ΑΡΘPΟΓΡΑΦΙΑ

by R. H. S. Crossman     (Esquire Magazine – November 1963)

The long suppressed story of the worst massacre in the history of the world.

If the British Commonwealth and the United States last a thousand years, men may say that this was their darkest hour.

Were all the crimes against humanity committed during World War II the work of Hitler’s underlings? That was certainly the impression created by the fact that only Germans were brought to trial at Nüremburg. Alas! It is a false impression. We all now know that in the terrible struggle waged between the Red Army and the German Wehrmacht, the Russians displayed their fair share of insensate inhumanity. What is less widely recognized — because the truth, until only recently, has been deliberately suppressed — is that the Western democracies were responsible for the most senseless single act of mass murder committed in the whole course of World War II.

The devastation of Dresden in February, 1945, was one of those crimes against humanity whose authors would have been arraigned at Nüremburg if that Court had not been perverted into the instrument of Allied justice. Whether measured in terms of material destruction or by loss of human life, this “conventional” air raid was far more devastating than either of the two atomic raids against Japan that were to follow it a few months later. Out of 28,410 houses in the inner city of Dresden, 24,866 were destroyed; and the area of total destruction extended over eleven square miles.

As for the death roll, the population, as we shall see, had been well nigh doubled by a last-minute influx of refugees flying before the Red Army; and even the German authorities — usually so pedantic in their estimates — gave up trying to work out the precise total after some 35,000 bodies had been recognized, labeled and buried. We do know, however, that the 1,250,000 people in the city on the night of the raid had been reduced to 368,619 by the time it was over; and it seems certain that the death roll must have greatly exceeded the 71,879 at Hiroshima. Indeed, the German authorities were probably correct who, a few days after the attack, put the total somewhere between 120,000 and 150,000.

[ΣΥΝΕΧΕΙΑ]