THOUSANDS MOURN VICTIMS OF ALLIED ATROCITY

 

 

'Neo-Nazis' upstage official Dresden ceremonies

 

NSNS Thursday, 17 February 2005

DRESDEN—In one of the largest patriotic demonstrations seen in postwar Germany, thousands marched Sunday through Dresden on the 60th anniversary of the city's destruction in a terror raid by British and American warplanes.

Carrying flaming torches and black flags, the demonstrators—numbering twice the official estimate of 4,000 to 5,000—overshadowed the parody ceremonies staged by the German puppet government and dignitaries of Israel and the wartime Allies, who sought to deny the extent of the Dresden Holocaust.

As the marchers crossed the Elbe towards the old city, they were accompanied by the solemn strains of Wagner and Bach playing from loudspeakers.

A small group of "anti-fascists," waving U.S., British and Israeli flags and throwing pink paper airplanes with Allied markings, shouted the usual obscenities. In response, the march organizers merely turned up the volume on their loudspeakers and played "The Ride of the Valkyries."

The well-attended demonstration was particularly embarrassing for Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who has gone to great lengths to play up to the former Allied powers and Germany's growing Jewish community. Before the march, he had pledged to prevent "rightwing extremists" from demonstrating in Dresden.

Regime responds with call for repression

The political establishment appears to have been taken completely unawares by the recent patriotic resurgence and the rise of the National Party of Germany (NPD), which won 9.2% of the vote in last September's elections in Saxony, giving it 12 seats in the provincial legislature.

In an interview with the newspaper Welt am Sonntag following the commemoration, Schröder hinted that he would try to ban the NPD, which helped organize the march. He accused it of portraying Germans as victims of the Second World War.

The chancellor now faces a tricky period in trying to reconcile the German state's proclaimed right of free expression and peaceful assembly with growing "neo-Nazi" ascendancy.

Support for the NPD appears to be rising, especially in depressed areas of the former communist East Germany, where unemployment averages 20%.

"My husband and I are NPD voters," said Anni Lutzner, who attended yesterday's NPD-organized rally in Dresden. "We believe that the German state favors foreigners and Jews."

She added: "There's no point in banning us—we'll simply find a new name."

'No forgiving, no forgetting'

The commemoration included thousands of young people, as well as pensioners who, like vast numbers of refugees, were driven out of Germany's former eastern provinces. They carried black balloons with the slogan: "Allied terror bombing—no forgiving, no forgetting."

Addressing the gathering, the NPD's leader in the Saxon parliament, Holger Apfel, launched an attack on the "gangster politics of the British and Americans."

"They have left a trail of blood from the past to the present, via Dresden, Korea, Vietnam, Baghdad and—tomorrow possibly—Tehran. Terror and war have a name," he said. "And that name is the United States of America."

Still other speakers cited the genocidal statements of Winston Churchill calling for the massacre of German civilians. They accused German authorities of deliberately underestimating the number of civilians killed in Dresden during the Allied raids.

'Florence of the North'

Once dubbed the "Florence of the North" and untouched by bombing until the end of World War II, Dresden was nearly destroyed by two waves of British bombers on the night of February 13 and 14, 1945. U.S. planes blasted the city the next day, deliberately targeting the surviving women, children and old men who had sought refuge in open areas of the city.

The official death toll from the raids is put at 35,000, But survivors reject this as ludicrous, as many of the bodies were simply reduced to ashes in the ensuing holocaust and never counted.

The exact number of those who died in at Dresden—a city of 600,000 packed with with another 700,000 refugees crowded in the open—will never be known. But many believe the true figure was at least 10 times the official figure and possibly over a half million.

Whatever the actual figure, neither Britain nor the United States has ever seen fit to issue a formal apology for this hideous wartime atrocity—not even on this solemn occasion, when supposedly they were gathered at ceremonies to honor the victims.