Death of a City
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287 pp paperback
BY DAVID IRVING
Single copies £1.50 inc. post.
___________________________________
by
Michael McLaughlin
1982
Part 3
‘And everybody praised the Duke
Who this great fight did win.’
‘But what good came of it at last?’
Ouoth little Peterkin:
‘Why that I cannot tell,’ said he,
‘But ‘twas a famous victory.’
— Southey, After Blenheim.
“In terms of personal success, there has been no career more fortunate than that of Winston Churchill. In terms of human suffering to millions of people and destruction of the noble edifice of mankind there has been no career more disastrous.”
— The European and English Journal. Source; American Manifest Destiny and the Holocausts, P. 176.
“One closes these volumes feeling, uneasily, that the true heroes of the story they tell are neither the contending air marshalls, nor even the 55, 888 officers and men of Bomber Command who were killed inaction, They were the inhabitants of the German cities under attack; the men, women and children who stoically endured and worked on among the flaming ruins of their homes and factories, up till the moment when the allied armies overran them …”
— London Times reviewer on the ‘British Official History of the Strategic Air Offensive’,
COVER PHOTOGRAPH
Hamburg at the end of the war. Millions of Germans had no home, no places of work, schools or hospitals, Almost the entire country was destroyed and that which remained was looted by allied governments and multi-national companies., Much of the looted industrial booty still produces goods in British factories today.
Copyright 1982
Michael Mclaughlin
Published by Phoenix Publications, 95a Chester Rd. East. Deeside, CLWYD. CH5 2AA.
ISBN 0-86246-00206
CONTENTS
A CITY MUST DIE
A CITY DIGS IN
THE HOLOCAUST BEGINS
WHEN SATAN RULED, GOD WEPT
HAMBURG IS NO MORE
WATER, SWEET WATER
HELL ON EARTH
IN THE AIR
A CITY IN RUINS
STRUCK FROM THE RECORDS
THE LAST CONVULSIONS
REFERENCES
IMAGES
A CITY IN RUINS
Words, even in a language as rich and descriptive as the English, fails to convey the sheer horror that faced survivors of the Hamburg holocaust. The putrid stench of decaying corpses, the sickening sweetish smell of roasted human flesh warped the mind and seared the soul. It polluted mile after mile of devastated city. The mere act of breathing, albiet it shallow breaths was enough to induce violent vomiting yet breath people must. It is a city that is no more, yet the life that is left must go on and thousands of survivors dejectedly scrambled from the ruins to do what they could. They endured the ultimate in grief yet were denied by circumstances even the opportunity to search for their own loved ones.
The streets of Hamburg were covered in corpses in various stages of decay and destruction. Death had chosen its victims indiscriminately. There were mothers and their children, mounds of dead babies from maternity homes and school children. One could see rows of corpses of old people who had perished in a nearby old folks home, Here and there, a body of a lone child would be found, or the body of a young lady who days earlier had barely concerned herself with the latest hit song or a letter from her boyfriend at the front. There were men and women, lying often in absurd postures who had recently lived with dignity. Many were now shrivelled and charred objects in the rubble-strewn roads. Here again there was hitherto unknown phenomena. Bodies were found that were burned beyond recognition yet clothes were untouched by fire. There were naked bodies that appeared to bear no violent marks or signs of burning. Many had died through, sheer overwhelming fright. In this one begins to grasp the magnitude of the tragedy for in reality, unless under totally exceptional circumstances, the human being is resilient and is not easily given to dying of fright. Many survive truly horrible traumatic experiences. Yet it was later revealed that no less than 12.6% of those who died in those ten days, did so through shock.
Thousands of bodies were naked; they resembled the wax dummies in tailors’ shops. Some looked peaceful in death whilst others were cramped in agony. Imagine, here was a city similar in size to Manchester or Birmingham, in which over 100,000 people had lost their lives. Many times that number had been maimed or otherwise badly injured. 750,000 people had been made homeless. Think of a city comparable in size to any major British city and consider what it would be like to pick your way through the rubble from one end of it to the other. To find in that area over 100,000 of your fellow citizens dead in the rubble. And weep because it had no affect whatsoever on the course of the war other than to lengthen it. As one analyst put it;
“The brutal allied air offensive against Germany proved to be costly, ineffective and of doubtful morality.”
[10] I’ll say it was! One might say it was Hobson’s choice as to whether it was better to be ‘liberated’ by Britain’s warlords or Moscow’s hordes of raping, looting Asiatics.
STRUCK FROM THE RECORDS
The British people of course had no way of knowing what was being done in their name and as we have seen, even M.P.’s were victims of a conspiracy to deny and hide the facts. It is beyond doubt that the British people and peoples of other nations engaged in the war with Germany, would never have tolerated carnage on such a scale, particularly as it brought nothing but misery for our side too. Only now, many years after the war’s end is the full truth available and then only for the scholar diligent enough to go to the trouble to seek it out. Such few books that do deal with this and related tragedies are given the orchestrated cold-shoulder by the British media. And yet this same media wastes no time in giving full publicity to tales of Jewish suffering, even those tales of dubious authenticity. And so, by means other than outright censorship, the lies and cover-ups continue to distort balance of opinion.
[Image] In air raid shelters, glass, metal and human beings disintegrated and melted into blobs.
But there is one element in this dreadful and pitiful episode which was so appalling that the allied high command went to great lengths to hide all trace of it. This was the use of, and the consequences of using phosphorous bombs on a civilian population. Even today no British television or radio station, or newspaper would dare to mention its consequences for fear of the revulsion it would cause.
Martin Caidin who as previously stated is perhaps better qualified than any man living to comment on the effects of terror bombing, who as an author has probably researched more material related to terror-bombing than any other, spent years trying to get details of the use of phosphorous. In his own words, he has;
“met with less than the success required by the historian to include the episode in a documentary book”.
He says:
“Perhaps the solution to the total absence of any reference in official (post war) German documents is explained in the story told to me by a U.S. Army officer, who learned that portions of the documents on the after effects of the Hamburg attacks were ordered to be destroyed and all references to the surviving victims of phosphorous bombs stricken forever from the records.” [11]
[Image] A picture taken as the first teams entered the still-smoking ‘dead-zone’ of Hamburg. This illustrates vividly the terrible difficulties of the people in trying to evacuate streets such as while flames roared through the air with a blast furnace effect.
Nevertheless, it has been established that the British weaponry used in the holocaust of Hamburg included many bombs of which the incendiary contents were phosphorous. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reports officially on these phosphorous bombs, stating;
“Phosphorous burns were not infrequent; but that most such burns occurred in people who had come in contact with unexploded phosphorous canisters lying about in the streets or in the rubble.”
Even in such a telling statement such as this, one smells the whiff of guilt. Note the wording carefully. Perhaps German inquisitively strolled the streets, sticking their fingers in the contents of unexploded bombs to see what they felt and tasted like! And the phosphorous bombs of course had obligingly fallen on buildings carefully avoiding people as they sprayed their murderous contents. An official British source was a little more honest when it gave as its reason for using phosphorous;
“because its demonstrated ability to depress the morale of the Germans.” [12]
Wouldn’t the rack, or beating to death on the wheel served the same purpose just as well but a little more humanely? What is so special about phosphorous that the allied High Command has gone to such lengths to hide? Simply this. As a refinement to barbarism, it has no equal and it is doubtful if it evil will have except those found in the pits of the KGB’s torture chambers in Moscow’s Lubianka Prison.
It is one thing to fight an incendiary bomb which can at least be put out using ordinary means — and which soon burn itself out anyway. It is quite another thing to face a bomb that no matter which way it is handled, persists in flaring into life again and again. And which furthermore will stick grimly to anything that it touches; brick, wood, concrete. steel; and human flesh. Whatever the material, the phosphorus clings tenaciously to it and continues to burn unless scraped off. Imagine the effect of that on a human body, not to speak of a child’s body. One can only stand back in mute horror at the minds of those who dreamed such a satanic weapon up and authorised its use to;
“Depress the morale of the Germans.”
There was one incident in the Hamburg holocaust which is on record and which stands as testimony to the use of phosphorous which incidentally is still used today in the Jewish/Arab conflict. This incident happened at the height of the bombing. It was at that most awful period earlier described when the whole city was engulfed in flames, tens of thousands were already dead, and many more were on the verge of death. Among those thousands cornered in the inferno were several hundred people who were trapped in a dense shower of phosphorous bombs. The injury to those poor souls was immediate.
The exploding phosphorous bombs sprayed their contents indiscriminately and clothing caught fire and had to be torn from the body quickly otherwise the wearer would suffer terrible nightmarish burns. When the liquid spattered on to people’s hair, the victim was doomed. There was no chance to cut off the hair. The chemical globules, like a burning jelly, burned fiercely setting aflame the entire head and indeed, the head itself burned.
These terrified and pain-wracked people were seen to leap about in a frenzy, dashing their heads against the ground in blind panic — anything to douse the flames. One can extinguish an ordinary fire by smothering it with clothing but such were useless. against phosphorous. It continued to burn and set afire any material that was thrown over it. Such people in these circumstances could only be left to their sad fate amidst the terrifying background glow of the streets in flames.
They writhed in the rubble strewn roads with their bodies partially ablaze. Others were nearer to the River Alster and dozens of these shrieking demented souls, trailing tongues of flaming smoke and dashed madly to the water to fling themselves into the life giving liquid. Men, women and children too; ran hysterically, falling and stumbling. getting up, tripping and falling again, rolling over and over. Most of them managed to regain their feet and made it to the water. But many of them never made it and were left behind, feet drumming in blinding pain on the over heated pavements amidst the rubble, until there came one last convulsive shudder from the smoking ‘thing’ on the ground, and then no further movement.
Those who made it to the water found the safety they had sought so desperately — but incredibly, some faced a choice that stuns the mind in its horror. Water prevents phosphorous jelly from burning because it denies the chemical the one thing it needs to burn: oxygen. Those with the blazing chemical on their arms, their legs or their bodies were able to douse the flames by remaining under the water. But many had the phosphorous jelly on their faces or heads. Certainly the spluttering fiery chemicals went out as the victims ducked their heads beneath the water, but the moment they brought their heads up again to break the surface and take a breath of air, the phosphorous burst into flames again immediately. And so such victims were faced with a choice. Death by drowning or death by burning.
While others watched, sick and despairingly, the victims of phosphorous on faces and heads thrashed in the brackish waters, screaming with pain and frustration. Spluttering and choking, they alternately burned alive or drowned. They met a slow and pain-wracked death. Their wild motions eventually ceased and the froth on the water slowly subsided.
Little wonder that such horrors were, “stricken from the records”. One can only imagine the publicity that would have been given to such a method of warfare had Hitler or Mussolini used it.
Those with a mystical mind might dwell on an incident that occurred high in the skies as fleets of bombers churned the air towards the stricken city. Flight lieutenant Robert Burr of No 44 (Rhodesia) Squadron described how on takeoff, masses of dense black clouds hung low over England. Climatic conditions were such that they assumed that tonight’s armada would be cancelled. The rain came down in sheets yet the expected recall never came. The bombers would go out that night. Against almost incredible natural odds, fighting turbulent rain and winds, the fought to stay air borne. Wind gusts were striking Robert Burr’s aircraft at gusts of over 100 miles per hour and bolts at lightening smashed open the blackness of night. The aircraft’s instruments unaccountably went haywire. The airspeed indicator had gone absolutely crazy and was fluctuating between 40 and 50 miles per hour. The altimeter was useless. One moment it would show that the bomber was climbing at 2,000 feet a minute; the next moment, the needle would slap down to indicate that the aircraft was plummeting towards the earth at 3,000 feet a minute. There appeared to be no good reason for such behaviour.
It was a mission in which weather exceeded the danger presented by the enemy, and became a foe much more deadly and effective. At 17,000 feet, the bombers refused to climb any more but they were at least above the turbulence and they cruised on towards the German coast line between massive banks of cloud. Then, without any warning, nature revealed a hidden weapon. From total darkness lit by brief moments of pale shadowy light oozed a strange new kind of light that slowly clutched at the bomber. It was a form of lightning which is not accompanied by thunder; nor does it rip through the skies in jagged bolts. It is a personal hellish fire, persistent and frightening. The pilot said;
“All the metal parts of the aircraft shone with the blues pikes of St. Elmo’s fire. About a quarter of a mile to port was another aircraft flying on a parallel course. It seemed to be in a mass of flames and I realised that it too, must be covered with St. Elmo’s fire. I stared at this flying beacon and suddenly, as I watched, a streak of lightning split the heavens. There was a huge flash and burning fragments broke away. The blazing wreckage tumbled into the clouds and quickly disappeared.” [13]
… and was it not retributive justice that Franklin Roosevelt, the American President whose bombers flew in daylight with the added refinement of his fighter planes straffing fleeing German refugees, was to be incinerated beyond recognition when he stumbled into the glowing embers of his fireplace at Warm Springs in Georgia? [14] Something else which has virtually been “stricken from the records.”
[Image] The heart of the firestorm area; a picture taken by the Germans soon after the attack. The half-buried vehicles are gutted fire trucks that had to abandoned because of the tremendous heat.
THE LAST CONVULSIONS
By the morning of 3rd August, 1943, Hamburg was no more. At least not in any true sense of the word. No less than 6,000 square acres had been utterly gutted. Ruined beyond repair. One can only wonder at the scale of values of ‘historians’ who equate Hamburg or Dresden with Coventry. This is not to minimise in any sense the loss of 380 people who died in Coventry, or the 100 acres lost but if we can flinch at such ruination, what of 100,000 people killed in Hamburg in a few days and nights? For every person who died in Coventry, no less than 300 people died in Hamburg. How well such comparisons reveal the enormity of this crime which transcends all others and which for 1,000 years and more will blacken the names of Britain and America.
Worst of all, it never changed the course of war by one iota. What it undoubtedly did do was instill in the minds of the people of the German nation, that their country was indeed fighting for a higher order of values against a foe so barbaric as to make Atilla and Ghengis Khan appear to be conscientious objectors by comparison. German war production hardly faltered as Albert Speer was to later testify. Certainly such policies lengthened the course of the war and embittered the German Armed Forces to fight with a spirit of vengeance. It is reasonable to assume that thousands of British servicemen and women, and civilians too, died because of Churchill’s penchant for satanic sadistic crimes on an unprecedented scale.
As the great fire storm of Hamburg thundered to its climax, the rampaging fires subsided only when there was simply nothing left to burn. Never in the history of mankind had any community of peoples been so utterly devastated although a similar fate which later befell Dresden and other German cities certainly equalled it. 60% of the city was destroyed beyond repair. No less than 30 square miles of Hamburg city and its suburbs were badly damaged. Twelve and a half square miles had been completely burned out making Hiroshima the lesser tragedy. 300,000 dwellings had disappeared. If God has ever wept for mankind’s weakness, this was surely the time.
There was one vast area of the city that was simply called ‘the deadzone’. It was in this area that nothing, absolutely nothing had survived. It was cordoned off and only decontamination and other specialist work units were permitted to enter the ‘deadzone’. At its edge, survivors huddled in groups. Few of them had mentally survived the holocaust. Those still in the waters of the Alster and other waterways, who had not been burned by phosphorous or other wise incapacitated by their injuries, made their way as best they could to the far banks of the Alster, or as far away as possible from the utter devastation. Those who couldn’t move any distance or swim across the waters, had no choice but to stay where they were. In the shallows or huddled in craters in the pock-marked desert that had once been a city. They were numb. Some were mentally deranged, and others were suffering from severe shock. Children, many of them orphan lay immobilised, their tiny minds paralysed, their pain-wracked bodies destined to live out their physical lives in postwar institutions and mental asylums. Such was the ‘liberation’ of Germany.
In such conditions little or no thing could be done for the victims unless they had the means to survive on their own for awhile. There were to few able-bodied people available. Medical supplies and other equipment was scarce. Many in the waters were suffering from heat and water blisters and were in the final stages of agony. Despite their tormented condition, they fought their would-be rescuers violently for they knew that their real agonies would come as their bodies left the water and came into contact with the air.
To the very limits of their ability the people who could come to their aid did so and did all they could to ease the hellish torture of the phosphorous victims still partially submerged with the globules of chemical still adhering to them and threatening to burst into flames as soon as it came in contact with the air. Rescuers cried as they gave these victims fresh water to drink. They tried to attend to their visible wounds and burns. But really, there was very little that could be done and many in the water were in effect the living dead.
Their skin in huge folds began to slough off. Burns festered and pus oozed exposing raw meat and muscles that are normally seen only by surgeons carrying out operations. Most of the victims were deranged to some extent and as night fell, the silence that fell on the Alster was broken only by the pitiful moans and the tortured cries of the demented souls still in the water. In the darkness of the night, huddled forms could be seen liS intervals, crouching along the banks in the murk, supporting an agonised victim in the water, administering to their needs. As the night wore on, huge folds of skin slipped from the bodies of victims like the skin from a peeling snake. Insanity showed in many of their eyes. They shrieked in agony. Weird, inhuman screams and they cursed and called damnation on all who would leave them thus.
Much later that night, and as the dawn approached, the most heart-rending task ever ordered of a city’s officials and a national army took place. As the sky lightened in the East, the last civilians in the area were removed by German official and military personnel. With the entire area seated off, small boats bearing policemen and soldiers who had been home on leave, began to move about with the waves slapping against the sides of the small craft in the cool morning air. Moving slowly and gently between the stumps of heads bobbing about in the water, and others close to the shoreline, they carried out their grim task and as they did so, more than one man vomited.
Above the splash of the oars against the water, and the moaning of demented human beings came the sound of metallic clicks. It was the noise of gun hammers being drawn back; the cold metallic warning of Lugers being cocked. And then … a shot would ring out. Another, and another, and another.
The boats moved quietly among the stumps, More shots, and more.
Some of the boats ran out of ammunition. There were sharp thuds, the crack of heavy oars against human skulls. It was the only and final act of mercy that could be carried out. It was the only peace that could be found. The pall of yellowish black smoke hung over the pock — marked desert and acres of devastated shells of buildings where once had stood a beautiful city. The sun shone grimly the yellowish sky but for those in the water. it was all over. They had gone home.
[Image] The Avro Lancaster of Bomber Command hurled tons of bombs and incendiary devices into Hamburg and other great cities.
[Image] Suffer little children.
REFERENCES
[1] F. J. P. Veale: ‘Advance to Barbarism’. Mitre Press London
Download here:
http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres10/VEALAdvance.pdf
Advance to Barbarism was first published in England in 1948. It was a noteworthy little book because it dealt for the first time with such then recent innovations as the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations and the trial of prisoners of war by their captors as symptoms of a world-wide development which had begun in 1914. At the time of its publication this point of view was considered so willfully perverse that no British newspaper with a national circulation would review this book. (Lord Hankey)
This eloquent work traces the evolution of warfare from primitive savagery to the rise of a “civilized” code of armed conflict that was first threatened in the US civil war, and again in the First World War, and was finally shattered during the Second World War. The ensuing “War Crimes Trials” at Nuremberg and Tokyo, and their more numerous and barbaric imitations in Communist-controlled eastern Europe, Veale argues, established the perilous principle that “the most serious war crime is to be on the losing side.”
[2] Ibid
[3] Dr. A. J. P: ‘The Bombing Atrocity of Dresden’. Boniface Press, Maryland.
[4] Martin Caidin: ‘The Night Hamburg Died’. Ballantine Books, N. Y.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Sunday Telegraph, 1.10.61.
[7] David Irving: ‘The Destruction of Dresden’. Transworld Publishers Ltd., London.
Download here:
http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Dresden/Apocalypse_2007.pdf
[8] A. J. P. Veale: ‘Advance to Barbarism’. Mitre Press London
[9] lbid.
[10] War Monthly. April. 333?‘
[11] Martin Caidin: ‘The Night Hamburg Died’. Ballantine Books, N.Y.
[12] lbid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] ‘American Manifest Destiny and the Holocaust’. Examiner Books.. N. Y.
IMAGES
[Image] The streets. covered with corpses.
[Image] The Borstelmannsweg section in Hamburg, part of the firestorm area. Temperatures here reached 1,472 degrees F.
[Image] Despite the shattered and fire-gutted appearance, this district near the waterfront was not part of the firestorm. This section was hit on the first heavy raid. Large mass fires exploded outwards.
[Image] Civilian casualties laid out in rows for identification by relatives. Victims of a Allied bombing on Berlin, September 23, 1944
[Image] There were too many bodies to bury so they had to be piled high in stacks of hundreds and burned. These pictures were put to the most dreadful use when after the war, allied propagandists claimed that these dead German civilian s were Jews killed by Nazis.
Note: This image was taken after the firebombing of Dresden.
“In spite of all that happened at Hamburg, bombing proved a comparatively humane method.” — Quote: Air Chief Marshall ‘Bomber Harris’. Such statements prove that Harris must have known inside that what he was doing was a crime against God and humanity. Otherwise he would not try to cover up for his policy by making such statements.
[Image] Some of Churchill’s enemies. “Our aircraft occasionally killed women and children,” said Air Chief Marshall “Bomber Harris”. Perhaps he made this remark at the end of the war when there weren’t any German woman and children left to kill!
[Image] Corpses found in shelters. Most likely carbon monoxide was the killer: the increasing heat afterwards blackened the bodies.
[Image] In 1945 Dresden received similar treatment to Hamburg with at least 135,000 dead. The picture shows victims being burnt on huge funeral pyres in the street.
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Version History
Version 3: Sep 1, 2019 – Re-uploaded images for katana17.com version.
Version 2: Dec 26, 2015 – Improved formatting using blog quotes.
Version 1: Published Nov 24, 2014