Dresden vs. Auschwitz (Germans, as victims of WW2)

Haaretz ^ | 23/08/2007 | Aviva Lori

[lizol]

Dresden vs. Auschwitz

By Aviva Lori

In February 2005, Dr. Gilad Margalit visited Dresden. The winter of 2005 was cold, but at the events marking the 60th anniversary of the Allied bombing of the city it was hot. Very hot. About 5,000 neo-Nazis descended on Dresden from all over Germany and from throughout Europe for the big demonstration on February 13, a Sunday.

It was a colorful, violent demonstration that sought to carve out territory in the streets and especially in the national consciousness. The massive physical presence of the demonstrators only heightened the growing recognition in Germany in recent years that the time has come to make it plain that the victims of World War II did not have a monopoly on suffering.

The questions of who suffered more and who is more to blame are not new questions in Germany, but they have been increasingly troubling the Germans. Responsibility and guilt feelings are no longer self-evident. Advertisement "It was a huge demonstration," Margalit recalls. "All the streams of this scene were there, from the wildest radicals - tattooed, skinhead thugs - to local members of parliament, well-dressed, pleasant-smelling people. They marched to commemorate the bombing raids on the city, which have come to symbolize the suffering of the entire German people. True, [the demonstrators] were a relatively small number out of a population of 74 million, but it took place in the light of day and with police protection. And they don't want to hear about the Holocaust."

[wideawake]

When are they going to have marches in Coventry?

[calex59]

Any idiot that thinks Germans suffered as much as their victims is just that, an idiot.

[gridlock]

Oh, cry me a FReepin’ river. You try to take over the World and exterminate all the Jews, bad things are going to happen to you. The NAZIs were as bad as it gets. Everything we did in Europe, and more, was easily justified.

[Northern Yankee]

And they don't want to hear about the Holocaust.

Those that ignore history are condemned to repeat it!

[2banana]

Actually - the allies bombing of Dresden was not the brightest thing we did in WWII. The city had no military significance and was bulging at the seems with innocent refugees.

And before I hear the - The German citizens deserved what they got answer - We just fought a war against Iraq. Can we fire bomb some cities there and kill a quarter of million people and just say they deserved it? If not - why? Saddam was just as evil as Hitler.

[BenLurkin]

The Germans may not have suffered but one thing is for sure — they asked for it and they deserved every bit of suffering that they got.

[dfwgator]

When are they going to have marches in Coventry?

And Rotterdam, and Warsaw, and Guernica.....

[GeorgefromGeorgia]

“Toward the end of the war, the Allies bombed dozens of German cities. Dresden suffered the greatest losses. Between February 13 and 15, 1945, the city was pounded and all but destroyed. About 35,000 people died in the air raids. One result was to change the direction of the German discourse of guilt. Many Germans exchanged their feelings of guilt for the Nazis’ crimes into a feeling of suffering and victimization. “The narrative of suffering is deeply rooted in the Nazi conception, and even people who were not Nazis shared part of this narrative,” Margalit says. “The bombings were described as a great wrong inflicted on the Germans by the Allies, who were waging all-out war, a war utterly unlike that of the Germans.”

Is it not possible that the Allies really did bomb a civilian population without restraint?”

I lived in Bavaria for four years and visited Dresden when it was still in the DDR. The Commie travel guides played up the allied bombing of Dresden, when made me very angry since the Soviets treated the Germans as bad as the Germans had treated Soviet citizens, and that was very badly. Germans were moving West to escape the Red Army, preferring the Western allies.

I have questioned the need for the bombing of Dresden, which was not an industrial city, and was full of refugees.
However, Hitler had indiscriminately bombed London, including the more recent V-1 and V-2 rockets. Did bombing Dresden hasten the end of the war against Germany like the A-Bomb did against Japan. I am not sure about that, but if it saved allied lives, it was probably justifiable.

Certainly, the Dresden bombing should not be spoken in the same breath with the Holocaust, or even the starving of the Dutch People after they rose up during Market-Garden, or the Katyn Forrest massacre by Stalin.

[Jeff Head]

I will tell you the simple difference...if the Nazi regime had not risen to power (with the support of the German people at the time) and committed the agression and atrocities like it did at Ausschwitz and throughout Europe, the allies would NEVER have committed a bombing campaing like Dresden to break their will and defeat them.

There is no moral comparison or equivalence. The former occurred because tyrants and those who supported them committed violence and agression against innocent peoples and nations. The latter happened as the allies committed violence against the perpetrators and those nations, cities, and peoples who provided material and moral support in the all out war that World War II was.

It was hell...but it was unleashed on the hellions and their peoples. In the end, the German people and Japanese people wanted NO MORE. They were made over into good Germans and good Japanese by the horrific events. I know this for sure...had Hitler and Tojo succeeded, the hell on earth that would have resulted would have been many orders of magnitude worse...world-wide...than what occurred at Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki to put a stop to it.

We waged all out war to end what would have been a much more, continuing brutal reign of terror and killing world-wide had we not stopped it in the fashion that we did.

[wideawake]

“The bombings were described as a great wrong inflicted on the Germans by the Allies, who were waging all-out war, a war utterly unlike that of the Germans.”

LOL!

Yes, the Nazis were extremely restrained in their warfare.

The Poles are grateful for their mildness and the people of Stalingrad look back to those lovely days of the half-hearted Nazi siege of their city.

[dfwgator]

And if anyone thinks we owe Germany for Dresden, consider The Marshall Plan as “payment in full.”

[mc5cents]

Saddam was just as evil as Hitler.

So, are there degrees of evil? A little evil is acceptable but a lot of evil is a bad thing? Now, to compare the Nazi "Final Solution" to a thug like Saddam is just laughable. Saddam killed people out of some kind of blood lust or lust for power and control. What Hitler and the Third Reich did is something of a different magnitude and not comparable.

[BenLurkin]

The Marshall Plan AND forty years of keeping the Russians out.

[dfwgator]

And the 31 US Servicemen who gave their lives during the Berlin Airlift.

[GOPJ]

The Germans should feel guilt - they earned it - it's theirs.

Now and forever.

World War II Germany was a modern culture that acted worse than the lowest, creepiest bush tribe. ( No insult meant to primitive people). It wasn't a few bad apples acting on their own - it was the whole figgin culture.

Shame on them. Shame on all of them.

Let the Germans live with the guilt. It's the least they can do.

[DirtyPigpen]

The reason there have been no more decisive victories since WWII is because we don’t fight “all out” any more.

[GOPJ]

And if anyone thinks we owe Germany for Dresden, consider The Marshall Plan as “payment in full.”

And them some...

[Jeff Head]

We did it to break the will of the German people. It was tragic...it was hell...but fighting that all out war in that fashion was also necessary IMHO.

Also, IMHO, one of the things we did wrong in Iraq is not pacify, with extreme prejudice, those towns and cities that support the insurgents and terrorists. It has caused the fighting...again, IMHO...to last much longer and cost many more of our own than it otherwise might have.

I think of Fullujah as an example. No way did we need to go in there and lose 120+ of our boys fighting an urban war made to order for Jihadists and their perverted notion of martydom. We should have ringed the place with steel and offered 72 hours for everyone who wanted to get out to do so. Women and young kids one way, fighting aged men another...who would then be used to rebuild their city and to rebuild it in such a fashion that is not only much more modern and with better sanitation, but with wide avenues and clear fields of fire.

Then we should have waged an around the clock bombing campaign that reduced the entire place to rubble. Any innocents dieing in the exchange are on the heads of the terrorist and insurgents. A clear message would also have been sent. A 'demonstration" that I bet would not have had to be repeated too many more times before the Iraqis in those areas where insurgents were abetted...stoppoed abetting them.

...but that's why I will never be in charge of such operations.

[dfwgator]

“I ask you: Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?” - Josef Goebbels

(Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it!)