The months of January, February, March and April are memories of horror for most Germans who know their history. It was the last few months of WWII, and the Allies had gone on a murder rampage, killing men, women, wounded and children alike. 141 cities in Germany were bombed to shreds. Millions of civilians deliberately killed.

Dresden 1945

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The source for the Dresden article is: Stars and Stripes, London Edition,
Saturday, May 5, 1945. Vol. 5 No. 156
Air Raid on Dresden Killed More Than 300,000
by Dan Regan
Stars and Stripes Staff Writer

With the 1st Army, May 3 (Delayed)-The Allied air raid on Dresden on Feb. 13-14 killed 300,000 persons, according to a report by Dresden police to a group of 600-British and French prisoners who were given passes by the Germans to enter the American lines.

Nine British PWs were working in Dresden during the raid and said the horror and devastation caused by the Anglo-American 14-hour raid was beyond human comprehension unless one could see for himself. One British sergeant said, “Reports from Dresden police that 300,000 died as a result of the bombing didn’t include deaths among 1,000,000 evacuees from the Breslau area trying to escape from the Russians. There were no records on them.

“After seeing the results of the bombing, I believe these figures are correct.”

“They had to pitchfork shriveled bodies onto trucks and wagons and cart them to shallow graves on the outskirts of the city. But after two weeks if work the job became too much to cope with and they found other means to gather up the dead.”

“They burned bodies in a great heap in the center of the city, but the most effective way, for sanitary reasons, was to take flamethrowers and burn the dead as they lay in the ruins. They would just turn the flamethrowers into the houses, burn the dead and then close off the entire area. The whole city is flattened. They were unable to clean up the dead lying beside roads for several weeks,” the sergeant added.
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Dresden

480,000 casualties, officially recorded. That was the result of the three British and American air raids launched within fifteen hours against Germany’s largest refugee and hospital city, Dresden. Among these 480,000 dead, there were: 37,000 toddlers and newborns; 46,000 school-age children; 55,000 war-injured, ill, doctors, nurses, Red Cross assistants, and orderlies; 12,000 rescue workers from the fire brigades, Wehrmacht, first-aid attendants, air-raid assistants, and air-raid police, 330,000 men, women and teenagers (Source) Henry Mawai, “Eidgenoss” 1-3/86, Winterthur: Verlag Eidgenoss, p. 4.

People will no doubt wonder how all these dead could be identified so exactly.

The answer is simple: The Germans were very precise in registering their citizens: name, date of birth, occupation etc., and during the war everyone received food ration coupons. Those who no longer picked up their ration coupons after the inferno, had died.

It is possible that the 480,000 registered deaths were all permanent inhabitants of Dresden, since refugee transports constantly entered the city and we can be sure that not everyone was immediately registered.

So if there were 600,000 refugees in the city, how many of THEM ended up on the pyres, and how many were turned anonymously to ASHES in the furnace that Dresden became? The exact death toll will never be determined, we can only guess how huge it was.

Dresden was a gigantic trap for humans, set up by Churchill: “I do not want suggestions as to how we can disable the economy and the machinery of war, what I want are suggestions as to how we can roast the German refugees on their escape from Breslau.”

And when one considers the utter destruction of that city and the attitude of the Allies to let nobody escape - hence the extensive American aerial hunt for survivors at daybreak - then everybody can figure out by himself what was left of this one-million-plus human misery. The British bombers came at night and the Americans came during the day to finish the job.

This was done to every German city. Have you ever heard or read about this genocide in the press? Of course not.

Herta Ruthard
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