and fumes to add to it. People were in a state of severe shock. Others appeared at first to be rational and composed until one looked into their eyes, which mirrored the horrors they had seen. Of these people, thousands wandered away over the ruins and out of the city hardly knowing or caring where their faltering steps took them. They were hardly clear of the city when behind them, they heard the sirens screaming once more. It was then twenty minutes to three in the afternoon and the bombs began to fall once more on the paralysed, terrorised city. This time it was the U.S. Air Force. To them the days, to the R.A.F., the nights.

The following 48 hours were broken by repeated air raid warnings, feints and minor bombing attacks. And then, on the night of 27 July, an attack was to come that would mortally wound this great city of north Germany.

It began at twenty-four minutes to midnight and the scream of thousands of bombs ripped the night apart. The sound of high-velocity bombs to people sheltering from them can only be likened to that of an express train screaming through one’s home. The sky, had it been light, would have been darkened anyway by the awe-inspiring phalanx of 1,000 bombers in perfect formation, pouring across the city’s skies in a never-ending train of destruction. Only fifteen minutes after this first onslaught, Hamburg was finished. There was no need to wreak further damage. Industry had come to a halt, the docks were useless, the people were incapable of helping the war effort. To all intents and purposes, the city of Hamburg as a going concern had ceased to exist. It had become a flaming inferno from one end to the other. The only differences worth commenting on were that some parts of the city were totally destroyed, others partially devastated but all normal life or anything approaching it had ended.

The fires were so intense that an entire house would disappear as completely and as quickly as would a piece of paper thrown onto a fire burning in a grate at home. Within thirty minutes of the first attack, two out of every three buildings in an area of six square miles were burning. Yet the bombers continued to empty their cargoes of death on the stricken city. The most heavily populated area of Hamburg was doomed.

There was no wind in Hamburg that night but the fires created their own wind. Hamburg was a city that was dead except for the intense flickering of flames and ignited gases. That which remained of the terrified population was underground: sheltering and knowing that exposure on the streets would almost certainly result in a quick and horrible death. The heat was so intense that phenomena previously unknown to man began to occur. Parts of buildings simply burst into flames although no flame had been near them. Flames, hundreds of feet in length, danced and waved in the air unattached to any combustible material. Pockets of air heated to incredible density exploded.

It became possible to see air moving. The flames of the doomed city needed oxygen and the breeze feeding the fires became a stiff wind wafting through the avenues and streets leading into the city. As a million flames embraced and became one in a multi-mile inferno, the winds became gales and partially destroyed buildings began to collapse in the fast-moving streams of air. Flaming wreckage was picked up and hurled through streets and into the city itself. Never in the history of man have such scenes been witnessed. Balls of fire were leaping into the air and exploding.

Gales shrieked as the countryside surrounding the mutilated city was starved of air. It began to look as though the very skies above Hamburg were on fire. For the tens of thousands of lost-souls in their air raid shelter sanctuaries, escape was hopeless. The condition outside of their shelters were such that survival could be measured in minutes if not moments. They sealed the doors tight and bolted themselves inside little knowing that they had sealed their own tombs and that they would never again set eyes on their city. There was no escape but some did try. They were totally unprepared for what they were to see. The neighbourhood that they had known all their lives had disappeared. Greeting them was an unrecognisable flaming desert. Roads had disappeared under rubble and here and there, charred corpses lay in grotesque positions. Having ventured out into the searing heat of the blistering city, they became bewildered and panic-stricken, stumbling through avenues of debris, blinded by fumes, gasping for air until they collapsed through a combination of heat, smoke and terror.

And the worst was yet to come.

HAMBURG IS NO MORE

Hamburg presented a vision of what the inner-earth must look like, or the fiery wastes of the sun’s surface. The sounds of the screaming winds competed with the deafening crackle of thousands of fires. Explosions filled the air and tar on the roads became liquid, rippling and moving slowly. It was a sight never before seen by man and in terms of lives lost and buildings damaged, far exceeded the damage done to atom-bombed Nagasaki. In such heat as this, everything, literally everything, burned. Gases vomited from stricken buildings. 

Super-heated gases travelling at incredible velocity seared the skies as high as the earth’s troposphere, an incredible 40,000 feet above the city itself. Still the bombers came and the pillar of twisting smoke and gases reached five miles higher than the bombers themselves. This was a firestorm.

The air above Hamburg was pure flame. Six square miles of Hamburg had become engulfed in the world’s greatest fire and merely looking at the blinding heat and light could terrorise and destroy the mind. There were no longer any individual blazes and the winds relentlessly feeding the flames were sucked in at higher and higher speeds. Even out in the suburbs it was like no ordinary wind. Such winds as we all experience each day of our lives swirl in eddies and gusts. They blow this way at one corner, another way at the next corner. But these winds showed no variation in direction or speed. The wind flowed into the city at a constant speed. During the early stages these winds had reached forty and then fifty miles per hour.

Ninety minutes after the first bombs fell, trees on the outskirts of the city were beginning to lose their leaves. It was as though some giant supernatural vacuum cleaner was sucking them off. Small branches were snapped off and the natural debris of the streets was picked up as though by some unseen hand and swirled away, bouncing off the shells of buildings but always sucked in one direction. Outside the city’s perimeter, tens of thousands of people had gathered to witness that which no man had witnessed before them. A whole city had become a throbbing inferno of intense heat. They watched as a column of flame a mile wide reached the inner limits of space. This surely was a night when God wept!

The winds reached supernatural speeds and far exceeded tornado or hurricane velocities. It flattened flames. It turned the city into one gigantic flame thrower or blow torch. Flames many hundreds of feet long were caught in the blast of wind and seared through streets where thousands of people still huddled in the open, hiding behind partly demolished walls, cowering in alleys. These unfortunates were incinerated and their shrieks of terror and pain mingled and were lost in the screaming wind and crackling firestorm. It will never be known how many such people simply disappeared as though they had never walked the earth. Not even a few charred bones marked their presence on earth. It is estimated that the winds feeding the blazing city reached speeds as high as 150 miles per hour, maybe more. This is twice that of hurricane force and at such speeds, trees three feet in diameter were sucked out of the ground and hurled into the flames.

For those of us whose knowledge of fire is limited to our experience of man-made controllable ones, such heat as was generated in the firestorm of Hamburg is beyond all comprehension. The temperatures reached 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit. At such temperatures, lead becomes a bubbling fluid as liquid as water itself. Balks of wood simply explode without necessarily coming in contact with flame. Metal, rubber, and glass melts.

The fire – for the city was literally a fire – threw flames three miles up into the sky and its gases reached as high again and more. It was a sight so spectacular and horrifying that the well known effect of an atom-bomb explosion becomes relatively lesser. As the fire’s superheated gases boiled upwards, they passed through a stratum of cold air high above the city. The debris in the soaring flames and smoke attracted moisture and caused a meteorological reaction. The natural elements combined to reject the debris which was transformed and fell to the earth once more in big greasy black rain blobs.

For those still trapped in the city there could be no escape but being human, many tried. Some judged that it was better to attempt escape through the blazing streets than to take their chances in the stifling heat of the oxygen-deprived shelters. Perhaps they had been deceived by seeing an acre or two of relative calm, minor crackling fires Such areas were as deceptive as the calm eye of a hurricane storm. Rushing out into the streets, they would soon run into a wall of flame. Retreating, some would look for another way and perish whilst others realising the hopelessness of their situation would stagger back to their shelter’s door. Battering uselessly on the door for admission as the flames licked around the corner and down basement steps, their twitching bodies were consumed by the flames.

For those in the shelters the heat became unbearable. They gasped for air uselessly. Some fainted and weaker, especially older people, had heart seizures. Children became hysterical and mothers were out of their minds with fear and horror. They had only one overwhelming urge and that was to flee and they did so, ripping open doors and rushing blindly into the heat-seared streets. There was no escape. They were doomed.

Firebrands coined down on them. The air was filled with choking gases and whirling embers of fire. One might as well try to dodge raindrops in a thunderstorm. The blazing firebrands stuck to clothing and to flesh and mothers, their children – and children who had lost their parents – ran screaming through the blazing streets. Such was the heat that as they ran, many simply burst into flame. They beat madly at their hair, their eyes, or whatever parts of the body was on fire and they ran in directions that no longer had any meaning or purpose. Out of their minds, they staggered, often running blindly into walls. They would stumble, pick themselves up and run a few more feet and the least fortunate ones lost their reason and became demented in their final moments. Others burst into flames. Some, beside themselves, dashed unseeing into fires and many just ran until they could run no further and collapsed to fall twitching in the bubbling street tar.

These is no cause in the world save that of Satanism which justifies the horror that was callously inflicted upon Hamburg during that ten day period. It was more than a blot on Britain’s coat of arms. It was a reminder that in mankind dwells the devil himself as well as the Lord, and that the arbiter between the two is our own conscience.

When innocent people and in particular, children, become an enemy to be disposed of using the most refined methods of torture, then whatever cause is championed is degraded. It no longer serves idealism or freedom once evil is recruited as an ally. There are many people motivated by high and noble ideals who will become so enslaved by those ideals that they lose all claim to nobility or even humanity. They will commit any crime, sell their souls to the devil to see victory theirs. Those who declare war on children declare war on God, and in Hamburg that night, and in tens of other German cities, children suffered as children have never suffered before.

Corpses found in the shelters. Most likely carbon monoxide was the killer: the increasing heat afterwards blackened the bodies.

Of the children during those dreadful nights, what can be said? Their fright became horror and then panic when their tiny minds became capable of grasping the fact that their parents could no longer help them in their distress. As Martin Caidin surmised, they lost their reason and an overwhelming terror took over. Their world had become the shrieking centre of an erupting volcano from which there could be no physical escape. Nothing that hell offered could be feared more. By the hand of man they became creatures, human in form but not in mind. Strangled noises issued from them as they staggered pitifully through the streets in which tar and asphalt ran as streams. Some of these tiny creatures ran several hundred feet. Others managed only twenty, maybe ten feet. Their shoes caught fire and their feet, the lower parts of their legs became flickering sticks of flame. Here were Joan of Arcs... thousands of them. All who had perished unjustly on the fires of the Middle Ages were as nothing when compared with what was happening this night. The sounds of many were unintelligible and undoubtedly many more called for their- parents from whom they were parted by death or by accident. They grasped their tortured limbs, their tiny burning legs until they were no longer able to stand or run. And then they would crash to the ground where they would writhe in the bubbling tar until death released them from physical misery.

How I wish that this were nothing more than sensational writing. These are not my words but a descriptive account by Martin Caidin who as an academic is not given to sensationalising emotive subjects. In his book The Night Hamburg Died he describes how “the fire instantly embraces them in curling tongues, sets aflame their clothes, their hair and their skin, rushes into their mouths and burns out their tongues even as they scream soundlessly from throats already blackening, already steaming with the evaporation of the body liquids.” Oh, what a price is paid for national self-righteousness. But for whom does the till ring?

There was no end to the horror. For those on the streets still, heat was a constant goad to movement and move they did until they too were consumed by the flames and heat. Those who were destined to escape were tragically few. Deprived of shelters for many reasons, thousands of civilians ran without reason or direction and as they did so, superheated air rushed past tongues that had become swollen and blackened. Air passages to the lungs rasped through having become as crisp and dry as leather bellows. Lungs seemed to explode agonisingly with each tortured breath. Imagine the horror of those last to die in such groups. They dashed in a frenzy along open spaces and in front of them, a man, a woman, a child burst into flames. 

WATER, SWEET WATER

Hamburg is a city that has its fair share of waterways, canals and dock basins, and thousands of people sought a watery refuge. They sought salvation in the waters grown brackish that ran in threads through their city. Those who had survived the fiery streets threw themselves into such waters even as the heat seared their flesh; a heat that had already scorched their hair and often their clothes from their bodies. The strongest made it to the middle, to the deeper waters where for hours they trod water dipping their heads repeatedly under the surface to escape the heat of the air. There were many who were unable to swim or were too weak to do so. They would go as deep as they could, standing on their toes and immersing themselves to their chins and they too would constantly duck their heads under the water to escape the unbelievable heat. Still the bombers came in waves.

Despite such efforts, many in the water continued to die from the heat. Large portions of the exposed skin on their faces and necks grew red and swollen, blistered and burst. Eyeballs stood out from their sockets. Great water blisters appeared and burst unfelt and the ruptured folds of skin slithered down raw faces and into gasping mouths. In such ways did countless European civilians die: Men, their wives and sweethearts, their mothers, their children.

Yes, it was the children who suffered most of all. It might be said with much truth that the world’s most renowned writers of horror fiction have never exceeded in descriptions of horrific events, the horror that was visited upon these unfortunate waifs of war. Parents retained a semblance of sanity only through the instinct to keep their children alive. “The children, save the children! Oh God, let them survive!”

It is an instinct that transcends all others and is just as total when all hope is lost and that night, even God had been driven out of Hamburg. That night, the city belonged to Satan.

Standing neck deep in the canals and waterways of burning Hamburg, parents – mostly mothers – held their children aloft so they would not drown. But it was not enough. Their super-human efforts were no match for the horrific events that surrounded them. They kept raising and lowering their children so that the heat did not flay their young skins. They suffered terribly and were unable to even cry out. They gasped for breath when they were pushed under the water; sucking and spluttering they vomited and gasped in the heat when raised above the water. Their hair that so recently had been lovingly combed and cared for steamed and streamed in the heat. Their tongues became swollen and they could not cry out. Only moans and sobs tortured their tormented parents.

For how long did their parents’ strength sustain them? Their energy was depleted, their muscles ached and grew weaker and finally they would subside beneath the water, no longer able to struggle against such overwhelming odds. Their children, left to flounder in the water, weak and terrified into insanity would thrash wildly in the water as an instinctive reaction against drowning.

As the hours passed, more and more bodies floated on the surface. Infants, older children, their mothers and fathers, grandparents. As the corpses floated in the brackenish waters, the clothing still above the surface steamed and then burst into flames as did any visible tufts of hair. The floating cadavers had become burning rafts of horror. Caidin writes: “The corpses are partially alive with flame. Mostly buried, the exposed skin becomes bloated and bursts open in great watery pimples. The skin shrivels and peels and shows the redness beneath. But at least these dead are beyond physical pain...

“Who has been to hell and returned, and can describe the ultimate in horror heaped upon horror? There are those in the waters who suffer indescribable tortures. They remain standing, constantly dousing their pain-wracked faces and necks. Terror and fatigue exert their toll and finally they lack the strength to remain afloat. They stand or half-float in the water while the burning debris spewed into the waters by the fires that surrounded them, float into their faces and sparks stab at their eyes. Tortured by pain, seeking only the sweet oblivion of death, they try to drown themselves and still the bombers roar overhead. They are dropping bombs on top of bombs. They are cratering craters. They are mutilating those who are already mutilated. They are bombing the dead. They are bombing a mortuary. It is as though the bombers no longer have control of themselves but are in the grip of some monstrous force.”

Caidin describes the scenes of horror in which thousands of people lost their lives. He describes relatives screaming for one another as they become separated and lost forever. Many of the fleeing refugees wrap themselves in wet blankets or soak their clothes but live long enough only to become insane from the visions of the horrors that survive them. Even in these cases, the clothes steam, grow dry and finally burst into flames. The tortured demented souls fling themselves on the ground, thrashing and flinging themselves about, their feet drumming in agony, their hands clutching at their faces in self inflicted unknowing pain. And then they are still and no more.

In the midst of so much carnage, there is the shrieking wind feeding the inferno. It is so powerful that it tugs and pulls at partially destroyed buildings until their walls collapse. Huge balks of timber, debris of all sorts is dragged by screaming winds along streets in flames. Imagine the horror as those alive fling their arms around trees to save themselves from being sucked along by the wind only to feel the tree that they clutch being itself torn from the ground. It is no exaggeration to describe events in which men, women and children, already burning alive, being swept helplessly along roads, caught up in the clutching fingers of wind and hurled bodily into the flames. They were as helpless as dried autumn leaves floating on the eddying winds that surround a bonfire.

HELL ON EARTH

Through 2,000 years of Christianity, the world’s most imaginative and inspired artists have depicted hell as they have imagined it in all of its horror. Yet each description leaves us unmoved once compared with such events as these. As bombers roared overhead and winds far beyond hurricane force screamed about them, thousands of survivors pressed towards canals and waterways that were already filled with doomed souls. There was no room in the waters for more yet still they came on, pressed forward by the fires behind them. The people in the canals standing and floating shoulder to shoulder screamed at those on the banks to stay there. They may just as well have screamed at the flames for the hordes of terrified people who pressed forward had no choice. To stop would have denied life to themselves, their families, their children. They plunged into the waters, their feet and arms striking those already there. Some were suffocated or drowned in the pressing assault of half-mad human beings. Wedged like sticks, they burned, suffocated and died yet still the crowds pressed forward until what had once been a canal became a snake of sorts that squirmed and wriggled between blazing buildings. Of those who still survived, many did so at the expense of weaker ones whose bodies were now beneath their feet and all around them in the turgid waters. In the shallows, the heaped mounds of corpses burned with bluish flickering flames yet even there life remained as occasionally, a mound would feebly jerk.

This was Hamburg experiencing the ultimate in barbarism, in wanton savagery that arguably had no precedent in the history of mankind.

It is impossible to imagine, let alone document each individual private horror. Merely touching the surface of events is depressing enough. Children were torn shrieking from the parents’ arms by the wind. They were flung head over heels, tumbling crazily down burning roads and into the infernos while their demented mothers half-ran, half-dragged after them. People are sent physically reeling as unseen fists of exploding air currents slam them in all directions. After the holocaust was over, one could still see the finger marks in the roads where people, out of their minds with terror, had clutched the road’s surface to save themselves from being swept up in the wind’s tidal race. Frantically, they attempted to save themselves from being incinerated alive. Their mouths were open but they were unable to scream out and their eyes appealed with animal pain. Their attempts to save themselves were useless against a wind that picked up cars and trucks as though they were toys, and hurled them into the all-consuming inferno.

In the shelters, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people suffered a different but no less horrifying fate as the world blazed above them. In many cases, no flames ever did touch them but they died all the same. Nobody survived the firestorm area. Not a man, woman or child. The entire area was sterilised. Not even insects lived through this holocaust.

In these shelters, the huddled, apprehensive and bewildered civilians could only guess at the horrors taking place above them. They sat, dimly aware of others sitting or lying beside them in the darkness, waiting and conserving their ebbing strength. Their breathing became shallow and rapid as the oxygen they needed so much began to disappear. It was feeding the flames above. For some, death came slowly and compared with the deaths of others, pleasantly. It came in the form of slow suffocation. They went to sleep and never awoke. They never knew when their heart stopped beating.

Groups of people, especially families, clung to each other in the blackness or the semi-darkness of their shelters. They embraced. Mothers held their children tightly, murmuring comforting expressions of hope as the raging firestorm shrieked somewhere high above them. Thus they died. Long after the last person had lapsed into the arms of death, the heat continued to rise in the shelters, the subways, the cellars far beneath the burning streets. No flame ever touched them but thick glass bottles grew soft and then melted into shapeless pools of molten fluid. Kitchen tools, knives, forks, pans, melted and formed pools of cloying liquid. The bricks began to glow and burn, throbbing with intense heat until such heat far surpassed the temperatures that had once created them. Finally, they crumbled into dust in these ovens of intense heat. It will be a long time before these shelters are opened again and when they are, men will look upon sights that mankind has never before witnessed, and hopefully. never will again.

Mixed in with the molten glass and metal, they will find hideous mounds of half-human remains. Such mounds are mostly dust or viscous fluid. Such mounds are their fellow citizens. Some of these shelters had to be left alone for as long as two weeks after the holocaust had ended, the heat was so intense. Each day, decontamination crews discovered thousands more corpses to add to their stupefying lists. Counting the bodies was a hopeless task. Some of the shelters had held hundreds of people yet they had disappeared without trace, buried beneath the rubble of collapsed buildings. Often when shelters were opened, workers had to run for their lives. As they opened the shelter’s door, air was sucked into the overheated oxygen-starved interior and the shelter’s interior would explode in flames. Some had to be left many weeks to cool down.

In most of the shelters, the number of corpses could only be guessed at. The bodies had melted into the debris and congealed with mangled, melted glass and iron, and brick turned into mounds of fine dust. Often just a few scorched bones remained: a man’s, a woman’s, a child’s?

The decontamination teams entered some shelters to find lifeless men worsen and children, often in family groups lying as though asleep. In some cases, a family group might be sitting around a table, slumped or sitting just as they had died. It was as though they were asleep. Death had come to them without warning. They had died through carbon monoxide poisoning but the heat had never touched them.

There were yet other shelters where the teams found signs of terror and panic. They discovered people who in their final moments had clawed insanely at walls, or had flung their bodies at walls and pillars. Bodies were frequently found lying in thick pools of greasy black substance which was subsequently found to be melted human fat. All kinds of strange phenomena were discovered as the teams of sickened weary relief workers entered the shelters. They discovered bodies that had been burned to a crisp long after the victim had died. The oxygen allowed in to the shelter by their arrival was all that was needed to cause the cadaver to burst into flames. Other shelters contained only heaps of ash with scattered bone from which it was concluded were the remains of another victim.

IN THE AIR

Modern warfare has reached new levels of barbarism largely because of man’s ingenuity in devising weapons that have results of which the pilot can hardly be aware. Then, as today, the pilot and the plane’s crew where spared the ordeal of witnessing the result of his pressing the fire button. Thomas Kiernan, the American author, described with great clarity a personal tragedy that in itself was so insignificant to the world at large that no more than two or three people witnessed it, and fewer cared to record it. Yet, it effectively explains why old rules of combat and chivalry play no part in modern warfare. He described what happened when an American jet, armed with American weapons and piloted by a Jew, attacked a Palestinian settlement.

“A human figure materialised out of the gloom, an eerie, unintelligible chant issuing from what was once its lips. Stumbling, weaving, then falling to its knees and crawling, it crept towards us. It was a child and its charred skin was literally melting, leaving a trail of viscous fluid in its wake. Its face had no recognisable features. The top of its skull shone through the last layer of scorched membrane on its head. Not more than ten yards from us it fell on its side, its kneecaps exposed like yokes of poached eggs. It twitched once or twice in the dust, gave a final wheeze, and then went still in the puddle of molten flesh that formed around it in the dust.”

“Next to me, Albricht was being sick. I tasted my own vomit in my throat.”

The pilot of the aircraft undoubtedly ate his meal that evening with great relish. He had not seen the result of his day’s work. So it was with Hamburg and sixty other German cities not to mention Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki which between them lost 250,000 people in just three air raids. I am well aware that such a critical view may appear to be partisan but this account concerns itself only with terror-bombing and its consequences. There are many excellent books on bombing as a legitimate act of war but that is something which is quite different and totally different from the policy of saturation bombing for the purpose of terrorising and destroying a civilian population.

The British bombers flew in darkness and rarely saw other aircraft. High in the night skies, each crew was a tiny community fulfilling an unemotional task as best they could do in the dim light of the aircraft’s interior. They saw the flames below but could hardly imagine the scenes of carnage below them. Theirs was a distant, perhaps academic view of events. They knew that the air raid sirens were sounding in the city below when the overhead electric flashes of the city’s tramcars ceased. From a hundred miles off, they could see the flames. From 15,000 feet they could see individual fires but often they were denied the sight of mile after mile of fires because of smoke clouds. However, even pilots far removed from the horrors described knew that what was happening was a completely new and terrible kind of warfare.

One said:

“It was murder in the city. I knew that the firestorms that came later were terrible and unlike anything that had ever happened, but the fires in the city were as had as anything I’d ever seen in the whole war so far – and I’d been along on a goodly portion of the major attacks.”

He went on to say, “I never had the chance to see the firestorm in full strength. Many of the other fellows did, and their stories were almost beyond belief. A few of the Lancs got caught in the flue of superheated air as they passed over the city at 16,000, and it was as if they were nothing more than wood chips in a storm at sea. The pilots told me that they had no control over their aircraft any longer. They were thrown about by the heat and even flipped over on their backs. Everything sort of went to hell until the Lancs managed to get free of the severe turbulence.

“We were at 16,000 feet. Everybody was still tossing ‘window’ tinfoil out of their aircraft, and we howled in glee as we listened in on the Jerry wireless and heard them going crazy.”

Condemnation can come easy but whether or not it would be justified is something that could be argued from both points of view. The really smart dog goes not for the stick that beats it, but the hand that holds it. Those powerful men such as Churchill, Lindemann and others were so much aware of the consequences of their actions, and indeed had engineered them for the precise results that they were now getting. By no stretch of the imagination could it be said that they were unaware of the consequences. These powerful men held the power of life and death over millions of their fellow human beings and irresponsibly abused that power. Such terror-bombing was a policy that had no other purpose than to satisfy their bloodlust. High-ranking members of the inner circles of power, in the Armed Forces also, argued against the policy of terror-bombing not only on moral grounds but on strategic grounds. They were dispensed with in as brief a manner as were Stalin’s underlings who disagreed with him.

Responsibility for the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of German civilians lies with Churchill. His, too, for the needless deaths of thousands of British civilians who died in raids of retaliation. And last but not least, responsibility lies heavy with him who in order to initiate his bloodlust, his pathetic scrabbling for personal power, sacrificed no less than 55,888 British airmen who died during the bomber offensive. This figure represents nearly the number of British junior army officers who died during the entire First World War.

There is no doubt that had the war ended other than as it did, or had the Nuremberg Trials been administered by neutral countries such as Sweden, Switzerland, or Chile, Churchill and his closest advisors would have ended their lives at the end of a rope, and justifiably so. That Churchill’s statue stands today in Parliament Square is no more a monument to his greatness than is a statue of Lenin or Stalin in Moscow’s Red Square.

A CITY IN RUINS

Words, even in a language as rich and descriptive as English, fail to convey the sheer horror that faced survivors of the Hamburg holocaust. The putrid stench of decaying corpses, the sickening sweetish smell of roasted human flesh warped the mind and seared the soul. It polluted mile after mile of the devastated city. The mere act of breathing, albeit shallow breaths, was enough to induce violent vomiting yet breathe people must. It is a city that is no more, yet the life that is left must go on and thousands of survivors dejectedly scrambled from the ruins to do what they could. They endured the ultimate in grief yet were denied by circumstances even the opportunity to search for their own loved ones.

The streets of Hamburg were covered in corpses in various stages of decay and destruction. Death had chosen its victims indiscriminately. There were mothers and their children, mounds of dead babies from maternity homes and schoolchildren. One could see rows of corpses of old people who had perished in a nearby old folks’ home. Here and there, a body of a lone child would be found, or the body of a young lady who days earlier had concerned herself with the latest hit song or a letter from her boyfriend at the front. There were men and women, lying often in absurd postures who had recently lived with dignity. Many were now shrivelled and charred objects in the rubble-strewn roads. Here again there was hitherto unknown phenomena. Bodies were found that were burned beyond recognition yet clothes were untouched by fire. There were naked bodies that appeared to bear no violent marks or signs of burning. Many had died through sheer overwhelming fright. In this one begins to grasp the magnitude of the tragedy for in reality, unless under totally exceptional circumstances, the human being is resilient and is not easily given to dying of fright. Many survive truly horrible traumatic experiences. Yet it was later revealed that no less than 12.6% of those who died in those ten days, did so through shock.

Thousands of bodies were naked; they resembled the wax dummies in tailors’ shops. Some looked peaceful in death whilst others were cramped in agony. Imagine, here was a city similar in size to Manchester or Birmingham, in which over 100,000 people had lost their lives. Many times that number had been maimed or otherwise badly injured. Another 750,000 people had been made homeless. Think of a city comparable in size to any major British city and consider what it would be like to pick your way through the rubble from one end of it to the other. To find in that area over 100,000 of your fellow citizens dead in the rubble. And weep because it had no affect whatsoever on the course of the war other than to lengthen it. As one analyst put it: “The brutal allied air offensive against Germany proved to be costly, ineffective and of doubtful morality.”¹⁰ I’ll say it was! One might say it was Hobson’s choice as to whether it was better to be ‘liberated’ by Britain’s war lords or Moscow’s hordes of raping, looting Asiatics.

STRUCK FROM THE RECORDS

The British people of course had no way of knowing what was being done in their name and as we have seen, even M.P.’s were victims of a conspiracy to deny and hide the facts. It is beyond doubt that the British people and people of other nations engaged in the war with Germany would never have tolerated carnage on such a scale, particularly as it brought nothing but misery for our side too. Only now, many years after the war’s end, is the full truth available and then only for the scholar diligent enough to go to the trouble to seek it out. Such few books that do deal with this and related tragedies are given the orchestrated cold-shoulder by the British media. Yet this same media wastes no time in giving full publicity to tales of Jewish suffering, even those tales of dubious authenticity. And so, by means other than outright censorship, the lies and cover-ups continue to distort opinion.

But there is one element in this dreadful and pitiful episode which was so appalling that the allied high command went to great lengths to hide all trace of it. This was the use of, and the consequences of, using phosphorous bombs on a civilian population. Even today no British television or radio station or newspaper would dare to mention its consequences for fear of the revulsion it would cause.

Martin Caidin who, as previously stated, is perhaps better qualified than any man living to comment on the effects of terror-bombing, who as an author has probably researched more material related to terror-bombing than any other, spent years trying to get details of the use of phosphorous. In his own words, he has “met with less than the success required by the historian to include the episode in a documentary book.”

He says: “Perhaps the solution to the total absence of any reference in official (post-war) German documents is explained in the story told to me by a U.S. Army officer, who learned that portions of the documents on the after-effects of the Hamburg attacks were ordered to be destroyed and all references to the surviving victims of phosphorous bombs stricken forever from the records.”¹¹

Nevertheless, it has been established that the British weaponry used in the holocaust of Hamburg included many bombs of which the incendiary contents were phosphorous. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reports officially on these phosphorous bombs, stating, “Phosphorous burns were not infrequent,” but that most such burns “occurred in people who had come in contact with unexploded phosphorous canisters lying about in the streets or in the rubble.”

Even in such a telling statement such as this, one smells the whiff of guilt. Note the wording carefully. Perhaps Germans inquisitively strolled the streets, sticking their fingers into the contents of unexploded bombs to see what they felt and tasted like! And the phosphorous bombs of course had obligingly fallen on buildings, carefully avoiding people as they sprayed their murderous contents. An official British source was a little more honest when it gave as its reason for using phosphorous: “because its demonstrated ability to depress the morale of the Germans.”¹²

Wouldn’t the rack, or beating to death on the wheel, served the same purpose just as well but a little more humanely? What is so special about phosphorous that the allied High Command has gone to such lengths to hide? Simply this. As a refinement to barbarism, it has no equal and it is doubtful if it ever will have, except those found in the pits of the KGB’s torture chambers in Moscow’s Lubianka Prison.

It is one thing to fight an incendiary bomb which can at least be put out using ordinary means – and which soon burns itself out anyway. It is quite another thing to face a bomb that no matter which way it is handled, persists in flaring into life again and again. And which furthermore will stick grimly to anything that it touches: brick, wood, concrete, steel... and human flesh. Whatever the material, the phosphorous clings tenaciously to it and continues to burn unless scraped off. Imagine the effect of that on a human body, not to speak of a child’s body. One can only stand back in mute horror at the minds of those who dreamed such a satanic weapon up and authorised its use to “depress the morale of the Germans.”

There was one incident in the Hamburg holocaust which is on record and which stands as testimony to the use of phosphorous which incidentally is still used today in the Jewish-Arab conflict. This incident happened at the height of the bombing. It was at that most awful period earlier described when the whole city was engulfed in flames, tens of thousands were already dead, and many more were on the verge of death. Among those thousands cornered in the inferno were several hundred people who were trapped in a dense shower of phosphorous bombs. The injury to those poor souls was immediate.

The exploding phosphorous bombs sprayed their contents indiscriminately and clothing caught fire and had to be torn from the body quickly otherwise the wearer would suffer terrible nightmarish burns. When the liquid spattered onto people’s hair, the victim was doomed. There was no chance to cut off the hair. The chemical globules, like a burning jelly, burned fiercely setting aflame the entire head and indeed, the head itself burned.

These terrified and pain-wracked people were seen to leap about in a frenzy, dashing their heads against the ground in blind panic – anything to douse the flames. One can extinguish an ordinary fire by smothering it with clothing but such methods were useless against phosphorous. It continued to burn and set afire any material that was thrown over it. Such people in these circumstances could only be left to their sad fate amidst the terrifying background glow of the flaming streets.

They writhed in the rubble-strewn roads with their bodies partially ablaze. Others were nearer to the River Alster and dozens of these shrieking demented souls, trailing tongues of flaming smoke and fire, dashed madly to the water to fling themselves into the lifesaving liquid. Men, women and children too, ran hysterically, falling and stumbling, getting up, tripping and falling again, rolling over and over. Most of them managed to regain their feet and made it to the water. But many of them never made it and were left behind, their feet drumming in blinding pain on the overheated pavements amidst the rubble, until there came one last convulsive shudder from the smoking ‘thing’ on the ground, and then no further movement.

Those who made it to the water found the safety they had sought so desperately – but incredibly, some faced a choice that stuns the mind in its horror. Water prevents phosphorous jelly from burning because it denies the chemical the one thing it needs to burn: oxygen. Those with the blazing chemical on their arms, their legs or their bodies were able to douse the flames by remaining under the water. But many had the phosphorous jelly on their faces or heads. Certainly the spluttering fiery chemicals went out as the victims ducked their heads beneath the water, but the moment they brought their heads up again to break the surface and take a breath of air, the phosphorous immediately burst into flames again. And so such victims were faced with a choice. Death by drowning or death by burning.

While others watched, sick and despairingly, the victims of phosphorous on faces and heads thrashed wildly in the brackish waters, screaming with pain and frustration. Spluttering and choking, they alternately burned alive or drowned. They met a slow and agonising death. Eventually, their wild motions ceased and the froth on the water slowly subsided.

Little wonder that such horrors were “stricken from the records.” One can only imagine the publicity that would have been given to such a method of warfare had Hitler or Mussolini used it.

Those with a mystical mind might dwell on an incident that occurred high in the skies as fleets of bombers churned through the air towards the stricken city. Flight Lieutenant Robert Burr of No 44 (Rhodesia) Squadron described how on take off, masses of dense black clouds hung low over England. Climatic conditions were such that they assumed that tonight’s armada would be cancelled. The rain came down in sheets yet the expected recall never came. The bombers would go out that night. Against almost incredible natural odds, fighting turbulent rain and winds, the bombers fought to stay airborne. Winds were striking Robert Burr’s aircraft with gusts of over a hundred miles an hour and bolts of lightening smashed open the blackness of night. The aircraft’s instruments unaccountably went haywire. The airspeed indicator had gone absolutely crazy and was fluctuating between 40 and 50 miles per hour. The altimeter was useless. One moment it would show that the bomber was climbing at 2,000 feet a minute; the next moment, the needle would slap down to indicate that the aircraft was plummeting towards the earth at 3,000 feet a minute. There appeared to be no good reason for such behaviour.

It was a mission in which weather exceeded the danger presented by the enemy, and became a foe much more deadly and effective. At 17,000 feet, the bombers refused to climb anymore but they were at least above the turbulence and they cruised on toward the German coastline between massive banks of cloud. Then, without any warning, nature revealed a hidden weapon. From total darkness lit by brief moments of pale shadowy light oozed a strange new kind of light that slowly clutched at the bomber. It was a form of lightning which is not accompanied by thunder; nor does it rip through the skies in jogged bolts. It is a personal hellish fire, persistent and frightening. The pilot said:

“All the metal parts of the aircraft shone with the blue spikes of St. Elmo’s fire. About a quarter of a mile to port was another aircraft flying on a parallel course. It seemed to be in a mass of flames and I realised that it too, must be covered with St. Elmo’s fire. I stared at this flying beacon and suddenly, as I watched, a streak of lightning split the heavens. There was a huge flash and burning fragments broke away. The blazing wreckage tumbled into the clouds and quickly disappeared.”¹³

And was it not retributive justice that Franklin Roosevelt, the American President whose bombers flew in daylight with the added refinement of his fighter planes strafing fleeing German refugees, was to be incinerated beyond recognition when he stumbled into the glowing embers of his fireplace at Warm Springs in Georgia?¹⁴ Something else which has virtually been “stricken from the records.”

THE LAST CONVULSIONS

By the morning of 3 August 1943, Hamburg was no more. At least not in any true sense of the word. No less than 6,000 square acres had been utterly gutted. Ruined beyond repair. One can only wonder at the scale of values of ‘historians’ who equate Hamburg or Dresden with Coventry. This is not to minimise in any sense the loss of 380 people who died in Coventry, or the 100 acres lost, but if we can flinch at such ruination, what of 100,000 people killed in Hamburg in a few days and nights? For every person who died in Coventry, no less than 300 people died in Hamburg. How well such comparisons reveal the enormity of this crime which transcends all others and which for a thousand years and more will blacken the names of Britain and America.

Worst of all, it never changed the course of war by one iota. What it undoubtedly did do was instil in the minds of the people of the German nation, that their country was indeed fighting for a higher order of values against a foe so barbaric as to make Atilla and Ghengis Khan appear to be conscientious objectors by comparison. German war production hardly faltered as Albert Speer was to later testify. Certainly such policies lengthened the course of the war and embittered the German Armed Forces to fight with a spirit of vengeance. It is reasonable to assume that thousands of British servicemen and women, and civilians too, died because of Churchill’s penchant for satanic sadistic crimes on an unprecedented scale.

As the great firestorm of Hamburg thundered to its climax, the rampaging fires subsided only when there was simply nothing left to burn. Never in the history of mankind had any community of peoples been so utterly devastated, although a similar fate which later befell Dresden and other German cities certainly equalled it. Sixty percent of the city was destroyed beyond repair. No less than 30 square miles of Hamburg city and its suburbs were badly damaged. Twelve and a half square miles had been completely burned out, making Hiroshima the lesser tragedy. Three hundred thousand dwellings had simply disappeared. If God has ever wept for mankind’s weakness, this was surely the time.

There was one vast area of the city that was simply called ‘the dead zone.’ It was in this area that nothing, absolutely nothing, had survived. It was condoned off and only decontamination and other specialist work units were permitted to enter the ‘dead zone.’ At its edge, survivors huddled in groups. Few of them had mentally survived the holocaust. Those still in the waters of the Alster and other waterways, who had not been burned by phosphorous or otherwise incapacitated by their injuries, made their way as best they could to the far banks of the Alster, or as far away as possible from the utter devastation. Those who couldn’t move any distance or swim across the waters, had no choice but to stay where they were. They remained in the shallows or huddled in craters in the pock-marked desert that had once been a city. They were numb. Some were mentally deranged, and others were suffering from severe shock. Children, many of them now orphans, lay immobilised, their tiny minds paralysed, their pain-wracked bodies destined to live out their physical lives in post-war institutions and mental asylums. Such was the ‘liberation’ of Germany.

In such conditions little or nothing could be done for the victims unless they had the means to survive on their own for a while. There were to few able-bodied people available. Medical supplies and other equipment was scarce. Many in the waters were suffering from heat and water blisters and were in the final stages of agony. Despite their tormented condition, they fought their would-be rescuers violently for they knew that their real agonies would come as their bodies left the water and came into contact with the air.

To the very limits of their ability the people who could come to their aid did so and did all they could to ease the hellish torture of the phosphorous victims still partially submerged with the globules of chemical still adhering to them and threatening to burst into flames as soon as it came into contact with air. Rescuers cried as they gave these victims fresh water to drink. They tried to attend to their visible wounds and burns. But really, there was very little that could be done and many in the water were in effect the living dead.

Their skin in huge folds began to slough off. Burns festered and pus oozed exposing raw meat and muscles that are normally seen only by surgeons carrying out operations. Most of the victims were deranged to some extent and as night fell, the silence that fell on the Alster was broken only by the pitiful moans and the tortured cries of the demented souls still in the water. In the darkness of the night, huddled forms could be seen as intervals, crouching along the banks in the murk, supporting an agonised victim in the water, administering to their needs. As the night wore on huge folds of skin slipped from the bodies of victims like the skin from a peeling snake. Insanity showed in many of their eyes. They shrieked in agony. Weird, inhuman screams and they cursed and called damnation on all who would leave them thus.

Much later that night, and as the dawn approached, the most heart-rending task ever ordered of a city’s officials and a national army took place. As the sky lightened in the east, the last civilians in the area were removed by German official and military personnel. With the entire area sealed off, small boats bearing policemen and soldiers who had been home on leave, began to move about with the waves slapping against the sides of the small craft in the cool morning air. Moving slowly and gently between the stumps of heads bobbing about in the water, and others close to the shoreline, they carried out their grim task and as they did so, more than one man vomited.

Above the splash of the oars against the water and the moaning of demented human beings came the sound of metallic clicks. It was the noise of gun hammers being drawn back; the cold metallic warning of Lugers being cocked. And then... a shot would ring out. Another, and another, and another.

The boats moved quietly among the stumps. More shots, and more.

Some of the boats ran out of ammunition. There were sharp thuds, the crack of heavy oars against human skulls. It was the only and final act of mercy that could be carried out. It was the only peace that could be found. The pall of yellowish-black smoke hung over the pock-marked desert and acres of devastated shells of buildings where once had stood a beautiful city. The sun shone grimly through the yellowish sky but for those in the water, it was all over. They had gone home.

REFERENCES

1. F.J.P. Veale. Advance to Barbarism. Mitre Press London.
2. Ibid.
3. Austin J. App. The Bombing Atrocity of Dresden: Review and comment by Prof. A. J. App of R.H.S. Crossman’s article, ‘Apocalypse at Dresden,’ in the November 1963 issue of Esquire. Boniface Press, Maryland (1967).
4. Martin Caidin. The Night Hamburg Died. Ballantine Books, N.Y. (1960).
5. Ibid.
6. Sunday Telegraph, 1 October 1961.
7. David Irving. The Destruction of Dresden. Transworld Publishers Ltd. London.
8. F.J.P. Veale. Advance to Barbarism. Mitre Press London.
9. Ibid.
10. War Monthly. April 333?
11. Martin Caidin. The Night Hamburg Died. Ballantine Books, N.Y. (1960).
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Conrad Grieb. American Manifest Destiny and the Holocausts: Millions of people exterminated, where it happened, when it happened, how it happened, who made it happen: An historical and sociological encyclopedia of domestic and foreign affairs. Examiner Books, N.Y. (1979).