Dresden:The shame of our civilization.

marcellus

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http://www.erichufschmid.net/TFC/Bollyn-Kurt-Vonnegut.html
please read it on the link.

The Passing of Kurt Vonnegut -
An Eyewitness to the Holocaust of Dresden
Christopher Bollyn
12 April 2007




Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
- Kurt Vonnegut in Bluebeard (1987)

I am truly sad to hear that Kurt Vonnegut has left us. He is one person that I really wanted to meet and now I regret that I didn't.
Having read Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) in high school and having lived a month at the slaughterhouse where he survived the fire bombing of Dresden in 1945, I would have very much liked to spend a few hours in Dresden, or anywhere for that matter, with Mr. Vonnegut.




Schlachthof 5
I wound up staying at Dresden's Alter Schlachthof, the old slaughterhouse, quite by accident. On February 14, 2004, exactly 59 years after the Allied fire bombing of Dresden, I took my family to hear the Mozart Requiem at Dresden's Semper Oper and we needed to find an affordable hotel.

We grabbed a taxi at the train station and I asked the driver for an inexpensive hotel. He drove about a mile from the town center down a wooded lane and through a large portal in a long wall that ran along the street.

We passed through the portal and entered into a large complex of well built but unused buildings that had a massive and most unusual tower structure in the middle.

A few hundred feet from the portal stood a small modern hotel, clearly from a later and less grand era, where we took a room. We wound up staying in there for several weeks.

The next day I walked around a bit and asked a groundskeeper some questions about what this large complex had been in the past. Eventually I learned that it had been a very famous and scientific modern slaughterhouse designed by Hans Erlwein in the early 1900s. In recent years it had been abandoned and most of the buildings were no longer used.

At the main entrance of the complex stood some very impressive buildings, one of which had the number 5 by the door. That building was the administration building and at the time that the complex served as a prison camp, the Allied POWs knew their camp by the post address for this main building: "Schlachthof 5."












As a 22-year-old POW, Kurt Vonnegut survived the fire-bombing of Dresden because he and the other prisoners had the good fortune to have been kept at the slaughterhouse where they had been taken into the well-built and deep meat cellar. The groundskeeper took me into the cellar so I could see where Vonnegut had survived the holocaust of Dresden.

I was surprised to learn that very few people knew that Allied prisoners had survived the bombing in the meat cellar of the old slaughterhouse and that one of them, Kurt Vonnegut from Indianapolis, had written a very famous book about what he had experienced in Dresden – 24 years later.

Vonnegut wrote about how he, as the character Billy, had survived the fire-bombing in Slaughterhouse-Five:

Billy was down in the meat locker on the night that Dresden was destroyed. There were sounds like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of high-explosive bombs. The giants walked and walked.
The meat locker was a very safe shelter. A guard would go to the head of the stairs every so often to see what it was like outside, then he would come down and whisper to the other guards. There was a fire storm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn.








Today, the day after Vonnegut passed away at age 84, the BBC played part of an interview with him. He said that he had been an eyewitness to the worst massacre in European history. Vonnegut was under the impression that about 135,000 people had been incinerated in the holocaust of Dresden.

This number is at the low end of the death toll estimates from the Ash Wednesday/Valentine's Day holocaust of Dresden.

The post-war British and American historians have greatly downplayed the number of victims and the size and viciousness of the Allied war crime that was the incineration – the holocaust of the hundreds of thousands of innocent people and the architectural masterpiece known as Florence on the Elbe.

Another eyewitness, the late August Kuklane, had spent time in Dresden looking for his Estonian parents among the hundreds of thousands of refugees that had sought refuge in Dresden during the desperate winter of 1945. Kuklane told me that the number of people estimated to have perished in the city center that had been totally destroyed by fire was about 600,000.

Both Vonnegut and Kuklane witnessed American fighter planes strafing the survivors of the holocaust of Dresden:

"American fighter planes came in under the smoke to see if anything was moving. They saw Billy and the rest moving down there. The planes sprayed them with machine gun bullets but the bullets missed," Vonnegut wrote.
"Then they saw some other people moving down by the riverside and they shot at them. They hit some of them. So it goes."

Photo below: after the bombing the Germans burned piles of dead bodies


Article Links:
Bollyn's article on Slaughterhouse Five:
Bollyn-Slaughterhouse-Five.html

The Dresden media picked up Bollyn's work also:
Bollyn-Slaughterhouse-Five.html#Auf-der-Suche

"Estonian Patriot Was Eyewitness to Firebombing of Dresden, Nuremberg Trials; The Historic Life of August Kuklane (1923-2006)"
http://www.erichufschmid.net/Kuklane_Dresden_eyewitness.pdf

There are photos of the Dresden bombing at the main page:
http://www.erichufschmid.net/EyewitnessToDresden.html


"The Dresden Bombing – An Eyewitness Account" by Edda West, Canada:
http://www.currentconcerns.ch/archive/2003/02/20030230.php


Musical links:

Eleven young choristers from Dresden's famous Kreuzchor were among those killed in the Allied fire-bombing on February 13, 1945.

Here are two short audio samples from the Kreuzchor singing from two moving works from Rudolf Mauersberger's masterpiece, the Dresden Requiem:

Here is the opening of motet 'Wir liegt die Stadt so wüst' -
http://www.carus-verlag.com/images-intern/medien/80/8311600/8311600.01s.mp3

Here is the opening of Introitus from Dresden Requiem –
http://www.carus-verlag.com/images-intern/medien/80/8311600/8311600.02s.mp3


Vonnegut Audio Links:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/625000/audio/_629620_dresden.ram

http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_6540000/newsid_6547900/6547903.stm?bw=nb&mp=rm

The following is a 30-minute BBC interview with Kurt Vonnegut. It begins (at 1:50 into the program) with an actor reading this excerpt from his book Slaughterhouse-Five about American fighter planes using their machine guns to kill the survivors of the Dresden holocaust on February 14, 1945:

American fighter planes came in under the smoke to see if anything was moving. They saw Billy and the rest moving down there. The planes sprayed them with machine gun bullets but the bullets missed.
"Then they saw some other people moving down by the riverside and they shot at them. They hit some of them. So it goes.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/frontrow/ram/programmes/frontrow_20060206.ram




Important:
Christopher Bollyn and his family are MIA

My response is here

Note: I don't know what happens if you donate money or order books from Bollyn! He was providing his articles for free and depending on sales of his ABC book for children, and on donations. His charming ABC book is here.

Please pass links to his articles, and try to find more people to join us in our struggle to expose corruption. Don't let "them" get all of us! Show some concern!
 
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Re: The fire bombing of Dresden.

Civilians (and cities with no military importance), were bombed by the Germans from the early days of the war. By stating that Dresden is, "...the shame of our civilization...", begs the question: Why is the Dresden incident any worse than what the Nazis did to allied cites and civilians? I am reminded in the now famous filmed Hitler speech where he asked the crowd: "Do you want total war?" And they shouted: "Yes". Well, they got total war (Dresden fire storm).
 
Dresden was the Florence of Germany ...
Only civilians .No defence for air bombing.
Phosphor bombs from the Allies.
German had the same kind of bombs but
never used them.

About Hitler ,who was an artist in pectore
was asked once ----If he was obliged to bomb
Florence or Berlin ,which of the 2 cities ha would
choose...He said Berlin.
 
Dresden was the Florence of Germany ...
Only civilians .No defence for air bombing.
Phosphor bombs from the Allies.
German had the same kind of bombs but
never used them.

About Hitler ,who was an artist in pectore
was asked once ----If he was obliged to bomb
Florence or Berlin ,which of the 2 cities ha would
choose...He said Berlin.

So what? For all the damage the Nazi's did to the world, Dresden was an insignificant event by comparison. Stop with your attempt at solicitation of sympathy for a single German city.
 
So what? For all the damage the Nazi's did to the world, Dresden was an insignificant event by comparison. Stop with your attempt at solicitation of sympathy for a single German city.

No. The posters efforts are really to denigrate western civilization and promote intolerant and murderous Islam using Nazi/Communist tactics.
 
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So what? The Palestinians have fired rockets into Israel frequently. Israel has the right to fire back. Poison gas? Please!!!! Arab Propaganda.
.
The real truth in the M.E. with statistics by UN
The jewish controlled media never mentions the
truth :Open the link .
Read the truth .
Do want to read it on Haaretz?

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the world’s major sources of instability. Americans are directly connected to this conflict, and increasingly imperiled by its devastation.

It is the goal of If Americans Knew to provide full and accurate information on this critical issue, and on our power – and duty – to bring a resolution.

Please click on any statistic for the source and more information.

Statistics Last Updated: November 16, 2010
Israeli and Palestinian Children Killed
September 29, 2000 - Present

124 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians and 1,452 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000. (View Sources & More Information)

Israelis and Palestinians Killed
September 29, 2000 - Present

1,084 Israelis and at least 6,430 Palestinians have been killed since September 29, 2000. (View Sources & More Information)

Israelis and Palestinians Injured
September 29, 2000 - Present

8,864 Israelis and 39,019 Palestinians have been injured since September 29, 2000. (View Sources & More Information.) Unfortunately, our sources have not updated these statistics in quite some time. We are working to find more up-to-date sources.

Daily U.S. Military Aid to Israel and the Palestinians
Fiscal Year 2009

During Fiscal Year 2009, the U.S. is providing Israel with at least $7.0 million per day in military aid and $0 in military aid to the Palestinians. (View Sources & More Information)

UN Resolutions Targeting Israel and the Palestinians
1955 - 1992

Israel has been targeted by at least 65 UN resolutions and the Palestinians have been targeted by none. (View Sources & More Information)

Current Number of Political Prisoners and Detainees

1 Israeli is being held prisoner by Palestinians, while 7,383 Palestinians are currently imprisoned by Israel. (View Sources & More Information)

Demolitions of Israeli and Palestinian Homes
1967 - Present

0 Israeli homes have been demolished by Palestinians and 24,145 Palestinian homes have been demolished by Israel since 1967. (View Sources & More Information)

Current Israeli and Palestinian Unemployment Rates

The Israeli unemployment rate is 6.1%, while the Palestinian unemployment in the West Bank is 16.3% and 41.3% in Gaza. (View Sources & More Information)

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Israel currently has 223 Jewish-only settlements and ‘outposts’ built on confiscated Palestinian land. Palestinians do not have any settlements on Israeli land. (View Sources & More Information)

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