The Fire Bombing of Dresden and False History

This was written in response to a posting that I read concerning this past weekend's march of about 6,000 skinheads in Dresden on the anniversary of the bombing coupled with recent discussions of Holocaust denial and minimization related to the rehabilitation of Bishop Williamson and other members of the Society of St. Pius X.

Shalom All,

Please note that inflation of the death totals of the fire-bombing of Dresden is a major part of Holocaust denial and minimization. Had I not heard Dr. Deborah Lipstadt speak and mention that specifically, I would not have known. David Irving's work The Destruction of Dresden had become THE historical account of the event.

Deborah Lipstadt's famous trial in which she proved David Irving wrong included a discussion of the fire-bombing of Dresden specifically and Irving's attempts, as a "historian" of World War II, to argue that some 135,000, 250,000, or even "hundreds of thousands" died, rather than the 25,000 noted in some articles or the 35,000 cited by the German Police at the time and quoted in Deborah Lipstat's blog
http://lipstadt.blogspot.com/2007/04/kurt-vonnegut-and-david-irving-in.html .

Irving wanted to argue that allied actions were as bad as those of the Nazis in relation to the Jews or worse. When you combine inflated Dresden death totals with minimized Holocaust totals you get a comparison of 250,000 or more dead in one attack at Dresden compared with 300,000 Jews dead (if we use Williamson as an example) in the camps during the entire war. This comparison further minimizes the Holocaust and does so to the point that the Germans become more the victims of genocide than the Jews were.

Remember that deniers believe that the Jews simply relocated to Israel and that relatively few died.

Let's take a look at what one Holocaust minimizer, Kevin Alfred Strom, wrote in his article http://www.library.flawlesslogic.com/dresden.htm .

Strom wrote:

Despite the fact that they could clearly see that the marked target area contained hospitals and sports stadia and residential areas of center city Dresden, the bombers nevertheless obeyed orders and rained down a fiery death upon the unlucky inhabitants of that city on a scale which had never before been seen on planet Earth. Hundreds of thousands of innocents were literally consumed by fire, an actual holocaust by the true definition of the word: complete consumption by fire.

Rabbi Kaufman continues:

Look at that last sentence! "Hundreds of thousands of innocents," "an ACTUAL holocaust by the TRUE DEFINITION of the word." The reason that Dresden is a haven for Neo-Nazi groups is that it has been created as the anti-Jewish holocaust, a demonstration that, in essence, the Germans got it worse that the Jews ever did.The repeated use of the term "holocaust" by Strom in his article is precisely to argue that this, DRESDEN, was a holocaust and NOT what the Jews PRETEND to have been one. Guess who was Strom's source? He tells us only a couple of paragraphs later, "I urge every one of you to read The Destruction of Dresden by David Irving. I assure you, after reading Irving's book, you will never take seriously the Establishment's version of what happened in that war again."

What is frightening about the gathering of thousands at Dresden is that the gathering was about the lie, not the truth. If truth can have no purchase in the modern world and liars and deniers be given equal say to historians, we are all in for a frightening future.

-D