Reconstructed Frauenkirche and square

We need to understand clearly that in modern German parlance, “right wing extremist” means, anyone that wants to remember his ancestors slaughtered by the “Allies,” unless he simultaneously confesses that they richly deserved to be slaughtered. This is what the rulers in Germany think, and an analogous viewpoint is held by our rulers. Therefore, it is worth while to reflect on this matter a little. I will do so by highlighting an anecdote from my own travel in Germany.

I was in Leipzig in December 2006 when Passau police chief Alois Mannichl was non-fatally stabbed, apparently at the door of his house. Instantly all the media — radio, TV, and newspaper — area-bombed the news that a “presumed right-wing extremist” (vermutlich Rechtsextremist), still at large, had done the deed. Every half hour on the radio, the same notice was given out.

Mannichl was a fanatical “anti-Nazi.” He had actually gone so far as to have the grave of a German dug up when he heard that a flag of the Third Reich had been draped over the body. In occupied Germany, such symbols are illegal. Showing Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will is illegal. Singing the Horst Wessel song is illegal. “This symbolism is illegal! We must seize the evidence” he must have screamed. Even the dead lying six feet under have no rest from zealots like him.

Mannichl had told police that a young man of such-and-such height and with a crewcut and a tattoo on his neck, before he jabbed the knife, had shouted, “with greetings from the national resistance.”

At the bar in the hotel lobby I had struck up an acquaintance with an amiable German who worked as federal police in the border control department.  I expressed doubt that the evidence that had been made public logically entailed that the deed was connected with “right-wing extremism” or even right-wing non-extremism. He said, they would not be claiming this if the investigation had not shown it. He knew, as a policeman. Trust the system, I suggested. Ja, he said.

Within days, perhaps just hours, all the pundits and politicians, like a flock of chirping sparrows, raised a unison cry that the NPD (National Democratic Party of Germany) — styled by our rulers as “neo-nazi,” presumably because it openly favors the continued biological existence of Germans –, should be outlawed. Even though no connection between the NPD and the skin-headed attacker had been made public! I encourage our readers to do a google search. Dozens of articles making this demand at the time can be scanned.

No suspect was apprehended, month after month. A strange detail leaked out: the knife used in the attack apparently came from Mannichl’s own kitchen.

A year after the attack, a few articles could be found that sheepishly conceded that the wound was probably received by Mannichl in a domestic dispute in his own household. Officially, the investigation is still “open” — even though finding a right-wing extremist with a tattoo visible on his neck ought to be exceedingly easy in a surveillance state like occupied Germany!

Was there an apology to the NPD? Was there an admission that there was a rush to judgment without sufficient evidence? Will anti-nazi Mannichl be indicted for making fraudulent statements?

To ask it is to answer it. Of course not.

Now, a little more than two years after the incident, a human chain is to be formed to keep the “right wing extremists” from honoring their slaughtered ancestors.

In a future post, I will document the extent to which censorship has already been put in place in Germany, and increasingly, here as well.

The Gulag is being constructed all around us, brick by brick. But this time, not a shot will need to be fired. The memory of Dresden stands as a reminder of what our rulers can do and will do if necessary. But they also have learned that mind-control is a much more convenient form of power than shooting guns.  No blood to mop up. Much cleaner.

I supplement with two brief, somewhat miscellaneous ruminations:

1. As I strolled around the cities of Germany, a few parts of which are still being rebuilt after more than a half-century, something struck me: the hard part of building a great civilization is the design, the plan, the concept; not the lugging bricks around and laying them. You can always do that; but only a few can design.

And the design has already been done! It is in our heads.

Imagine an analogy: a musical Bomber Harris tries to destroy every manuscript containing the works of Beethoven, and say he succeeds. But Beethoven is in our hearts and inner ears. There are undoubtedly musicians that have memorized long stretches, and even more that could finger it out from the audio memory. At length, there is little doubt that nearly the entire opus of Beethoven would be reconstructed and recommitted to paper.

2. There is a tendentious group that is trying to shave a digit off the number of victims of the Dresden bombing raid, i.e. to convert 130,000 into 30,000 dead. I have a theory for what is motivating such people, but the first point to make is that it is neither here nor there from an ethical standpoint.

Churchill and Harris knew that Dresden was swollen with refugees from the East, with more than a million jam-packed into its timber-framed downtown. From an ethical standpoint, from the standpoint of intent, they are, therefore, guilty of the murder of well over a million. That the actual number killed was only a tithe of that is to be accounted to several things, but one thing it cannot be accounted to is the good intentions of Churchill and Harris.

Irving’s book tells the story by interweaving the perspectives of the British Bomber Command, the pilots, the German populace, and the Nazi government, along with cameos by American and Soviet officials. The history of civilian bombing in the war is also rehearsed to set the framework for analyzing the propaganda campaigns of both sides, and to reflect on the ethical issue. I can recommend the book for the intermediate student of WW2, because of its overview of the air war, and its setting down anchors in a number of matters of importance.

The deliberate terror-firebombing of civilian population centers had reached its first apogee with the bombing of Hamburg in the nights following July 23, 1943 that I discussed earlier. Many cities were to follow. One that is not as well known was the October 14, 1944, bombing of Brunswick (Braunschweig). It created, by 3:10 AM, a medium-strength fire-storm: “light pieces of furniture, tables and chairs were being sucked up by the tornado; violent whirlwinds whipped up the dust and showers of sparks and burning embers were driven before them through the streets… It was just in this area however that six giant bunkers and two public air raid shelters, with about 23,000 people now trapped in them, had been built” (64). The problem was that underground shelters provided protection while the bombs were actually falling, but became death traps if one remained in them during the mounting fire. The right strategy, if one only knew, was to go into the shelter until the bombs stopped, then break out and dash through the flames in hopes of getting out of the fire-storm center in time. In this case, firemen tried to break through to the inner-city bomb shelters by creating a “water alley.”

A group of high-pressure fire-hoses was to be fought forwards under a constant screen of water into the heart of the fire area: the front and sides of this “alley” would be protected from the fierce, radiated heat by veils of water from overlapping jets of water; obtaining water-supplies presented considerable difficulties for this, because although water supplies and hydrants as such were at hand nearby, they were in the fire-area itself. Similarly, the pressure in the hoses had to be reinforced several times by auxiliary pumps in the hose-system; all the time both pumps and hoses were endangered by collapsing building and the heat radiation.

Nevertheless, in spite of time wasted in constantly having to shift the pumps to safer locations, by 7:00 a.m., four and a half hours after the raid had begun, the bunkers were reached. As the doors were unbarred and unlocked, the rescuers heard the sound of “many people talking quietly but nervously under the breath.” All the shelterers were still alive. The evacuation of the 23,000 people was effected, with the people forming an endless human chain along the inside of the water alley to the areas of relative safety outside the fire-storm zone, without any casualties (64-65).

I love that story. It tells so much about the German character at several levels: of the heroic, indefatigable, and creative firemen, but not neglecting the quiet dignity of the citizens waiting patiently for their doom or rescue. Compare that scene to the panic scene in the movie Independence Day.

Flash forward to Dresden, Feb 13, 1945. There is no need to review the details of the fire-storm created by the first wave; see the summary given last year. Here is one of the sights, however, that greeted the pilots of the second wave, three hours later: “The bomb-aimers could see the roads and Autobahnen leading into Dresden alive with activity.” Now, based on our experience of human nature, confirmed by movies like Independence Day and doomsday-scenarios depicted by Scary Gary, you naturally assume the highways were clogged with people frantically trying to escape the city, right? Wrong.

Long columns of lorries, their headlights full on, were crawling towards the city. These must have been the convoys of lorries with relief supplies, and the fire-brigades arriving from the other cities of Central Germany; clearly the second component of Harris’s double-blow strategy was being substantiated: the annihilation not only of the passive defenses of Dresden, but also of a large number of forces summoned from surrounding cities (142).

How many nations would be characterized by traffic jams going into the burning city to help?

It is too discouraging to narrate the aftermath discovered by the rescue crews: what they found as the cellars were opened up one by one, the fate of the refugees huddled in the basement of the train station, others that were camped out in the Grosser Garten Park, children still decked out in Carnival costumes, the collapsed tunnels, the bombed out hospitals and maternity wards… but read it.

The dome of the Frauenkirche actually survived the bombs, seemingly as a defiant witness. But within a day or two it too succumbed to the heat, and the last remnant of Dresden’s glory cracked and fell into the dust and ashes.

There is an interesting detail about the bombers themselves that indicates the double-mindedness of the Anglo-American establishment throughout this raid. “The nine Mosquitos of the Marker Force contained in their equipment racks some of the most advanced electronic apparatus developed by Western scientists…. If they ‘got into trouble, they were to head back west, and try if possible to avoid being forced down, or landing, to the east of Dresden… The crews were to land in German-occupied territory in preference to that overrun by the Soviet army.’” (122) The crews themselves were issued “large Union flags, embroidered in Russian with the words I am an Englishman… it was the best that Bomber Command could offer the airmen for their personal security in the event of being forced down behind Russian lines: they were not offered much other comfort, but warned that the simple Russian soldiery had the habit of shooting strange militiamen on sight, whether decorated with the English Union flag or not.” (137)

Think about it: both as to the safety of their troops, and the security of their secret equipment, the Allies were not worried about falling into German hands. No, they were worried about falling into the hands of their ally, the Soviet Union. This fact alone is worth pondering for a long time.

My final example to mention in detail is the Herculean effort that went into identifying the bodies and preserving their last belongings to be claimed, if ever, by survivors. “All valuables, including jewelry, papers, letters, rings and other identifying material, were placed in separate paper envelopes. These envelopes bore the essential information: the place and date of finding, the sex and, if known, the person’s name, in addition to a serial number. Each victim had affixed to it a colored card with the same serial number on it” (187). Helpers were required to “open up the clothing of unidentified victims and cut samples from the blouses and underclothes, parts of which were pinned to the bodies, the remainder inserted in the envelopes of personal effects. Unidentified bodies were serial-numbered with red cards to avoid confusion” (193). Another index and sorting system was devised for miscellaneous personal effects found in houses or streets. Yet another index was a list of wedding rings recovered. “By May 6th there were between ten and twenty thousand of these rings stored in two-gallon buckets at the Ministry of the Interior” (196).

Is there any other nation in the world where tens of thousands of wedding rings would be, not looted, but catalogued and saved? (But alas, they fell into the hands of the Soviet “liberators.”)

A massive effort to bury the victims in neat rows with identification was undertaken, but as the weather warmed and danger of epidemic threatened, the pace was increased to mass graves, then bulldozing into mass graves, and finally mass cremation on huge steel grates. Such was the natural revulsion of that last expedient to German sensibilities that it was carried out secretly in the Altmarkt, which was cordoned off. A photographer, at risk to his life, slipped in and captured some photos (206), without which that macabre end to it might never have been known to the public.

Irving produces an astonishing amount of detail from many perspectives. The tactical details of how the lead aircraft navigated, found the target, and dropped flairs to guide the subsequent waves of bombers is quite fascinating, as is the account of counter-measures attempted by the Germans. The American “third wave,” allegedly only going for the militarily-significant targets, included the strafing of groups of fire-survivors that is shocking to read about. On the other hand, several British bomber squadrons blanched and failed to cheer when the mission was announced, though there was not much they could do about it.

Last year I provided a summary of the situation colored by a reading of Paul Johnson and A. C. Grayling: it is interesting to compare the slightly different spin here. There, the villain was chiefly Arthur “Bomber” Harris, head of Bomber Command, though a deep shadow was cast on Winston Churchill as well. In Irving’s treatment, Bomber Harris comes off a bit more sympathetically – indeed, according to the Foreword by Air Marshal Robert Saundby, Harris cannot take any of the blame for Dresden –, and the chief villain appears to be the “Prime Minister” himself. At least at the time Irving wrote (1963), he was unable to find actual documentation that Stalin had even asked for Dresden to be taken out. It would be bad enough if WC ordered the bombing in obedience to Stalin; but if the order came unprompted, then – well, let’s just say that it is starting to become difficult to say whether Stalin or WC was the greater war criminal. Much more study will be necessary to make a finely-graded assignation of blame: and the study needs to be done, for the brutal and unjustifiable destruction of Dresden is a festering sore on the Anglo-American soul that is not going to go away until dealt with properly.

Irving, David. Destruction of Dresden (NY: Hold, Rinehart and Winston, 1963)

When I studied at the Goethe Institute in Lüneburg years ago, I remember the teacher saying, he was okay with just about everything, except he couldn’t understand the bombing of Dresden. It was nothing but museums and hospitals. Why Dresden?

Even though I was a college graduate, I had never heard of Dresden, let alone its bombing. By the principle of non-uniqueness, it is a safe assumption that there are at least some others out there who are in the same place. So, let me share what I have learned.

Paul Johnson writes,

Dresden was not an industrial but a communications center. Its population of 630,000 had been doubled by German refugees, 80 per cent of them peasants from Silesia. Stalin wanted them destroyed to facilitate his plan to ‘move’ Poland westwards…

The attack was carried out in two waves (with a third, by the USAF, to follow) in accordance with Bomber Command’s tactic of the “double blow,” the second falling when relief forces had concentrated on the city. Over 650,000 incendiaries were dropped, the firestorm engulfing eight square miles, totally destroying 4,200 acres and killing 135,000 men, women and children. As it was the night of Shrove Tuesday, many of the children were still in carnival costumes. For the first time in the war a target had been hit so hard that not enough able-bodied survivors were left to bury the dead. Troops moved in and collected huge piles of corpses. The center round the Altmarkt was cordoned off. Steel grills, twenty-five feet across, were set up, fuelled with wood and straw, and batches of five hundred corpses were piled up on each and burned. The funeral pyres were still flaming a fortnight after the raid. Goebbels claimed, “It is the work of lunatics.”

Modern Times, pp. 404-405

A firestorm in this context is achieved by dropping incendiary bombs, filled with highly combustible chemicals such as magnesium, phosphorus or petroleum jelly (napalm).

In other words, the Allies intentionally napalmed civilian population centers.

I don’t think very many Americans know this. We need to let it sink in.

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Dresden was not the first to go this way. Creating firestorms over civilian areas was the British policy all along, but especially from July 1943. The American bombing in Europe at least putatively aimed at industrial and war production facilities. The British goal, on the other hand, was explicitly and self-consciously the inflicting of terror.

Starting in Feb 1942, Bomber Command was headed by Arthur Harris, who became known as “Bomber Harris.”

Harris was not utterly without moral sensibilities. At one time he wrote a scathing memo complaining about the American fondness for eating hot dogs. Cutting a portly figure himself, Harris was quite the gourmand. Each evening, while no doubt his own duck and quail were roasting to perfection, his bombers set in process scenes like this one in 1943, from Hamburg:

On the second major attack by the RAF during Operation Gomorrah, during the night of 27 -8 July, Hamburg’s fire-fighters were overwhelmed by the torrents of incendiaries that fell on to the city, so many and in such concentration that they initiated a terrifying phenomenon: a fire-storm. Fires in different streets progressively joined together, forming into vast pyres of flame that grew rapidly hotter and eventually roared upwards to a height of 7,000 feet, sucking in air from the outlying suburbs at over a hundred miles an hour to fuel their oxygen hunger, creating artificial hurricanes ‘resonating like mighty organs’ as W. G. Sebald put it, which intensified the fires further. It was the first ever firestorm created by bombing and it caused terrible destruction and loss of life. Its greatest intensity lasted for three hours, snatching up roofs, trees and burning human bodies and sending them whirling into the air. The fires leaped up behind collapsing facades of buildings, roared through the streets, and rolled across squares and open areas “in strange rhythms like rolling cylinders.” The glass windows of tramcars melted, bags of sugar boiled, people trying to flee the oven-like heat of air-raid shelters sank, petrified into grotesque gestures, into the boiling asphalt of the streets.

The bomber crews reported that they could feel the heat of the city’s fires in their aircraft as they made their bombing runs. The next day smoke from the destroyed city rose 25,000 feet into the sky. Little bluish flames still flickered around some of the disfigured corpses. The victims of the first attack were either blown up, suffocated in their air-raid shelters from which the air had been sucked away, or cremated instantly in the raging fires outside. Many bodies were found so shriveled by the heat that adult corpses had shrunk to the size of infants.

A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: the History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan (NY: Walker 2006) p. 18

Bomber Harris liked Dresden as a target because it had no anti-aircraft defenses. It was well-publicized as an art and hospital town. Undoubtedly, this is why the terrified Silesian peasants fleeing the Red Army had gone there rather than to Cottbus, Chemnitz, or other eastern towns.

The touch that is particularly impressive is that the second wave of bombers was timed to arrive at just the moment that rescue personnel would be fully deployed to try to help the burned survivors from the first wave.

I don’t think very many Americans know this. We need to let it sink in.

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Churchill, perhaps already thinking ahead to his “legacy” wrote on 28 March 1945, “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land. The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing” (ibid., p. 73).

This memo indicates that the British bombing of German civilians had sheer terror as its goal.

Arguably, the British invented terrorism in the twentieth century. Fifty years earlier, they had invented the concentration camp for civilians.

In Dresden, the Americans get off the hook a bit. They were only the third wave, and as usual, purportedly after militarily-relevant targets that might still be standing.

But is it that easy, ethically? Which is worse, to attack and pummel a woman to near death with a sledge hammer; or to come along later and kick the twitching body in the teeth?

At the very least, there is the complicity of silence: of failing to register a protest.

Nor is it clear that destroying the industrial basis of an enemy nation is justifiable in any case.

Finally, the American treatment of Japan — not just Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but Tokyo as well — has exactly the same criminal character as the British treatment of Germany.

I wish we could say we were off the hook. We cannot.

My teacher in Lüneburg was far too generous to concede everything but Dresden. (Actually, he also wondered why the Americans held back and let the Soviets take Berlin. But that was it.)

Dresden brings the issue into focus without any remaining ambiguities. But Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, and many others stand as partially-rebuilt witnesses to the Anglo-American crimes of that war.

My government school never mentioned any of this. Did yours?

It’s not time to rediscover or revise history. It’s time to discover it for the first time.

When fire rains down from the sky on our cities, will we have any right to expect heaven to hear our plea for mercy?

All’s well that ends well. And generally, it ends well sooner rather than later. So take heart, and start booking your travel arrangements!

Finally ensconsed in my hotel, warm, and with a map in hand, I was able to set out.

The large square dominated by the Frauenkirche is the first interest. The Frauenkirche is a fabulous design, as proven by the fact that you can stare at it and then just keep staring.

Hint: there is a Canadian restaurant next door where you can sit and drink coffee and eat a Kuchen: try to get a window seat, and continue to gawk out at the Frauenkirche while you nibble.

However, before you do, take note on the information board in front of the church of any organ recital that might be coming up. They block the doors promptly when it begins; I missed one by two minutes, and in fact, never made it into the Frauenkirche.

No matter; this gives an excuse to return to Dresden sooner rather than later.

Augustus the Strong was the Saxon Elector that built up many of the beautiful sites. However, for political reasons, he converted back to popery, in connection with conniving to be awarded the crown of Poland, and probably thinking, “Poland is worth a mass.” However, the population and the estates were so solidly Lutheran that he had to do his own thing religiously, and built a Catholic church across the river. Note the large statue of Luther planted in front of Frauenkirche, as if standing guard.

Nearby, don’t neglect the Transportation Museum. The name is boring, but it is chock full of trains, cars, and interesting machines.

Right on this main square is a worthy-looking hotel, with perfect location, the Steigenberger Hotel de Saxe. Check for rates before leaving home and if it is not too outrageous, consider staying there.

Walking south ten minutes, visit the Church of the Cross. The main thing to do here is pay a small fee then walk up to the top of the tower. You finally emerge on a catwalk the allows scanning the view 360 degrees.

Returning back toward the Elbe river, and going a bit west, downstream, you come to another cluster of buildings. There is a Porcelain Gallery. The Art Gallery is world class. I only had time to spend a couple hours — plan to spend at least twice that long, perhaps broken up by lunch at the attached cafe.

A good plan would be to drop the girls off at the Porcelain Museum, then the guys head over to the Transportation Museum. Plan to rendezvous at the Art Gallery after a couple hours.

The opera building is also part of this group. I was fortunate to have a ticket for Tristan with the celebrated Waltraud Meier doing Isolde. Just to show what a great coincidence this was– the fellow in the seat next to mine was an Englishman that had flown in just for this opera.

Unfortunately, the orchestra, though mostly wonderful, was degraded with a few instrumental blemishes in the horn section. It was also conducted too loud, and without sufficient dynamic. Too, the staging was such that Waltraud was put at the back of the stage for the Liebestod, so she could barely be heard.

Earlier, at the end of Act I they went abstract, so that T&I sang their duet from opposite sides of the stage. So you never really heard it as a duet.

Nevertheless, it was great to be there, and to drink wine and talk about it during intermissions.

When at length I exited the opera, I involuntarily gasped at the night-time beauty that struck the eyes. A woman nearby did the same.

In some ways, Dresden improves with darkness.

Be sure to walk along the path on the Elbe at night– say, up to the next bridge, then back. It would probably be worth crossing over and doing so from the other side as well, though time ran out this time for me to do so.

In general, Dresden is stately and beautiful in an “august” (pun intended) sort of way; it does not perhaps excel in Gemütlichkeit. This is not a criticism, however. It is just pointing out a subtle difference.

It is amazing to think that Dresden was once even more beautiful, especially in the manner of the beauteous residences expanding outward. More on that anon.

The parting shot is looking back through the opera hall from my seat.