← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Hilaire Belloc
Thread ID: 10653 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2003-10-22
2003-10-22 05:35 | User Profile
[url]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3211690.stm[/url]
Horrific fire-bombing images published
By Ray Furlong BBC Berlin correspondent
A ceremony is being held in the central German town of Kassel on Wednesday, marking the 60th anniversary of an allied bombing raid that claimed more than 10,000 lives in a single night.
The event, at which eye-witnesses will relive the horror of that night, comes just as a new book has been published with shocking photographs of German air raid victims which have never been seen before. The pictures in Brandstaetten (Places of Fire), are truly gruesome.
Heaps of twisted, charred bodies amid piles of rubble are a visual echo of Holocaust victims - and therefore also a hugely provocative image.
"We've all seen the pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But these (new) images are not part of the iconography of the war," says historian Joerg Friedrich, who compiled the book.
"If you like looking at these photos you're crazy and you need a doctor. But this is a matter of truth."
Mr Friedrich collected the photos from town archives across Germany while touring the country last year presenting a book about the Allied bombing.
That book, The Fire, caused controversy both here and in Britain by suggesting the air campaign may have been a war crime.
His new work has also sparked passionate debate.
"Can you show the body parts of bomb victims collected in bathtubs? The charred corpses of women, who crouched to the floor in a desperate search for oxygen?" asked Die Welt newspaper.
'Provocation'
Sueddeutsche Zeitung went even further - suggesting the reader consign the book to a dustbin, while a cultural magazine programme on ARD public television wrote it off as a "provocation" that sought to "compare the air war with the Holocaust".
Mr Friedrich says the decision to publish the photos was not easy.
In the end, the former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl played a part in convincing him - with the proviso that British, Dutch, Polish and other civilian victims of air warfare also be portrayed.
But he says the British Public Records Office would not release the kind of horrific images that he found of German victims. "There were 15,000 deaths in southern British cities between September and December 1940. But you won't see any photos of them," he says.
"The Germans admired the endurance of the Londoners in the Tube stations. But this is the heroic story. If you look at the image of the suffocated grandmother cradling her grandchild in a bunker, there is no heroism."
Keeping pictures like that, and the ones in the book, under wraps may be regarded as a sign of sensitivity - maintaining the dignity of the victims. But could it also produce a censored, sanitised version of history?
"Goebbels forbade these photos of our victims from the German papers," says Mr Friedrich. "In a way, we've obeyed his orders until this day."
2003-10-22 19:33 | User Profile
Most sickening was this quote "If you look at the image of the suffocated grandmother cradling her grandchild in a bunker, there is no heroism." which makes me so damn angry I am at loss for words.
As for the 15,000 deaths in UK mentioned that really is nothing compared with the holocaust of 100,000 in one day in Kassel. I note that one one mentioned that the bombing of cities was started first by the UK or that Churchhill had plans to dump Anthrax and plague on the German countryside in fantastic quantities. While the German bombing campaign killed many thousands of civilians (as any bombing of a population center would) and that was a tragedy at least the Germans bombed cities that had major war production or C3 resources. The allied bombing campaign was far larger and it's aim was simply to murder as many German civilians as possible and the numbers slaughter and maimed were shocking as were the fantastic numbers of people maimed for life.
What bothers me so much about this sort of thing is the unspeakable dishonesty and brass it takes for a moral cripple to scream about human rights, democracy and supposed guilt of the Axis when looks at America's use of atomic weapons and the murder of perhaphs well over a million civilians via fire bombing. Of course any one allied with Stalin is in no position to lecture anyone about morality of any sort. When I look at the mass murder of a million or so German POWs after the war and the even worse tribulations suffered by Axis civilians from '45 to '50 I become totally livid. Worst of all, I have yet to hear of these crimes being recognized let alone any attempt at condemnation which simply denonstrates that unspeakably vile nature of the anti - Occidental allied leadership and their purpets.
2003-10-22 21:23 | User Profile
A. Linder:
[url]http://www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/[/url]
American Atrocities in Germany [url]http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,2763,1067259,00.html[/url], Jew-Produced, Rest Assured
Rounding up millions of Germans after jews' war II and starving them to death? Americans wouldn't do that. They did. Oh yeah -- and they did some pretty nasty firebombing [url]http://www.codoh.com/incon/inconabr.html[/url] too... Of course, the "controversy" is not these disgusting atrocities but TALKING about them. Nice people don't mention that the British aren't nice. Nice people don't observe that jews are the turd in every punchbowl. I think nice is overrated, don't you? Jürg Friedrich defended the decision yesterday to publish the photographs showing the incinerated bodies of German women and children, most of them killed by British bombs. His book, Fire Sites, published at last week's Frankfurt Book Fair, argues that the RAF's relentless bombing campaign against German cities in the last months of the war served no military purpose. He claims that Winston Churchill's decision to bomb a shattered Germany between January and May 1945 was a war crime. "The bombing left an entire generation traumatised. But it was never discussed," he told the Guardian. Note that the man says 600,000 were killed. Yet another jew-produced REAL HOLOCAUST.
2003-10-22 21:57 | User Profile
Well, I realy didn't expect otherwise from that allied RAG "Süddeutsche Zeitung".
The Süddeutsche is an SPD rag.