The Dresden Holocaust – February 1945

Between 13th-15th February 1945, the Royal Air Force and its American counterpart the USAAF carried out the greatest crime of the Second World War, destroying the historic city of Dresden. To this day no one knows the true death toll, partly because the city was packed with refugees who had fled from Stalin’s Red Army as it advanced into eastern Germany. Based on his detailed archival research, the British historian David Irving has estimated 135,000 deaths.

Unlike many ‘war crimes’, these were not isolated murders carried out by desperate and brutalised individuals. In fact the men who flew the missions and dropped the bombs were not the true guilty parties.

Dresden was the culmination of a deliberate policy of terror bombing – a deliberate decision to flout pre-war agreements (and to abandon the policies of the British government at the start of the war, maintained until Churchill took office).

In 1922 the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments drew up The Hague Rules for Air Warfare (1923) which stated: “Aerial bombardment for the purpose of terrorising the civilian population, of destroying or damaging private property not of a military character, or of injuring non-combatants is prohibited.”

At the start of the war in September 1939 the British and French governments issued a joint statement that only “strictly military objectives in the narrowest sense of the word would be bombed”. The German government issued a similar statement – in fact Adolf Hitler had for several years been making sincere efforts to reach firmer international agreements against the bombing of civilians. Hitler’s Germany was in favour of ratifying the Hague Rules banning such policies.

On 15th February 1940 the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told Parliament: “whatever be the lengths to which others may go, His Majesty’s Government will never resort to the deliberate attack on women, children and other civilians for purposes of mere terrorism.”

Less than three months later Chamberlain was ousted. New Prime Minister Winston Churchill wasted little time in moving towards a policy of unrestricted terror bombing against German civilians.

It is often stated by Churchill’s supporters (and widely believed even to this day) that the RAF bombings of Germany were justified as retaliation for the Luftwaffe’s bombing of British cities. Yet the historical record is clear, as was admitted (in fact proudly stated) by British Air Ministry official J.M. Spaight in his 1944 book, Bombing Vindicated.

Spaight wrote:
“Hitler only undertook the bombing of British civilian targets reluctantly three months after the RAF had commenced bombing German civilian targets. 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… Retaliation was certain if we carried the war into Germany… there was a reasonable possibility that our capital and industrial centres would not have been attacked if we had continued to refrain from attacking those of Germany… We began to bomb objectives on the German mainland before the Germans began to bomb objectives on the British mainland… Because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic bombing offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May 11th, 1940, the publicity it deserves.”

A decade later the official history of the Royal Air Force, written by Denis Richards, stated that Churchill’s decision to bomb German civilian areas was a calculated provocation as well as an act of terror. Churchill’s government wished to provoke Germany into attacking British civilian areas rather than airfields and military targets:
“If the Royal Air Force raided the Ruhr [May 1940], destroying oil plants with its more accurately placed bombs and urban property with those that went astray, the outcry for retaliation against Britain might prove too strong for the German generals to resist. Indeed Hitler himself would probably head the clamour. The attack on the Ruhr was therefore an informal invitation to the Luftwaffe to bomb London.”

The most famous British military historian, J.F.C. Fuller wrote in 1948:
“It may seem a little strange, nevertheless it is a fact, that this reversion to wars of primitive savagery was made by Britain and the United States, the two great democracies… With the disappearance of the gentleman as the back-bone of the ruling class in England, political power rapidly passed into the hands of demagogues who, by playing upon the emotions and ignorance of the masses, created a permanent war-psychosis.”

Fuller was a retired General: his books including the three-volume Decisive Battles of the Western World and the 1958 biography The Generalship of Alexander the Great have been used to teach generations of British officers. Yet he acknowledged that as a consequence of the seizure of power in Britain by such “demagogues”, notably Churchill, “the obliteration of cities by bombing was probably the most devastating blow ever struck at civilisation”. Fuller wrote of “the moral decline which characterised the war.”

This moral decline was typified by the British “Area Bombing Directive” in February 1942. Several German towns and cities had already been bombed by the RAF as early as May 1940, almost as soon as Churchill took office, but after this 1942 directive the bombing war intensified.

Oxford scientist, civil servant and author C.P. Snow (in a series of lectures delivered at Harvard University) asked whether future generations would damn those wartime British decision-makers who plotted the terror war against German civilians, deliberately calculating that “the bombing must be directed essentially against German working-class houses. Middle-class houses have too much space around them, and so are bound to waste bombs; factories and ‘military objectives’ had long since been forgotten, except in official bulletins, since they were much too difficult to find and hit. …What will people of the future think of us? Will they say … that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity? They will have the right.”

On this 79th anniversary of the Dresden bombing, we Britons must be prepared to face the facts about our nation’s history. More than 55,000 young Britons in Bomber Command were killed during the Second World War: their average age was 22. They were not “wolves with the minds of men”: they were putting their lives on the line for what they had been told was vital for their nation’s defence.

The true criminals – among the worst criminals in history – were Churchill and the cabal around him. These were the men who benefited from war and whose descendants continue to benefit from lies about that war. We cannot undo the great crime of the destruction of Dresden, nor the broader crime of the Second World War. We cannot bring the victims back to life. Nor can we undo the damage that was caused postwar: the Soviet domination of Central and Eastern Europe, the crushing of civilisation, and the murder of countless more civilians in peacetime.

What we can do is to dedicate our efforts to telling the truth about those years. The truth will not only set us free, it will enable the rebirth of the true Europe in our times.