De la historia de los crímenes de guerra occidentales: la masacre de Dresde (febrero de 1945)

Vladislav B. Sotirovic *

Los tres hombres del tajo

Fue en mayo/septiembre de 1945 cuando terminó la Segunda Guerra Mundial, la guerra más sangrienta y horrible jamás librada en la historia de la humanidad. La guerra que provocó la creación de la ONU en 1945 para proteger al mundo de acontecimientos similares en el futuro (una organización panglobal de seguridad política que emitió por primera vez un acto jurídico) fue una Carta de la ONU que inspiró la definición de la Convención de Ginebra de 1948. genocidio. 

The Nüremberg and Tokyo Trials were organized as “The Last Battles” for justice as the first ever global trials for war criminals and mass murderers including the top-hierarchy statesmen and politicians. However, 78 years after WWII the crucial moral question still needs a satisfactory answer: Are all the WWII war criminals faced justice at the Nüremberg and Tokyo Trials? Or at least those who did not escape from public life after the war. Here we will present only one of those cases from WWII which has to be characterized as the genocide followed by the personalities directly responsible for it: The 1945 Dresden Massacre.    

The 1945 Dresden Raid was surely one of the most destructive air raids during WWII but in world history of massive military destruction and war crimes against humanity too. The main and most destructive air raid was during the night of February 13th−14th, by the British Bomber Command when 805 bomber military crafts attacked the city of Dresden which up to that time was protected from similar attacks primarily for two reasons: 

1. The city was of extreme pan-European cultural and historical importance as one of the most beautiful “open-air museum” places in Europe and probably the city with the most beautiful Baroque architectural inheritance in the world.

2. The lack of the city’s geostrategic, economic, and military importance. 

The main air-born raid was followed by three more similar raids in daylight but now by the U.S. 8th Air Force. The Allied (in fact, the U.K.−U.S.) Supreme Commander-In-Chief the U.S. five-star General Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890−1969) was anxious to link the Allied forces with the very advancing Soviet Red Army in South Germany. For that reason, Dresden suddenly became to be taken into consideration as a point of high strategic importance as a communication center, at least in the eyes of Eisenhower. However, at that time Dresden was known as a city that was overcrowded by up to 500,000 German refugees from the east. For the U.K.−U.S. Supreme Command Headquarters, it was clear that any massive air bombing of the city would cost many human lives and cause a human catastrophe. That was not primarily only on Eisenhower’s conscience to decide to launch massive air-born attacks on Dresden or not as we have not to forget that Eisenhower was only a military commander (a strateg in the Greek) but not a politician. Unquestionably, the Dresden question in January−February 1945 was of a political and human nature not only of military one. Therefore, together with a Supreme Commander-In-Chief of the Allied Forces a direct moral and human responsibility for the 1945 Dresden Massacre was on the British PM Winston Churchill (1874−1965) and the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882−1945) too.

These three men, however, finally agreed that the inevitably very high casualties in Dresden might in the end, nevertheless, help to shorten the war, which from a technical point of view was true. During one night and one day of the raids, there were over 30,000 buildings destroyed, and the numbers of those who were killed in the bombing and the ensuing firestorm are still in dispute among historians as the estimations go up to 140,000. Here it has to be noticed that if this highest estimation number is going to be true it means that during the 1945 Dresden Massacre were killed more people than in the Hiroshima case from August 1945 (around 100,000 or one-third out of the total Hiroshima’s pre-bombing population). 

The “Bomber Harris” and the “Atomic Harry”

One person with direct responsibility for transforming Dresden into an open-air crematorium, as the city was bombed by forbidden flammable bombs for massive destruction (Saddam Hussein was attacked in 2003 by the NATO’s alliance under the alleged and finally false accusation of possessing exactly such weapons - WMD) is the “Bomber Harris” – a commander of the British Royal Air-Forces during the Dresden Raid. The “Bomber Harris” was, in fact, Arthur Travers Harris (1892−1984), a Head of the British Bomber Command in 1942−1945. He was born in Cheltenham, and joined the British Royal Flying Corps in 1915, before fighting as a solder in South-West Africa. He became a Commander of the Fifth Group from 1939 till 1942 when he became the Head of this Group (Bomber Command). The point is that it was exactly Arthur Travers Harris who stubbornly required and defended the massive area bombing of Germany under the idea that such practice would bring the destruction of Germany (including civil settlements) that would finally force Germany to surrender without involving the Allied forces into the full-scale overland military invasion. The crucial point is that this “Bomber Harry’s” strategy received full support from the British PM Winston Churchill who, therefore, became a politician who blessed and legitimized massive aerial massacres in the legal form of genocide as it was described in the post-WWII Charter of the UNO and other international documents on protection of human rights (for instance, the 1949 Geneva Conventions). Nevertheless, there was the “Bomber Harry”, Dwight Eisenhower, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill who transformed the bombing of selected targets such as transport systems, industrial areas, or oil refineries into the massive aerial destruction of the whole urban settlements with transforming them into the open-air crematoriums like it was done for the first time in history with Dresden – a city with a rare historical heritage (today the pre-war Dresden would be on the UNESCO list of protected places of the world’s heritage) but flattened during one night and one day. 

Esta práctica exitosa fue seguida muy pronto por las fuerzas aliadas en el caso de otras ciudades alemanas, como Würtzburg, una ciudad de viviendas medieval muy poblada que explotó en una tormenta de fuego en marzo de 1945 en una noche con el 90% del espacio urbano destruido y que no tenía ningún valor estratégico. importancia. Sin embargo, un bombardeo estratégico de los asentamientos urbanos durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial alcanzó su punto máximo con la destrucción de Hiroshima y Nagasaki por orden del presidente (demócrata) estadounidense Harry Truman, el "Harry atómico" (1884-1972), que autorizó el lanzamiento de la bomba. bombas atómicas sobre estas dos ciudades japonesas para poner fin a la guerra contra Japón sin más pérdidas de las tropas militares estadounidenses, insistiendo en la rendición incondicional de Japón.

“La última batalla por la justicia” y los “Carniceros de Dresde”

Seguramente, uno de los resultados más obvios de la Segunda Guerra Mundial fue “su incomparable destructividad. Fue más visible en las ciudades devastadas de Alemania y Japón, donde los bombardeos aéreos masivos, una de las principales innovaciones de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, resultaron mucho más costosos en vidas y edificios que los bombardeos de ciudades españolas durante la guerra civil española. ”. Por esa y otras razones, creemos que muchos militares aliados y personalidades civiles con alto poder de decisión durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial debieron tener que enfrentarse a la justicia en los juicios de Nüremberg y Tokio junto con Hitler, Eichmann, Pavelić y muchos otros. Sin embargo, es una vieja verdad que los ganadores están escribiendo historia y reescribiendo la historiografía. Por lo tanto, en cambio, ver a Dwight Eisenhower, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), Harry Truman o Arthur Travers Harris en las salas de los juicios de Nüremberg y Tokio acusados ​​de crímenes contra la humanidad y genocidio como lo fueron los alemanes Los acusados ​​nazis, que incluían a funcionarios del NSDAP y oficiales militares de alto rango junto con industriales, agentes de la ley y médicos alemanes, estamos incluso 73 años después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial leyendo y aprendiendo biografías políticamente blanqueadas y embellecidas de aquellos criminales de guerra que destruyeron Dresde, Hiroshima. o Nagasaki como héroes nacionales, luchadores por la libertad y protectores de la democracia. Por ejemplo, en ninguna biografía oficial de Winston Churchill no está escrito que él sea responsable de la limpieza étnica de los civiles alemanes en 1945, pero sabemos que el primer ministro británico prometió claramente a los polacos recuperar después de la guerra territorios étnicamente limpiados de manos de los alemanes.

Si el juicio de Nüremberg, 1945-1949, fue “la última batalla” por la justicia, entonces estuvo incompleto. Además, a dos de los asesinos más ardientes de Dresde, Churchill y Eisenhower, se les concedió después de la guerra el segundo cargo de primer ministro y la presidencia de doble mandato, respectivamente, en sus países.  

Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic

Ex profesor universitario

Investigador del Centro de Estudios Geoestratégicos

Belgrado, Serbia

www.geostrategy.rs

[email protected]

© Vladislav B. Sotirovic 2024  

Descargo de responsabilidad personal: el autor escribe para esta publicación a título privado y no representa a nadie ni a ninguna organización, excepto sus puntos de vista personales. Nada escrito por el autor debe confundirse jamás con las opiniones editoriales o posiciones oficiales de ningún otro medio o institución        .

* Gracias a Vladislav B. Sotirovic