Dwight Eisenhower was a war criminal

[RedDog]

Of course, the Bombing of Dresden took place primarily between only February 13 and 15, 1945 so that was a lot of destruction in three nights. One night over 700 USAF Bombers were participating as they burned a path to Berlin.

Today of course, students marching and texting (between tattoo and piercing appointments) while tossing molotov cocktails at police would successfully get a court injunction to prevent the mission.

[Smaug]

Dresden - Often said to have been payback for London?

Tonnage on German cities:

That is an interesting chart. Unfortunately it gives no indication of bombing intensity. In Dresden there were four 'raids' (1300 planes) that dropped 3900 tons of explosives and incendiaries in a two day period in February 1945 that started a firestorm with devestating consequences.

[Smaug]

Of course, the Bombing of Dresden took place primarily between only February 13 and 15, 1945 so that was a lot of destruction in three nights. One night over 700 USAF Bombers were participating as they burned a path to Berlin.

Today of course, students marching and texting (between tattoo and piercing appointments) while tossing molotov cocktails at police would successfully get a court injunction to prevent the mission.

Too funny. Maybe too true as well.

[WestViking]

Branding Eisenhower a war criminal 44 years after the European armistice lacks credibility.

The premise of the lead article, which, by the way is ascribed to “author unknown” is a classic in character assassination. Inclusion of a 29 word excerpt from a Worthington article is intended to give the whole piece undeserved credibility.

The article appears here: http://www.rense.com/general46/germ.htm. I have no faith in Jeff Rense or his web site - http://www.rense.com . I believe credibility of the site is reflected in the first line of the face page disclaimer: “The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.” In other words, Rense will print anything and stand behind nothing.

One aspect not considered or covered in the lead article (or by Worthington for that matter) is that turning loose somewhere around a million German soldiers on a starving civilian population would not have been pretty. Bands of marauders would have preyed on the civilian population which would have been appropriate if, as the ‘author unknown’ asserts, Eisenhower truly hated the German people. Allowing German soldiers to attack and debase their own people would have been more consistent with the alleged hatred.

I do know a little about the bombing of Dresden and other major German cities. Amongst others, the Allied command sought advice from the general insurance sector property insurance specialists. They helped the Allies to find physical firewalls in the city using the same maps they used to determine fire zones when assessing catastrophe potential from large fires. From that, Bomber Command was able to determine the mix of high explosive and incendiary bombs to have the most devastating effect.

WW-II got underway in September 1939 with the German invasion of Poland. The US openly joined the Allies in December 1941 following the attack on Pearl Harbour. During 1942 the Axis advances in Europe and the Pacific were stopped. In 1943, with a series of German defeats in Eastern Europe, most notably at Stalingrad, the Allied invasion of Fascist Italy (September 1943) and American victories in the Pacific, the Axis lost the initiative and undertook strategic retreat on all fronts. The Allies invaded France in June 1944, and the European war was over in May 1945.

Thousands of Canadian from my father’s generation took part in WW-II. Those who I most respect the most do not talk about their experiences. Those who have shared their experience in private conversation were, to a man, repulsed by the brutality and waste of human life. Most would never have answered the call to duty had they known what they would encounter. I can’t imagine the reality of hill to hill and house to house combat with no relief from booby-traps and land mines set to maim or kill the unwary or those just too tired to care anymore.

The European war was unbelievably brutal; millions died or were murdered and many more millions were maimed. There is no doubt that bad judgement was exercised - on all sides and by all members of the Alliance and Axis. Poking through the entrails four decades later to try to ‘prove’ that Allied commanders were no better than the Germans is just plain stupid IMHO.

If you don’t like the outcome, don’t start a war.

[pirapoi]

The premise of the lead article is James Bacque's book Other Losses

The book, OTHER LOSSES, found its way into the hands of a Canadian news reporter, Peter Worthington, of the OTTAWA SUN.

I've already posted the following link, but here it is again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Losses

Wiki admits that the article's neutrality is disputed, but at least it attempts to give both sides of the debate.

[Ogopogo]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rm-dougla ... 25437.html

R.M. Douglas

Associate Professor of History
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The Expulsion Of The Germans: The Largest Forced Migration In History
Posted: 06/25/2012 3:40 pm

R.M. Douglas is the author of "Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War" (Yale University Press, $38)

In December 1944 Winston Churchill announced to a startled House of Commons that the Allies had decided to carry out the largest forced population transfer -- or what is nowadays referred to as "ethnic cleansing" -- in human history.

Millions of civilians living in the eastern German provinces that were to be turned over to Poland after the war were to be driven out and deposited among the ruins of the former Reich, to fend for themselves as best they could. The Prime Minister did not mince words. What was planned, he forthrightly declared, was "the total expulsion of the Germans... For expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting."

The Prime Minister's revelation alarmed some commentators, who recalled that only eighteen months previously his government had pledged: "Let it be quite clearly understood and proclaimed all over the world that we British will never seek to take vengeance by wholesale mass reprisals against the general body of the German people."

In the United States, senators demanded to know when the Atlantic Charter, a statement of Anglo-American war aims that affirmed the two countries' opposition to "territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned" had been repealed. George Orwell, denouncing Churchill's proposal as an "enormous crime," took comfort in the reflection that so extreme a policy "cannot actually be carried through, though it might be started, with confusion, suffering and the sowing of irreconcilable hatreds as the result."

Orwell greatly underestimated both the determination and the ambition of the Allied leaders' plans. What neither he nor anybody else knew was that in addition to the displacement of the 7-8 million Germans of the East, Churchill, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had already agreed to a similar "orderly and humane" deportation of the more than 3 million German-speakers -- the "Sudeten Germans" -- from their homelands in Czechoslovakia. They would soon add the half-million ethnic Germans of Hungary to the list.

Although the governments of Yugoslavia and Romania were never given permission by the Big Three to deport their German minorities, both would take advantage of the situation to drive them out also.

By mid-1945, not merely the largest forced migration but probably the largest single movement of population in human history was under way, an operation that continued for the next five years. Between 12 and 14 million civilians, the overwhelming majority of them women, children and the elderly, were driven out of their homes or, if they had already fled the advancing Red Army in the last days of the war, forcibly prevented from returning to them.

From the beginning, this mass displacement was accomplished largely by state-sponsored violence and terror. In Poland and Czechoslovakia, hundreds of thousands of detainees were herded into camps -- often, like Auschwitz I or Theresienstadt, former Nazi concentration camps kept in operation for years after the war and put to a new purpose.

The regime for prisoners in many of these facilities was brutal, as Red Cross officials recorded, with beatings, rapes of female inmates, gruelling forced labour and starvation diets of 500-800 calories the order of the day. In violation of rarely-applied rules exempting the young from detention, children routinely were incarcerated, either alongside their parents or in designated children's camps. As the British Embassy in Belgrade reported in 1946, conditions for Germans "seem well down to Dachau standards."

Though the death rates in the camps were often frighteningly high -- 2,227 inmates of the Mysłowice facility in southern Poland alone perished in the last ten months of 1945 -- most of the mortality associated with the expulsions occurred outside them.

Forced marches in which inhabitants of entire villages were cleared at fifteen minutes' notice and driven at rifle-point to the nearest border, accounted for many losses. So did train transports that sometimes took weeks to reach their destination, with up to 80 expellees crammed into each cattle car without adequate (or, occasionally, any) food, water or heating.

The deaths continued on arrival in Germany itself. Declared ineligible by the Allied authorities to receive any form of international relief and lacking accommodation in a country devastated by bombing, expellees in many cases spent their first months or years living rough in fields, goods wagons or railway platforms.

Malnutrition, hypothermia and disease took their toll, especially among the very old and very young. Although more research is needed to establish the total number of deaths, conservative estimates suggest that some 500,000 people lost their lives as a result of the operation.

Not only was the treatment of the expellees in defiance of the principles for which the Second World War had professedly been fought, it created numerous and persistent legal complications. At the Nuremberg trials, for example, the Allies were trying the surviving Nazi leaders on charges of carrying out "deportation and other inhumane acts" against civilian populations at the same moment as, less than a hundred miles away, they were engaging in large-scale forced removals of their own.

Similar problems arose with the UN's 1948 Genocide Convention, the first draft of which outlawed the "forced and systematic exile of individuals representing the culture of a group." This provision was deleted from the final version at the insistence of the U.S. delegate, who pointed out that it "might be interpreted as embracing forced transfers of minority groups such as have already been carried out by members of the United Nations."

To the present day, expelling states continue to go to great lengths to exclude the deportations and their continuing effects from the reach of international law. In October 2009, for example, the current President of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus, refused to sign the European Union's Lisbon Treaty unless his country was granted an "exemption" ensuring that surviving expellees could not use the Treaty to seek redress for their maltreatment in the European courts. Facing the collapse of the accord in the event of Czech non-ratification, the EU reluctantly acquiesced.

To this day, the postwar expulsions -- the scale and lethality of which vastly exceed the ethnic cleansing that accompanied the break-up in the 1990s of the former Yugoslavia -- remain little known outside Germany itself. (Even there, a 2002 survey found that Germans under thirty had a more accurate knowledge of Ethiopia than of the areas of Europe from which their grandparents were deported.)

The textbooks on modern German and modern European history I use regularly in my college classroom either omit mention of the expulsions altogether, or relegate them to a couple of uninformative, and frequently inaccurate, lines depicting them as the inevitable consequence of Germany's wartime atrocities. In popular discourse, on the rare occasions that the expulsions are mentioned at all it is common to dismiss them with the observation that the expellees were "got what they deserved," or that the interest of the expelling states in unburdening themselves of a potentially disloyal minority population should take precedence over the deportees' right to remain in the lands of their birth.

Superficially persuasive as these arguments may appear, they do not stand up to scrutiny. The expellees were deported not after individual trial and conviction for acts of wartime collaboration -- something of which the children could not have been guilty in any event -- but because their indiscriminate removal served the interests of the Great Powers and the expelling states alike.

Provisions to exempt proven "anti-fascists" from detention or transfer were routinely ignored by the very governments that adopted them; Oskar Schindler, the most famous "anti-fascist" of all who had been born in the Czech town of Svitavy, was deprived by the Prague authorities of nationality and property like the rest.

The proposition, moreover, that it is legitimate in some circumstances to declare in respect of entire populations that considerations of human rights are simply not to apply is an exceedingly dangerous one. Once the principle that certain specially disfavoured groups may be treated in this way is admitted, it is hard to see why it should not be applied to others. Scholars including Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, John Mearsheimer and Michael Mann have already pointed to the expulsion of the Germans as an encouraging precedent for the organization of similar forced migrations in the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East and elsewhere.

The history of the postwar expulsions, though, shows that there is no such thing as an "orderly and humane" transfer of populations: violence, cruelty and injustice are intrinsic to the process. As the former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia as a small child, has correctly noted: "Collective punishments, such as forced expulsions, are usually rationalized on the grounds of security but almost always fall most heavily on the defenseless and weak."

It is important to bear in mind that no valid comparison may be drawn between the expulsion of the Germans and the far greater atrocities for which Nazi Germany was responsible. Suggestions to the contrary -- including those made by expellees themselves -- are both offensive and historically illiterate.

Nonetheless, as the historian B.B. Sullivan has observed in another context, "greater evil does not absolve lesser evil." The postwar expulsions were by any measure one of the most significant occurrences of the mass violation of human rights in recent history. Their demographic, economic, cultural and political effects continue to cast a long and baleful shadow across the European continent. Yet their importance remains unacknowledged, and many vital aspects of their history have not been adequately studied.

Nearly seventy years after the end of the Second World War, as the last surviving expellees are passing from the scene, the time has come for this tragic and destructive episode to receive the attention it deserves, so that the lessons it teaches may not be lost and the unnecessary suffering it engendered may not be repeated.

[tango37]

It's easy to sit back 67 years afterwards and attempt to dissect the motivations of the parties involved. This fact however is indisputable. The Germans waged a war of extermination in the east. Their purpose was nothing less than the complete annihilation of the elites and the reduction of everyone else to the status of helots who would not be allowed to reproduce. That was Lebensraum in action so spare me the river of tears for the German expellees. Over 20 million Russians and 6 million Poles died in WW2.These staggering numbers are difficult for Canadians to fathom given our losses of barely 40000.I won't attempt to balance the evil and depravity of the Nazis vis a vis the Bolsheviks but there's a reason the Red Army soldier fought so desperately. What happened was regrettable and perhaps not morally justifiable but in the context of Nazi crimes, committed with the complicity of large swaths of the German population, it's understandable.

[wildernessvoice]

At the end of World War 2 Germany was supposed to hve been broken into a pastoral existence- no industry, no army and no culture. Then along came Mr Stalin and the US realized they needed Germany as a buffer against Russia.
On to plan b.
The breaking of Germany had the same effect as the breaking of Germany after WW 1. It built up resentment and with resentment came that great German pride.
The result? Today Germany is the most powerful country in Europe.
You can write that the German people have forgot what was done to children, women and old men but don't believe it. Germany today is stronger than it has ever been. France and England are as week as they have ever been.
It took Hitler two days to drive from Berlin to Paris. Today? He could do it on a Sunday afternoon drive.
There are more people than the Jews that are sworn to never forget.