Post by Dan Dare on Jun 21, 2023 8:45:42 GMT
Re Dresden.
I offer the following extract from a review I wrote some years of Frederick Taylor’s Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945. . A bit lengthy probably but that’s necessary given the scale of the myths that have arisen about the city and the air-raids.
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In his Preface Taylor sets out his stall, as it were, and positions his book as a corrective to what he views as the ‘legend of Dresden’ , a legend perpetuated in the English-speaking world and elsewhere as he sees it, by authors such as David Irving and Alexander McKee , who originally published their ‘revisionist’ works on the subject in 1963 and 1982, respectively. Taylor takes particular issue with the notion that Dresden has since that time and largely through the efforts of those two authors, become synonymous with the term ‘senseless crime’. He asserts that the most objective work on the subject is available only in German, and refers particularly to a book by a Dresden-born eyewitness, Götz Bergander which, according to Taylor, is a ‘scrupulous, rich and fascinating’ account of the attacks on his native city. For Taylor, the principal argument revolves around the question whether Dresden was or was not at the time of the event a ‘special case’ given its reputation as the ‘Florence on the Elbe’, as Herder termed it. Was it merely the glittering baroque Kulturstadt of the Saxon monarchy, and therefore deserving of exclusion from Allied attentions, or was it, as Taylor proposes, a normally functioning major city in the Third Reich, albeit culturally uniquely endowed, with an attendant industrial infrastructure and extensive communications facilities, and therefore a legitimate military target? That is the principal question to which Taylor applies himself in the work under review here.
… In Chapter 13, ‘The City of No Military or Industrial Significance’, he marshals the key arguments in support of the contention that the bombings were a military necessity. He cites the 1944 Handbook of the German Army High Command’s Weapons Office, which includes over 120 manufacturers of weapons, munitions, and other military equipment which were located in or around the city. Famous names such as optical giant Zeiss and radio- and communications-equipment producer Radio-Mende employed tens of thousands in the city itself. By this stage of the war, all of the area’s light- and precision-engineering concerns had converted to war production, producing a vast array of military hardware including machine guns, searchlights, aircraft components, directional guidance systems (for V2s) and torpedoes. Although Dresden may not have been in the business of producing instantly-recognizable end-products like the neighboring cities of Chemnitz (tanks) or Leipzig (aircraft), Taylor leaves us in little doubt that the city’s extensive precision-engineering sector formed a vital cog in the German war machine, in much the same sense as did Schweinfurt with its ball-bearing industry.
Along with its manufacturing base, Dresden was equally notable as a communications hub. It lay at the junction of vital rail links, north-south from Berlin to Prague and Vienna, and the east-west route linking western Germany with the industrial regions of Silesia. By late 1943 the Dresden-based regional directorate of the German State Railways (Deutsche Reichsbahn) employed a total of 128,000 people. At the time of the bombing, Dresden had taken on an additional significance as the logistical supply center (and potential evacuation route) for Army Group Centre, then facing the Red Army a hundred miles or so to the east. The importance of Dresden as a military transport node is underlined by the scale of rail traffic passing through it; in late 1944 no fewer than 28 military trains, with a total complement of over 20,000 troops and their equipment, were passing east through Dresden every day . Taylor also recounts an Allied analysis of German plans for the reinforcement the Eastern front, based on Enigma intercepts, which entailed moving 26 divisions from Norway, Italy, Hungary and elsewhere in the south and west, the majority of which would have had to be routed via Dresden during February 1945 en route for the Eastern Front .
In addition to its military significance as a hub for the transportation of troops and materiel to the East, Dresden also served as a major channel for the evacuation of German civilians from the areas to the east which had been overrun by the Red Army. The question of the size of the population of the city at the time of the attacks, inevitably swelled as it must have been to some extent by an influx of refugees, is intimately connected with the politically-charged issue of the death toll, to which we return later. Irving makes the (unsourced) claim that “…At the time of the attacks in addition to its full peace-time population of 650,000 citizens Dresden was housing perhaps three or four hundred thousand refugees from the east, and probably even more” . Taylor, on the other hand, goes into considerably greater detail on the mechanics of the refugee management protocols then in effect, and basing his case on the fact that there is no evidence of any large scale compulsory billeting of refugees in the city, nor were any transit camps set up to house them, as well as on the work of local historians such as Bergander, and thus claims that most refugees had already been ‘moved on’ further to the west. According to Taylor, Bergander states that the total number of displaced persons and refugees in the city at the time of the attacks was “maximally of the order of several tens of thousands”.
Taylor addresses the overall death toll in Appendix B ‘Counting the Dead’. He surveys the range of estimates that have been proposed over the years, ranging from the 35,000 or so cited by the East German politician Max Seydewitz in 1955, David Irving’s original 1963 figure of ‘at least 135,000’ (long accepted as the standard, at least in the English-speaking world), up to the 202,400 referenced in the notorious Tagesbefehl (Daily Order) No. 47, a document which is now known to have been ‘doctored’ in Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry. Taylor cites new documentation that has emerged from the city archives since reunification, indicating an overall death toll of around 25,000. He acknowledges, however, that other credible sources continue to insist on figures as high as 40,000 .
Another area of contention on which Taylor casts his spotlight is the alleged strafing of civilians by the USAAF escort fighters which had accompanied the US bombing forces during the daytime raid following the RAF night bombing. Irving continues to make much of this, and Taylor reviews the available evidence in Appendix A ‘The “Massacre on the Elbe meadows”’. Citing documents in the US National Archives, he concludes that the strafing did not occur as claimed, and that the few US fighters that did appear at low altitude over the city were involved in dog-fights with Fw 190 interceptors that had been dispatched to harry the bomber stream. He concedes that there could well have been civilian ‘collateral damage’ as a result, but plausibly maintains that there was no orchestrated effort to strafe civilians sheltering along the Elbe meadows in the aftermath of the bombing. In a final bout of ‘myth-busting’, Taylor debunks the story, which is apparently still enthusiastically recounted by locals, that German-American agents resident in Dresden had provided the Allies with key intelligence and even guided the bombers onto the target by means of light signals from their rooftop (see Appendix C ‘Legend of the Fall’).
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I offer the following extract from a review I wrote some years of Frederick Taylor’s Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945. . A bit lengthy probably but that’s necessary given the scale of the myths that have arisen about the city and the air-raids.
**********************
In his Preface Taylor sets out his stall, as it were, and positions his book as a corrective to what he views as the ‘legend of Dresden’ , a legend perpetuated in the English-speaking world and elsewhere as he sees it, by authors such as David Irving and Alexander McKee , who originally published their ‘revisionist’ works on the subject in 1963 and 1982, respectively. Taylor takes particular issue with the notion that Dresden has since that time and largely through the efforts of those two authors, become synonymous with the term ‘senseless crime’. He asserts that the most objective work on the subject is available only in German, and refers particularly to a book by a Dresden-born eyewitness, Götz Bergander which, according to Taylor, is a ‘scrupulous, rich and fascinating’ account of the attacks on his native city. For Taylor, the principal argument revolves around the question whether Dresden was or was not at the time of the event a ‘special case’ given its reputation as the ‘Florence on the Elbe’, as Herder termed it. Was it merely the glittering baroque Kulturstadt of the Saxon monarchy, and therefore deserving of exclusion from Allied attentions, or was it, as Taylor proposes, a normally functioning major city in the Third Reich, albeit culturally uniquely endowed, with an attendant industrial infrastructure and extensive communications facilities, and therefore a legitimate military target? That is the principal question to which Taylor applies himself in the work under review here.
… In Chapter 13, ‘The City of No Military or Industrial Significance’, he marshals the key arguments in support of the contention that the bombings were a military necessity. He cites the 1944 Handbook of the German Army High Command’s Weapons Office, which includes over 120 manufacturers of weapons, munitions, and other military equipment which were located in or around the city. Famous names such as optical giant Zeiss and radio- and communications-equipment producer Radio-Mende employed tens of thousands in the city itself. By this stage of the war, all of the area’s light- and precision-engineering concerns had converted to war production, producing a vast array of military hardware including machine guns, searchlights, aircraft components, directional guidance systems (for V2s) and torpedoes. Although Dresden may not have been in the business of producing instantly-recognizable end-products like the neighboring cities of Chemnitz (tanks) or Leipzig (aircraft), Taylor leaves us in little doubt that the city’s extensive precision-engineering sector formed a vital cog in the German war machine, in much the same sense as did Schweinfurt with its ball-bearing industry.
Along with its manufacturing base, Dresden was equally notable as a communications hub. It lay at the junction of vital rail links, north-south from Berlin to Prague and Vienna, and the east-west route linking western Germany with the industrial regions of Silesia. By late 1943 the Dresden-based regional directorate of the German State Railways (Deutsche Reichsbahn) employed a total of 128,000 people. At the time of the bombing, Dresden had taken on an additional significance as the logistical supply center (and potential evacuation route) for Army Group Centre, then facing the Red Army a hundred miles or so to the east. The importance of Dresden as a military transport node is underlined by the scale of rail traffic passing through it; in late 1944 no fewer than 28 military trains, with a total complement of over 20,000 troops and their equipment, were passing east through Dresden every day . Taylor also recounts an Allied analysis of German plans for the reinforcement the Eastern front, based on Enigma intercepts, which entailed moving 26 divisions from Norway, Italy, Hungary and elsewhere in the south and west, the majority of which would have had to be routed via Dresden during February 1945 en route for the Eastern Front .
In addition to its military significance as a hub for the transportation of troops and materiel to the East, Dresden also served as a major channel for the evacuation of German civilians from the areas to the east which had been overrun by the Red Army. The question of the size of the population of the city at the time of the attacks, inevitably swelled as it must have been to some extent by an influx of refugees, is intimately connected with the politically-charged issue of the death toll, to which we return later. Irving makes the (unsourced) claim that “…At the time of the attacks in addition to its full peace-time population of 650,000 citizens Dresden was housing perhaps three or four hundred thousand refugees from the east, and probably even more” . Taylor, on the other hand, goes into considerably greater detail on the mechanics of the refugee management protocols then in effect, and basing his case on the fact that there is no evidence of any large scale compulsory billeting of refugees in the city, nor were any transit camps set up to house them, as well as on the work of local historians such as Bergander, and thus claims that most refugees had already been ‘moved on’ further to the west. According to Taylor, Bergander states that the total number of displaced persons and refugees in the city at the time of the attacks was “maximally of the order of several tens of thousands”.
Taylor addresses the overall death toll in Appendix B ‘Counting the Dead’. He surveys the range of estimates that have been proposed over the years, ranging from the 35,000 or so cited by the East German politician Max Seydewitz in 1955, David Irving’s original 1963 figure of ‘at least 135,000’ (long accepted as the standard, at least in the English-speaking world), up to the 202,400 referenced in the notorious Tagesbefehl (Daily Order) No. 47, a document which is now known to have been ‘doctored’ in Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry. Taylor cites new documentation that has emerged from the city archives since reunification, indicating an overall death toll of around 25,000. He acknowledges, however, that other credible sources continue to insist on figures as high as 40,000 .
Another area of contention on which Taylor casts his spotlight is the alleged strafing of civilians by the USAAF escort fighters which had accompanied the US bombing forces during the daytime raid following the RAF night bombing. Irving continues to make much of this, and Taylor reviews the available evidence in Appendix A ‘The “Massacre on the Elbe meadows”’. Citing documents in the US National Archives, he concludes that the strafing did not occur as claimed, and that the few US fighters that did appear at low altitude over the city were involved in dog-fights with Fw 190 interceptors that had been dispatched to harry the bomber stream. He concedes that there could well have been civilian ‘collateral damage’ as a result, but plausibly maintains that there was no orchestrated effort to strafe civilians sheltering along the Elbe meadows in the aftermath of the bombing. In a final bout of ‘myth-busting’, Taylor debunks the story, which is apparently still enthusiastically recounted by locals, that German-American agents resident in Dresden had provided the Allies with key intelligence and even guided the bombers onto the target by means of light signals from their rooftop (see Appendix C ‘Legend of the Fall’).
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