The Allied Bombing Campaign from the German Civilian's Perspective
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- Опубликовано: 1 июл 2023
- Much is made of the impact that the Allied Strategic Bombing Campaign had on the outcome of the war, along with it's associated moral questions. But in this video we look at life for the German civilians who lived and died under the bombs of the RAF and the USAAF.
Source List
Among the Dead Cities: Is the Targeting of Civilians in War ever Justified? London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2014.
“The Fire-Bombing of Dresden.” The bombing of Dresden. Accessed January 2, 2023. timewitnesses.org/english/~lo....
Fischer, Ursula Anna. Picking Tomatoes When the Sky was in Flames: Growing up in Germany during World War II. Los Gatos, CA: Robertson Publishing, 2010.
Garrett, Stephen A. Ethics and Airpower in World War II: The British Bombing of German Cities. New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, 1993.
Mierzejewski, Alfred C. The Collapse of the German War Economy, 1944-1945: Allied Air Power and the German National Railway. Chapel Hill, N.C: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Stargardt, Nicholas. The German War. Random House UK, 2015.
Taylor, Frederick. Dresden: Tuesday, 13 February 1945. London, UK: Bloomsbury Paperbacks, 2011.
Reupload after a slight audio tech issue. Pledge comments to the algorithm gods 🙏
Oh, I thought I was going insane because I saw the notification earlier but didn't see the video when I I sat down to eat.
Comment for the algorithm gods🙏
Worth watching again
All hail the algorithm!
A sacrifice the algorithm
My mother-in-law (who is a US citizen) was a daughter of German immigrants who went back to see family in Western Germany in the summer of 1939 (what was supposed to be ~3-4 week visit) - while there were certainly war rumors-no one was thinking it was right around the corner. They were literally on their return ship home - when the German gov't made everyone get back off the ship - and the port was closed. long story short-- she spent the ENTIRE war IN GERMANY being bombed - and didn't make it back home until 1947. She is now 90 (even served as US Army nurse during Korean war). She has some stories to tell....
Just remember Germany had been into bombing city's in the first world war, zeplins and gothas.
@@thomasbaker6563Crimes don’t justify crimes. The difference in scale and intention are not remotely the same.
@@JRyan-lu5im take ur nonsense elsewhere.....
@@JRyan-lu5im They were terror bombing civilian centers to there maximum capacity. The intention was there but the means limited. And your in a total war scenario, many ethical frameworks would suggest that war should only be conducted to your maximum potential.
@@JRyan-lu5im The Germans and Japanese said they wanted TOTAL WAR. They were given TOTAL WAR.
"The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind." -Arthur Harris
He was a moron.
Unfathomably based.
War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. -W.T. Sherman.
To this day one of the hardest lines in history
Ah the words of the war criminal.
My mother was born in Kiel on the Baltic Sea in 1941. Kiel was bombed 90 times between 1940 and 1945. Although my mother was very small at the time, the air alarms and the escape into the bunker are deeply etched in her memory. She can still remember how my grandmother, together with her and her two siblings, always ran in a great hurry to the next bunker. Once she witnessed how a provisional shelter received a direct hit and all the people there were dead. Now she is 82 years old and when there are sometimes test alarms to test the air raid sirens, she gets goose bumps and a slight tremor affects her.
Except that most Schlevig Holstein was involved in the murder of their Jews. So her family were murderers. And most of the women were informers. This is what she was. I am happy she suffered.
My half brother was killed during the last air raid, on kiel, 2/3 May, 1945. After being fired at by a Night fighter, a Bomber close to his, collided with them after the flight controls were damaged. only 3 out of 16 crew combined, survived, he was not one of them, and is buried in Kiel Cemetary. He had joined the RAF in 1940 aged 18, and died aged 22, married for 5 months. The war ended 5 days later. They were all doing their duty.
@@MrDaiseymay A family member of mine was an auxiliary in the RAF through the war, in Bomber Command. She always spoke very highly of the bravery of the "young boys" who would be missing in the mess hall after bombing missions. Your half brother was a hero. A boyfriend of hers in the war was a Spitfire pilot who was killed over France and another one was a tail gunner in a bomber and returned to base after a mission, dead at his position, having been shredded in two by a Germen night-fighter.
That is PTSD.
Berlin was bombed 314 times, those who ordered that had no respect whatsoever for German and RAF and USAF crew's lives. Deadly, Expensive and useless. As soon as the war ended, the British had to borrow $3,75 billion from the US not to starve, 61 German cities were reduced to rubble and 1,500 French towns and villages were also bombed, I guess Churchill didn't keep the tabs.
The (german) Grandfather of a close friend of mine was injured on the eastern front and sent back to Germany to get treated. After his injury he and his new unit were supposed to take a train to Dresden for air defense purposes. He missed the train and didn't go with them. This was short before the bombing of Dresden.
Of his unit, he was the only one to survive as far as he knew it.
He passed away earlier this year at the age of 97.
o7
Should have passed away much earlier, a nazi is a nazi.
The bombing of Dresden was 1945 meaning he would have been 19 at that time and only 13 at the start of the war. He basically grew up in the war
@@aozzya1563Everyone is a soldier when the men are all dead.
The brother of my grandfather was with his unit in the Dresden HBF (main train station) during the bombing of Dresden, not sure if it was the same unit as your grandfather was supposed to be in though. However, he told me that on this night about half of his unit was killed during the bombing.
He later got in soviet captivity, returned some time after the war. He passed away last year.
It’s hard to imagine what a fire tornado would be like raging in the center of a city, terrifying.
I remember hearing an account from a survivor:
*_Literal hell on earth._* *_People got sucked up into fire tornadoes as they desperately clawed at the ground trying to grab hold of anything._*
That’s a terrifying image.
@@alitlweird Jesus.
Normal tornadoes are terrifying enough, fire tornadoes are shockingly destructive; temperatures can sometimes be high enough to liquefy - yes, liquefy not soften - the metal in a steel framed building. The only country in which I have heard of them occurring naturally is Australia, where bush fires occasionally combine with tornadoes to form natural fire tornadoes. The first few times they struck human settlements nobody understood what had happened because there were no survivors and the evidence left behind was so unfamiliar that nobody was able to work out what it meant. Eventually somebody caught one on video from a distance.
So far no town of significant size has been struck by a natural fire tornado, and I really hope it stays that way.
A lot of people died of suffocation as the fires use all the oxygen up..
@@gordonemery6949that's actually what flamethrowers are for.
Here is a couple of anecdotes from the British side. My mother was borne in Birmingham city during an air raid. Imagine the hospital staff that remained there for her life to begin. My father played as a boy amongst the ruins of Birmingham with whatever mates were still alive after each bombing raid. My Grandfather was a gas fitter and jumped into a bomb crater to shut off a gas main and put out a fire threatening to ignite the gas. Not all the heroes were at the front.
This is an amazing story.
tu quo-que fallatio and attack ad-m&m, your argument is illogical and irrelevant
Also my mother was a dwarf in a travelling circus in Birmingham, my father played the tuba and my grandfather was my father. Not all were heroes at the front.
Thank the gods for “Mr Brown of London Town”
Thanks for sharing that story. As for your grandfather: respect.
I am from a small village about 20 km from Wurzburg. About 20 years ago, I was speaking with some long-time family friends (who have since passed away). They lived in Wurzburg in March 1945 when the British firebombed the city. They remember that they were hiding in a basement and that the air was on fire outside in the city. A man covered in a wet rug came to rescue them. He would take one person at a time (they were 10 - 15 years old) and run to the river Main (about 3/4 mile away) covered in the wet rug. There, others would help them to cross the river and move up onto the vineyards that covered the hillside on the other side of the river. The man rescued all 10 of the children taking shelter in the basement and they never saw him again.
About 90% of Wurzburg was destroyed with a much higher casualty rate than Dresden (as a percentage of the population). There were no major factories in Wurzburg, but it was a transportation hub and between England and Nuremburg, Germany where Hitler held many major rallies. The historic city center, churches, and Residence were rebuilt after the war. There is an exhibit in Wurzburg that shows what the city looked like after the bombing of 1945.
My father remembers standing outside of the family home in our village (about 8 years old at the time) where he could see the "sky burning" and praying that it didn't come for them.
I am from a family of Germans emigrated to the United States in the 1890s. All of the relatives who stayed died in the Wurzburg bombing.
Wow
Danke-interessante Geschichte.
Which village? My dad was in the American army in Wurzburg, I was there from 2002 - 2004. I lived in Eisengen which us wear on the A3. In 2008 - 2011 I was assigned to Mannheim but they had already closed Wurzburg so I didn't go back sadly. I miss it
One third of people in the town were killed in one night in a literal holocaust (“burnt offering”.)
Before I start the story I'd like to add to the video, a little explanation so you interested can put it into context:
Todays fire alert siren signal is very similar to the ww2 air raid siren signal - Fire Alert is up- and downswelling 3 times followed by a pause and repeated 3 times in a minute, while air raid signal was a continous up- and downswelling. Every first saturday in a month, the sirens are tested at noon, usually with the fire alert.
So back in the mid 2000's I was walking in the village I lived back then when this test happened. Close to me was an elderly lady who completely collapsed when the sirens started - crying, screaming, even wetting herself. Being a) active duty soldier and b) interested in history at that time, I (didn't know but) suspected what happened and headed over to tend to her. Turned out, she suffered a PTSD flashback as the siren caught her off guard 60 years later. I stayed in contact and later learned, that she was buried in a cellar when the house above her was hit and collapsed. She was dug out three days later (iirc) as the sole survivor of her family...
I can't even imagine how she must've felt, war is terrible.
There are RUclips videos of how to make authentic sounding air-raid sirens, they are remarkably simple if a bit antisocial.
And that was the main reason post war then West Germany went with famous hi-lo sirens for the police vehicles
What a story
I've quoted it before;
"Krieg führen ist wie den Tür eines dunklen Zimmers öffnen......-Man weiss nie genau was passieren wird"
Adolf Hitler-21 juni 1941.
My great-grand-father Bruno Gelbrich (1871-1953) and some of his family was from Dresden and lived there all his life. He wrote a lifelong diary which I have today.
He was present at the bombing of Dresden and was lucky to survive. His daughter threw the incoming small fire bombs (yes, this was daunting!) out the roof windows before major damage happened, but the neighbor house burnt down and the spot is today a parking place.
He wrote a long private report on the bombing of Dresden, which I also have. He wrote it to inform the rest of the family. He notes lots of terrible details (just making photos was prohibited to civilians). It is from this report that I know details to the level of which street was hit and where the damage zone ended - his house was at the very edge of it.
But one thing was absent: he showed no resentment against the bombing enemy (the British and Americans), in fact he lost not a single word on that, neither on his other diary notes. All of his writings is only about what was damaged, and how difficult it was to continue to live.
Thanks for the video. Every documentation about this event brings home some detail to my private history.
have you guys published or thought about publishing his diary?
@@hkiller57 after reading through all the diaries, in 2013/14 (6 volumes): no. Because, 99% of it is only private details about the family, which is irrelevant to public events. His notes about the Dresden bombing was a very rare exception of this "rule". Another fun details from this is: in 1945 when the Nazis definitely lost, I find the one and only super-emotional rant from him, about the "scumbag Goebbels", Hitlers' propaganda minister. Before that time, such thing was leading to death penalty. So, i guess, something had opened some ventiles and he let go a lot of steam ... as I said, very rare.
@@jangelbrich7056 You are letting your hollywood indoctrination surface!
No one was executed for honest criticism. My mother had a run-in with police officials when requesting a travel visa. The visa was issued without question or delay.
After the war my parents and numerous relatives had very little to say about the war. They simply went on with their lives according to the principle that the best revenge is to live well and prosper, to the chagrin of the enemy.
@@BasementEngineer very sorry, but You are very wrong when You say that "no one was executed". Defaitism, even if only in words, was punished, as was listening to "enemy radios"! The most prominent Nazi judge Roland Freisler alone reportedly sentenced some 5000 people to death, and not only the famous plotters against Hitler in 1944, but also many ordinary Germans who would talk too much to the wrong people. THIS fact is why most Germans were so used to shut-up-for-ever, even decades after the war: because they could not trust each other. And it took the next generation in the 1960s, to break up that barrier of silence.
@@BasementEngineer You may want to read this intro. It is only Wikipedia which can be debated, but there is more documentation around how far defaitism could be punished: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrkraftzersetzung
My dad was an mid-upper gunner on Lancasters 32 missions Mar-Sep 1944. He did discuss his wartime experiences with me as I too went into military service. He was deeply troubled by what he witnessed from his turret. However he was also well aware of what the German airforce did over Europe & the UK. Fast forward to 2023… civilians are still the victims of total war.
yes...and war is legalized killing....
Yeah in this war noone got spared and noone was free from guilt
Donald Pleasence (actor) always played these 'haunted' characters in his roles. When I later read he had been in RAF Bomber Command and at a point a POW I understood how easily he moved into those roles...perhaps he never escaped them.
@@vcv6560 = I know the fella from "The Great Escape" (1963)
He played the role of 'Colin' who went blind & next to James Garner
By chance, do you know which squadron(s) that D.P served with ??
@@hawnyfox3411 ha I am living i. The village were McQueen did his motorbike stunt. Always great to watch the movie
My mother, born 1942 in Cologne, started to count in a very strange way.
"3, 6, 9, 12"
Later they found out why.
She just simulated the adult people looking in the sky counting bombers.
I read too much history and watch far too many World War II videos. This is one of the best I’ve seen. It not only gives the overall facts, it provides human anecdotes and the lessons perceived at the time. Very, very well done. Thank you.
I agree, I think of all the books I've read and never had this perspective from the 'bombed' side.
Same
I too respect this docu. In HS in the 60s, I read Wheels of Terror by Sven Hassel, a Dane who served with a Nazi tank unit in WW2. It details the horrors suffered by German cities in chilling nightmarish detail. It's how I learned how German cities and civilians fared during the allied bombings.
A movie with the same title was made much later but it was unrelated to the book.
We weren't bombing "humans."
2:25 If even a single enemy bomber reaches Berlin, I shall no longer be called Göring but Meier.
- Hermann Meier
German civilian called air raid sirens, Meyer's Trumpets.
I don't get it.
@@stickemuppunkitsthefunlovi4733 It's from Goering's words when he was boasting that no allied aircraft would reach Berlin, he said if it happens you can call him Meyer. So when allied bombers did indeed start arriving, it left quite a bit of egg on his face and the air raid sirens were ironically nicknamed Meyer's Trumpets.
RAF Bomber Command aircrews suffered a high casualty rate: of a total of 125,000 aircrew, 57,205 were killed (a 46 percent death rate), a further 8,403 were wounded in action and 9,838 became prisoners of war. Therefore, a total of 75,446 airmen (60 percent of operational airmen) were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. Source: Wikipedia.
The RAF as well as the American Eight AF crews knew the danger, and were of course apprehensive and even frightened of the danger of flying into Germany. But they went. And they destroyed enough of the infrastructure to make a difference. That's why we pay tribute to the heroes.
@@kennykomodo2576If you could find the time, visit the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum just outside Savannah, GA. Was an incredible experience!
Yes, the losses of the Allied bomber crews were as high as those of the German U-boat crews. The two branches of arms were a meat grinder.
A well deserved punishment for their crimes.
@@keerf255 Got the shoe on the wrong foot, muppet. Nice try.
My grandma was born in 1940 in Hamburg between mattresses to shield from shrapnel from flak. The midwife came to them despite the fact that she was not allowed to do so because she was deemed vital medical personel. Later on when the big firestorm happened, it sucked oxygen out of the bunker where the family of my greatgrandma usually went. Noone survied there. Luckily her family went to a different bunker that night.
During the firestorm, the winds around were so strong that people still on the streets were sucked into the fire. Also the heat was so intense that the asphalt of the streets was melting. The home of my greatgrandparents was in the outskirts of the city, so the were not hit. But they had to take in a lot of their family because their home was destroyed.
My grandmas older sister was sent of to the countyside alsonside a lot of other children to be safe. We still have some letters her mum (my greatgrandma) wrote her.
Civilian casualties from flak must have been horrendous. Huge flak towers delivered thousands of shells into USAF bomber formations. An American airforce commander exclaimed.....We could never overcome the German flak artillery.
The mother and grandparents of a good friend of mine since 2nd grade were from Frankfurt. The mother just turned 90 and never spoke about the war until she was 85. She described running from the bombs and seeing body parts flying around her. She was sent to a farm when children were moved out of cities. The farmer’s 13 year old son sexually assaulted her. The fears she developed as a child stayed with her. Her father fought at Stalingrad, survived and was a POW. He was one of only 5,000 or so German soldiers who survived that experience.I have read a lot of WWII history, including about the 8th Air Force. My father in law was a B17 co-pilot and completed 35 missions. He served in late 1944 through April 1945, at which time the bombers finally had fighter escorts into Germany. Having heard both perspectives of the bombing raids has been very interesting. It’s only in the last couple of decades that more attention has been focused on the loss of non combatants in the ETO.
Very interesting & informative upload as always, thank you.
The scenario of German residents fleeing to live rough in the countryside during the raids was also well documented in Coventry UK - My late grandma lived through the blitz in Cov as a 30 year old - she never really spoke about it much, but I think the anger and bitterness changed her & never ever left her (she was very harsh and was difficult when I was left with her to look after me as a kid), and I remember her being genuinely horrified that I had started work for a German company back in the late 90's. she sort of mellowed in her 90's before passing, but I'll never know what she went through - I expect there were many German women similarly changed through city bombings.
My mom was a child and lived in Cambridge during the war. She would tell me stories of my grandad extinguishing fire bombs with dirt in their backyard. They would all huddle in a space under the stairs during German bomber raids. They even had a young girl from London that was evacuated and living with them for a while. My grandad was a railway supervisor and he was at work one day when there was an air raid and he saw a German bomber flying down the railroad tracks so low he could see their faces in the cockpit.
You handled a difficult topic with a great deal of sensitivity. I really appreciated that you included the perspective of German kids as well.
The Hitler Youth?
@@leojanuszewski1019Don’t be ridiculous and childish.
Lol you are ignorant and brainwashed Israel is doing the same thing If not worse right now to Gaza and Palestinian people, and the same people committing war crimes that are the same ones who lied about Germany
My grandmother lived in Trier - a ca. 100.000 citizens city. She told me that she had developed a life long aversion to Christmas trees as before every raid spotters dropped flares to mark the target region. These flares must have resembled Christmas trees looking up from the ground.
All this suffering everywhere in Europe is unimaginable. And now we see it happen again in Ukraine.
The Ukrainians are fighting the good fight they'll stay strong as long as the West stays interested and funding
Which is why America must keep supporting the Ukrainians. We already saw in WW2 how appeasing the aggressor does nothing but embolden them to start a world war. This time we're giving the ukranians what they need to kick their teeth in
Not really. Ukraine was the third largest contingent in the illegal invasion of Iraq. They thought it was great fun then! They found out it’s not much fun for the people being invaded.
And where are the anti-war protesters? On page 12 if they are lucky. What a disgrace.
Too cowardly to fight the regime they despise
April 1945. A GI was taking items out of the footlockers of the crew that bunked next to my dad's crew. They confronted him. "What the hell are you doing?" "I'm collecting personal items to send back home. They were shot down." It was the crew's first and only mission, less than 38 days before the end of the war in the European theater.
@whocriesforbidennotme641 And you were there? You self-important, know-it-all little girl. The only bs is in your hollow little girl head.
Not really
@@tomhenry897 So you were there and my father's crew wasn't? Right. Got it. Bugger off, loser.
My grandparents lost everything in one single raid on London, their house, their rental houses - all five and their business - a book store. At 16/17 my father joined the fire watchers, sat on top of a building whilst being bombed and directing the firemen where to go. At 18 he joined bomber command and found out his uncle was Air Vice Commodore of his area. My dad’s airbase in Lincolnshire lost 2000 men just in that one base. After the war he became very anti war. He would be devastated to see what is happening in Europe today.
My mother, who turned 85 today (2nd July 2023), remembers the sound of the bomber fleets. Since she was only 5 when liberation came in 1944, it's probably the Allied fleets that she heard.
Cologne has some amazing museums, but there's also a small city museum. Inside, you'll find a real nazi flag, which once hung in the Dom cathedral, and was taken as a trophy by an American soldier. There's also a large photograph of what Cologne looked like after the war. This photo is quite easy to find with Google or another search engine. What you see is a completely destroyed inner city, a collapsed Hohenzollern bridge, and then the huge Dom sticking out, seemingly unscathed.
The architecture of Cologne is decidedly 1950s. There's practically nothing left that survived the war. There are "old" houses next to the Rhine, the Altstadt, except those houses are rebuilt. There are the Romanesque churches, but those too had to be rebuilt.
I believe the Dom was only hit by a dozen or so misaimed bombs... it was too important to the allies as an easily recognizable landmark for navigation by air, especially after many of the urban centers and cities had been turned to rubble and ash.
A classic recording was made in London . The sound of a Nightingale and the rumble of night bombers.
@@normannokes9513liberating from freedom...LOL
From a german perspective: Those bombings are actually really engraved in german memory and are still a major reason for the german attitude of “peace for all costs” (as seen in the early stages of the war in ukraine). Due to the much higher (civilian) casualties (compared to for example Great Britian or the US) it really is a collective memory. But on the other hand i think it’s fascinating that those mortal enemies went on to be close allies just a few years later.
Explains Japan's attitude as well
Ukraine, like nazi Germany, is a fascist dictatorship. The people there are like the Germans during WW2, they are receiving retribution.
My father fought against Germany and had no love for the country or people ever after.
One of the places he 'liberated' was Belsen.
Myself, I really like Germans and appreciate their country.
Shame some only see others through the eyes of war.
@@emmypuss4533 One of my great uncles was wounded in action by a Japanese sniper in the Pacific. I wonder how he felt about them? I do not believe he was captured however.
The German citizens were good people, hard working, and intelligent. Unfortunately they were treated poorly after WW1 especially by the french and were in a no-win situation. Had they been given a break and allowed to recover and get a democratic government in place the national socialists wouldn't have been able to take over. When they got in and got the secret police state setup it was all over. So, after the war, the United Nations had learned it's lesson and made sure that Germany was going to succeed with a democratic government, at least in most of the country and they did very well. It really is too bad about the war but the national socialists started it and we fought them with what we had at the time. It's a good thing that Goering was fairly incompetent or the Luftwaffe may have been able to defeat the UK from the air and then by ground invasion. Churchill was probably the one indispensable person in WW2 and the Brits didn't re-elect him until the 1950s. He was a great PM during the war but not as great in peacetime. It's really too bad that we had to go to war with Germany but we had no choice, especially since Schicklegruber declared war on us, not that we didn't deserve it, still it was a dumb thing to do. Schicklegruber was excited when Japan joined the Axis but it really wasn't any help and it pressured him into declaring war on the US. Dumb thing to do. Now we didn't even have to pretend to be neutral. Schicklegruber did not know how to pick allies. The italians were useless and they changed sides. Japan was useless and it caused Schicklegruber to declare was on the US which was something not in his best interest especially since he was at war with the USSR. They may have been dumb but their were a LOT of them and they were willing to fight with their lives instead of with skill, at least in the beginning. Anyway, the German people did not want war. Unfortunately they didn't have any choice. My reading indicates that talk in the bomb shelters was not against the UK or US but more against the national socialists. Sometimes people would speak out as though the secret state police were not there during a raid and they may not have been. So, it doesn't surprise me that absent the national socialists in power Germany gets along with everyone. Congrats on your success. You guys have done great.
As a German I think that this is quite a difficult topic. On the one hand these bombings killed a lot of people and many of those were innocent (I mean you can’t blame kids or people who didn‘t vote the Nazis for the war). However on the other hand I think the bombings were completely justified. I mean you can’t go around start a major war, genocide millions and then claim to be the victim when you get bombed in return. It‘s sort of a fuck around find out situation if you will.
Did those who burn to death/receive burn wounds genocide millions and start a major war? The problem is bombing civillians (unjustified especially creating firestorms in residential areas) when Germany at that point were going to lose. Bombing industries is in line with military targets so if thats what the allies stuck to it’s be fine but the other isn’t a valid military target. An eye for an eye and the world goes blind
The guilt propaganda has certainly been effective...
@@Nightdiver20You mean being properly educated about the crimes your nation committed in the past? Oh sorry, that’s “woke”
@@sr7129 name a nation, I can name a crime. But you're definitely sorry, yes
Can you blame the brainwashed children that went from the Hitler youth to the SS for the crimes they committed? War is terrible and blurs the lines of innocent and guilty. Interested in your thoughts on this.
Thank you for this great production. Keep up the good work.
When I was doing my student teaching, i was teamed with a german master teacher. She had been teaching for years and had became an American citizen. At any rate, she told me that when she was a little girl in Germany, she was placed in a bomb shelter, no more than a celler. She remembered laying on a cot in the center of a room. There were old people seated around the room against the wall. She remembered waking up to find all the old people dead. A soldier came in, wrapped her in a blanket, and carried her out. She remembered it raing fire as they moved from the area. She thought it was phosphorus raining down.
We had a family friend who lived through the bombings of Hamburg. She didn’t talk much about it, but it still effected her greatly.
The overwhelming horror is described in Middlebrook's The Hamburg Raids.
Statistically speaking it was safer to be in the bombed cities than to be in one of the planes dropping the bombs. Only 30% of the US 8th Air Force crew members survived the war.
Goebels said Total War to thunderous applause. This is what they applauded
Very professional. I like that you list your sources.
War does not determine who is right but who is left
Learned more than I knew before, thank you!
My mother was in Budapest during WW II. She said you could hear the allied bombers coming twenty minutes before they arrived. You did not need the air raid sirens.
The sheer amount of people that died every day in world war in world war 2 is insane
The world would be a better place , if Germany never existed..
Thats a really nice channel. Very rich content. Congrats from Brazil
THIS is the topic for a big budget film. With terrifying special effects. And NOT centered around a stupid love story. This event is an absolutely horrific tragedy.
It should be depicted as such.
I’ve heard accounts of this and it’s unimaginable. Literal hell on earth. *_People got sucked up into fire tornadoes as they desperately clawed at the ground trying to grab hold of anything._*
That’s a terrifying image.
The perpetually-delayed Masters of the Air is scheduled to release in September.
It would be awesome but sadly Hollywood rarely approve movies that make the US military look bad
@@CrimsonAlchemist Sure they do, but I fail to see why an honest depiction of the bombing campaign would make the US Military look bad.
@@CrimsonAlchemist
Much of Hollowood is going to be arrested over the next few years and imprisoned. China owns seditious and corrupt Hollowood.
Great movies are going to start getting made again. Maybe Hollowood will become a ghost town.
if you really want to make a story out of this for maximum impact, then id suggest doing on the firebombing of tokyo. it was even worse as all of the buildings in the city were made of wood and paper. pilots from that bombing have gone on record stating that they could smell burning flesh from up in their planes. and citizens of tokyo would boil alive from jumping into rivers to escape the heat above
I have a friend whose dad was a child in Berlin during the war. He lived in a hospital where his parents worked and told me everything around it was completely flattened by the end. Given the accuracy of the Norden bombsight, I'm kinda surprised the hospital made it 😅
Given the accuracy of the Norden bombsight, maybe they were aiming for the hospital?
I won't say too much here (at work now and no one cares anyway), but my grandmother was a young child in Germany during the war. Born and raised in Berlin and eventually had to flee the city, for obvious reasons. She was separated from her younger brother, and lived on a farm with who I know to be complete strangers. By some miracle, her family was able to reconnect after the war, and they all moved to the USA. She passed away 2 years ago.
My mother was in her mid teens when the bombing began in her part of Germany. During air raids It was her job to carry the second youngest sibling and basically had another younger sibling tied to her waist and then run like hell to the bomb shelter. On one bombing raid there was next to no prewarning, and so a lot of people were caught out in the open running for the nearest shelter; she had to run past a neighbor who had their legs blown off, but this person was still trying to crawl to the bunker. On another raid a 500 pound bomb had punched through two floors of their house but had not detonated - they lived with it in the house for about a week before German soldiers came and took it away.
But because of the constant bombing starvation was a thing for even up to a year or so after the war had ended; in the bunkers people called her the Ghost because she was so thin (Always giving her younger siblings some of her share of food.).
Despite the fact that it was MY Air Force that were doing most / majority of that Bombing, it makes both interesting AND harrowing reading & I found what you've related both intriguing & heartfelt - Therein lies the complication.
It was 79 years ago this year & back then, MY nation HATED the Germans - TWICE they dragged us into a World War
Harris decided he would literally HAMMER the Germans & make them pay for it, as a nation via Bomber Command
It's always been stated by those who flew Stirlings, Lancasters, Halifaxes etc, that their main objective WAS to knock Germany out of the war & their anger wasn't as much directed at the German people, as the Nazi Party.
Trouble is, in WAR, you don't get such a clean-cut divide, not since the WW.I bombing raids were initiated.
13th June 1917 saw the German Gotha Biplane Bombers destroy a London school & murder 18 children
Up till THAT point, civilians in the U.K had remained untouched - It cause MASSIVE, massive outrage !!!!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poplar_Recreation_Ground_Memorial
From THAT point onwards, the bombing of civilians increased & even in WW.II it WAS the Germans who started it
Rotterdam, London, Coventry, Guernica etc, etc, etc - Finally the British had "had enough" & the "Gloves were off"
Unfortunately for Germany, they chose to "bully" the wrong nation, as the British just grew stronger & stronger....
If you walk into a bar & walk up to Mike Tyson & start punching him 'in the face' for no reason, expect retaliation
This is EXACTLY precisely what the British did & Bomber Command was formed - By 1944 & 1945 they were lethal
In 1971 we had new neighbours move in next-door (London) - Husband was Welsh (British) & was a former Royal Air Force Navigator on Avro York transport a/c (derivative of the Lancaster) - Their only child named Christine was English as I am, yet her Mum, Elizabeth was from Berlin & was one of 'Adolf Hitler's children' in 1943-'45
They'd met & "fallen in Love" during the 1948 Berlin Airlift - A far cry from the mass bombing raids of '42-'45
I kept being asked to go round her house for dinner & became close friends with the family
By God, she (Elizabeth) took some terrible 'stick' & 'Flak' & huge criticism from neighbours in our town
Even then, even during the 1970's, the Germans WERE still universally HATED by so many esp' in London
I was one of those 'postwar kids' who learned to adapt to the NEW EUROPE & peace with our former enemy
I went to Germany in Aug' 1973 & stayed there for a full-week & kept going back there until July 2003
Glad that our two nations finally 'healed their wounds' & that the Germans have NOT "kicked-off" again for yet another "3rd Try" at World domination - That is WHY British troops WERE stationed there, in Germany, right up until their mass-withdrawl back in 2013 & of course, formerly to (hopefully) "keep the Russians in check" in our former occupied part(s) of Northern Germany, namely places like Lunenberg Heath, Paderborn, Sennelager & Osnabruck
Frankly, I cannot imagine Britain & Germany EVER clashing again, in the foreseeable future.....
However, the wounds of both WW.I and WW.II are still fresh in the minds of many.
I sincerely DO hope that our two nations now forever do remain 'at peace' & that MY generation were part of that reunification process, whilst at the same time, I'll always defend Bomber Command to the hilt, for the VERY very extremely difficult job(s) they had to do, under extreme & difficult circumstances (frostbite, flak, etc, etc)
Easy to view things NOW from a 2020's perspective, but back in 1942, 1943, 1944, it WAS sadly "All out War"
Remember - only ONE nation in Europe back then WAS being the major "bully", invading other European nations...
Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, FRANCE, Greece, Crete, Yugoslavia, RUSSIA = the list goes on !!!!!!
They HAD to be stopped & Bomber Command WAS one of the tools tha Allies used to being Germany to it's knees
She could have hidden a concentration camp, they were not bombed. She could have shared their food!
@@hawnyfox3411 Yah I should have prefaced my comment by saying. " In no way do I want to invoke sympathy for the Germans ...." or something to that effect; it was just adding another war story .
@@Dusty3030 I get your point - I should have prefaced my comment by saying. " In no way do I want to invoke sympathy for the Germans ...." or something to that effect; it was just adding another war story.
@@mrzoinky5999 = Mate, I found what you wrote VERY interesting indeed....
My Nan took cover in the sub-basement of London & the U.K's 3rd largest Royal Mail sorting office on the night of 29th Dec' 1940 & the Luftwaffe destroyed en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_Church_Greyfriars
Did that woman you mention (stumps) make the shelter, I doubt it - She woulda died from her injuries.
War & Bombing is awful, but that's what happens "when the gloves come off" & all out war.
I never thought that, in MY lifetime I'd see yet another war, then, Ukraine 'invasion' kicked off....
I have a collection of documents from an entire family: mom, dad, 3 boys, and a daughter. It starts in 1918. Pretty immense. The whole family died, save the girl (born in 1923), who survived and had a daughter, but she died in 1962, last document being her Bible with a note from her daughter. The mother was injured in an air raid in which mother died, in 1943. She kept the Work Books (Arbeitsbuch) and other items, and you learn a brother dies on D-Day, she goes to the Work Office (Arbeitsamt) and gets a stamp to verify his death and thus removal from the worker's rolls. Her father died in Breslau. Her two other brothers died in Russia. The family embraced Nazism as early as 1928 or so, they are from Stuttgart, and wholly bought the whole spiel. But there are many documents and notes about the air raids. It's kind of spooky ro go through and even includes a very nice plate which is in mint condition and beautiful, except for the swastika. An entire thick photo album from her "arbeitsjahr" shows a happy young lady and includes also an original photo of Hitler ar a rally the girls are attending. It's all pretty hard to go through. I collect such things and have dozens of different people's personal effects showing how they were seduced by Nazism and how they were ruined by them.
I recall going through photo albums in Berlin flea markets a few years back. So many of them contained photos of a young family. Parents and a child, the father in uniform. The father only ever featured in the beginning of the album. The rest is mother and child going through life. Then just child. Then the flea market. It was so sad.
I visited St. Nicholas Church in Hamburg. The tower is still blackened and what had been the interior is an open courtyard with a museum in the basement that talks about the firebombing of the city and the horrors of war.
It even had a display of the aluminum strips described at 11:09. They look like someone put tin foil through a shredder.
In most of the territory that was previously Reich, these strips still survive as christmas tree decorations. Because they used to be everywhere around and the children picked it up and brought it home. We still have a big box of them in the basement, although they are getting replaced nowadays by a modern made substitutes, this sort of shiny strip stuff can be seen on many a tree, all originating from these bombings.
Those people who start these wars, should be first to lead their troops into combat. This would prevent 90% of all wars.
Arthur Harris's recorded speech on the morality of allied bombing of German cities is accurate and exactly right. What apologists fail to appreciate, is that the total casualties inflicted by the Nazis, outmunbers by a factor of over a thousand, the number of casualties suffered through allied bombing. The cold hard facts of war are that the innocent suffer along with the guilty. From a purely military standpoint, the allied bombing campaign caused thousands of 88 flack guns to be kept in Germany for defence, instead of on the battlefields.
By the Wars end, German artillery production had in INCREASED by 700%. They had plenty of 88s to go around, manned in cities by civilians, as were the seachlights, ambulances, rescue crews: German artillery and soldiers stayed at the front lines.
Forget apologists, most Germans weren't Nazis, most hated them, many worked against them, many ended up in concentration camps (and were often executed). The Allied bombing united them as victims, not as Nazis: they blamed the Nazis for the bombings.
The cold, hard fact is that the RAF Bomber Command night campaign was a complete failure, 52,000 men died for no result; the 8th Army Air Force daylight campaign was the success, smashing the German economy by October, 1944 albeit at an enormous cost of American air crew.
Hello from New Zealand.
@@davidstevenson9517 sorry but your figures are wrong. Between Apr 43 & Jan 45, an 18 month period, German artillery production fluctuated as cities were bombed and plants had to move then get built and set up. Some months were up to 350% on the previous, but not two in a row. Post war records found by Americans show overall numbers of pieces fell over that period. Speer had to show "best" figures to inner circle - ie best comparison. Subject too long and convoluted for this forum. Read Speer's book, and Walter book on Nazi economics
My Aunty Erica survived Dresden as a 15 year old. Her father, a station master and her mother, a school teacher both died in the fire storm. The year before that she lost her elder brother when his U boat was sunk. After the war she moved to England and married my Uncle Donald and never returned to Germany once. She used to say that before the Nazis she had very little but a happy childhood, but by 1945 she didn't even have that, and she hated the German high command for taking it away from her.
Don't start something and there won't be something.
Great video. I hadn't heard much of the August Crisis
Reminds me of Sherman saying, "There's many a boy here thinks war is glory. It's all hell." Rule #1 of war is people die. Rule #2 is you can't change rule #1.
Total war against a ruthless enemy.
cope with your sins
@@darklysm8345Shouldn’t have slaughtered those Jews or civilians on your way to victory then.
@@m1a1abramstank49 babies and old peoples in dresden and other big cities surely masscared the jews
flattening of Warsaw was as much of a viable target as firebombing Dresden
@@m1a1abramstank49 Completely disproved during Zundel trials in Canada.
i am from Germany and remember my grandmother (who was around 11-13 during the war), telling us how she experienced the raf dam buster raids on the Möhnetalsperre and the resulting not too far from us... it must have been horrifying
Thanks for the great video!
Thank you another interesting perspective.
My grandmother had to move house 2 times during the war because her house was destroyed by the allies 2 times. I never met her but I’m sure it deeply affected her as a child. My mum said she was a very neurotic and anxious person.
maybe dont start wars and genocide millions
killing millions of jews, slavs, gypsies, homosexuals and disabled people: :)
having to move 2 times: >:(
She wasn’t a forgotten thin film of ash lying under the grass outside some death camp.
@@givenfirstnamefamilyfirstn3935are u seriously calling her grandmother a concentration camp guard?
@@adambrande what does 2 plus 2 make? 5 is not the correct answer.
Grandmother living near Bamberg said they used to go out at night and witness the glow of Nurnberg burning which was about 60km to the southeast. You could imagine what the Dresden firestorm could be seen at night probably from 100km away in the night time sky.
A Lancaster crashed near her village and entire crew was killed near the same time. Possibly a New Zealand or Canadian aircraft.
24 million Russians died at the hands of the German Nazi's.
We live a bit over 100km from Dresden, and you are right, my Grandmother saw Dresden glow in the distance.
She told me she used to hide in the water drainage pipes next to roads.
Amazingly enough their overall war material production continued to grow and actually reached it's peak in 1944, to include high tech items like jets and the v2 program. Albert Speers book is an interesting look at this phenomena.
No, what they did was they spent what little resources they had on trying to achieve the drug induced delusions of Adolf Hitlers wunderwaffe because he believed these would somehow single-handedly win the war
Really good put together 👍
How do these Germans feel about the Battle of Britain ? the V-1 flying bomb? the V-2 ?
The Germans were lucky; the atomic bombs were developed with Germany in mind. Fortunately for them, the first bomb wasn’t tested until 7 weeks after the Germans surrendered.
The allies were also lucky because Hitler could have had the bomb much earlier, but he gave it no priority, only when it was too late. Also the americans probably only could finish their first bomb because of the uranium they got from a conquered german u-boat.
@@weisthor0815😂😂😂😂😂
Strange, the Allies did not complete their atomic bomb until they took control of German blueprints and scientists.
@@cracoviancrusader6184the good German scientists were working for allies already
The first Casualty of any War is the Truth.
I live in Dortmund, in West-Germany. Every year, there are several evacuations here in our neighbourhood because WWII bombs have to be defused. Hard to believe, it's been 78 years since the last bomb was dropped here but still there are hundreds of unexploded bumbs in the ground.
By September 1944 the RAF was dropping more bombs on Germany every night than the Luftwaffe dropped on the United Kingdom during the entire blitz 1940/1941.... Quote from "Chastise" by Sir Max Hastings
I don't doubt it. The raid on Coventry was small compared to what Hamburg faced. Ouch, payback sucks.
Can you make a video on the 8th air force. My grandfather was a navigator on a B-24 as a part of the 44th bombardment group.
Fantastic assessment of the total picture behind the N'I façade.
Excellent research and presentation 🧐
I'd say they didn't take it very well at all.
Nevertheless it took boots on the ground to defeat the nazis.
My father was dutch from Nijmegen and they where bombed also only it was friendly fire they where told there city looked like a German city close to the border. Met a dutch lady that as a kid lived through the bombings and when there was a lightning storm she would run into a closed , my mother in law is German and also does the same it affected them all.
love this channel
Great video!!
My great-grandma lived in Munich during the war, she told me stories of what it was like to see the sky darken with bombers flying overhead.
My grandmother's cousin married a German who was born in Munich and was 12 during the bombings. The stories were terrifying. He was in an apartment near the tire factory. When they bombed it, he had the measles, and wasn't allowed in the bomb shelter. His grandpa stayed with him. The glass got so hot from the fire that the windows were red. After the war he moved to the US, joined the army, and got sent back to Germany as an interpreter.
'Tribe' By: Sebastian Junger does a good job of describing how disastor unites a people. he sites many of these events. Good video.
During the 80's,while stationed in Germany ( then West Germany), I remember that I noticed more amputees of a certain age than I had ever run across before.
Marshal Zhukov thanked Bomber Harris personally as the RAF Bomber Command strategy meant 88mm AA guns (which were also tank killers) were occupied in air defence as opposed to being used on the Eastern Front.
Interesting to hear that the city bombing was a propaganda win for the resistance in some places. Though it seem ultimately WWII showed that bombing civilians overall makes them more determined not to give up.
They can be as determined as they like away from the industrial centers and unable to fuel the war machine. Bombing the cities in Germany's industrial core starved the Reich of vital war resources.
I would argue that this is only true for conventional bombing. Bombs ultimately made Japan surrender. And they were extremely determined, to say the least.
This is also a fundamental misunderstanding of the goals of bombing. While bombing was not successful at destroying the enemy’s will to fight, it certainly destroyed their ability to fight. Total War is a war of economies and economies are built out of cities, therefore they’re essential targets.
I mean, other than London, where is that true?
That didn't happen when the US nuked Japanese cities and bluffed having more nukes to drop and the Communist invasion in Manchuria.
An excellent account ...thankyou
I'm appreciative of all the amazing stories that are being shared.
It's so important to know that true history from the perspective of the civilian population.
How sad it is that the civilian populous were so uninformed by their government leaders of the reality they were facing.
Thank you, to everyone who shared an important story from a family member or friend of a family who witnessed the true devastation of War.
I wonder what that woman, who gave that shrudding answer to the American journalist, thought when British and American tanks rolled through her town 3-4 years later
I am a half - Deutsch Ami . The suffering of Everyone during WW2 , including my father, is something I think about 6 & 1/2 days a week . Father was a fighter pilot , barely survived, but lived to be 83 + . I think that overwhelming majority of people from EVERY type of background, mostly want to be left alone, to hopefully have a nice marriage, and 2, 3 , maybe 4 (!) beautiful children . Over Thousands of years, there have been people who don't always Start Out to be power - hungry, but become,over several years, power - hungry & sometimes Really evil . ( 'Chairman' Mao , a mass - murderer , might have started out this way .) Then , they start manipulating people With their Mouths , to varying degrees of dishonesty . It is a (tiresome) extra job for most people , I believe, to sort out who is exaggerating a bit , from those who are lying dangerously . But now, in this information - age , one CAN get a good handle on facts if one takes 15 minutes a week on the net , & a half hour once every two months at a Library , reading 'old - fashioned ' BOOKS ! Encyclopedias and more specilized books , historic or somewhat technical .
Could you imagine if all those bombs dropped had JDAM kits and could single target locations…nothing would be standing after the first large invasion
My mother in law had PTSD until the day she died and would go into a panic every time there was a thunderstorm. She was Maltese and the bombs were German and Italian.
Admittedly I only watched the first few minutes, but by not mentioning the Blitzkrieg of London civilians for weeks and months prior to Dresden is impossible to overlook. How could that go unmentioned?
Because this whole video is about the German perspective of the bombings? Like the title say?
He can eventually make a video about the English playing carrots in their gardens and hiding in the London metro and many more interesting things.
No tragedy is worse than another (unless you are a brainwashed person) both sides suffered greatly.
@@MarcosGarcia-kx4rb ok, so German civilians didn't realize that their country had been bombing other nation's civilians for years... got it.
Not handwringing enough.
Fair and well rounded on a limited scale.
At 9:48, video shows with looks like the nose cone of a bomber that rotates. I've seen footage like this before and I've been trying to find out what kind of bomber had a nose cone like that. Anyone have any idea?
It’s a heinkel 111. A documentary maker may just be forgiven for using this as footage of a RAF raid on a German city…if it wasn’t for the fact the gunner is clearly wearing Luftwaffe flying kit. All in all it makes me realise this is just a load of crap.
"If the planes come during the day it's the Americans, If they come during the night the British and if they don't come at all, it's ours"
Apparently a Wehrmacht joke about the Luftwaffe from 1942 or later
I wonder how many Germans looked to the sky and said to themselves "I guess this is what consequence looks like."
Those are not consequences just like Palestinians are not experiencing consequences, Germans didn't even control the politics of their nations. Free Palestine.
It may be late and I am falling asleep but this was worth it
A number of surviving factories in the Ruhr (in Essen and Bochum for example) are now used to host arts events.
You forgot to mention that the initial attack was in retaliation for the Luftwaffe bombing London.
I didn't forget to say that
What did the civilian population of Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece felt about the Nazi attacks on their citizens?
Don't forget the Russians. For the first two years of the war, the Soviet Union was allied with Nazi Germany and conducting its own wars of conquest.
They were not particularly amused…
And what they thought when allied razed completely occupied cities... It was difficult times
It warms the cockles of my heart.
I had the great fortune to stationed in Heidelberg. It was not bombed during the war, as it was picked to be the headquarters of the US Army in Germany after the conflict.
Germany not surrendering early was what the Soviets preferred anyway. They had yet to serve their own version of vengeance.
They, the population of Germany, is lucky the atomic bomb wasn't quite ready yet.
Bombing often makes the civilian population more resilient than submissive, think of North Vietnam, Japan, England and Germany
Hey algorithm, this is the sort of stuff you should be promoting, you bloody bit of poorly written code!
Thanks man, that was excellent. Fresh look at a familiar topic.
The hard way to learn how to say in German: "Now I know how London must have felt."
I always thought that the allies should have built enough bombers to form a continuous line from the runway where they take off all the way to the city then back to reload refuel and takeoff again so theres a continuous loop of bombers doing a never ending run in a huge circle just pounding relentlessly. The poor people are always the ones who suffer most in rich mens wars
Unfortunately, it's always been that way. Hell awaits those that start these wars for their own self enrichment.
Of course. The ones that actually order the attacks should be forced to lead them. We'd enjoy a lot more peace.
@@intercommerce It hasn't been that way since the Civil War when 124 generals were killed in combat.
Based in Yorkshire the RCAF fielded 15 squadrons of Wellingtons, Halifaxes and Lancasters. Part of Bomber Command, 6 Group as they were known RCAF bomber squadrons contributed a significant addition to the air war against Germany.
Berlin diaries, 1940-1945 by Marie Vassiltchikov
This is a good read that contains much about the bombing of Germany from the German perspective.
A relative of friends was in Dresden as a newborn. The bombing raids with the panic and chaos had such an impact that he was severely mentally disabled for the rest of his life