WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) (16 page)

In 1940, the death toll at Brandenburg reached about 10,000 people; at other centres, such as Hartheim and Grafeneck, the figures were similar. In total, there were around 35,000 people killed under the Action T4 programme before it was closed down due to public opposition in August 1941. When this happened, the centres continued to operate, but their victims were now prisoners from concentration camps.

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ACKLASH OF PUBLIC OPINION 

Hitler had been careful to avoid passing laws sanctioning the use of the T4 programme, fearing that public opinion would be against it. In particular, there was intense opposition from the Catholic community, who now formed nearly 50 per cent of the German population. High-ranking members of the legal profession, including judges, also protested. The Nazis responded by trying to keep the programme as secret as possible, but this was difficult since there were thousands of doctors, nurses and administrative staff involved in it; also, there were thousands of families who lost loved ones in the purges. As well as the fact that staff talked to their friends and relatives about what was going on at the centres, despite strict instructions not to, many families had begun to realize that the hastily issued death certificates they received to notify them of the patients’ deaths were false; for example, in one case, a patient was alleged to have died of appendicitis, when in fact he had already had his appendix taken out. In addition, those citizens who lived near the centres noticed that more and more busloads of patients were going in but none ever came out, and that there was a steady stream of smoke issuing from the furnaces. Gruesome incidents, such as clouds of ash and human hair falling on townspeople living near the centre at Hadamar, were clear indications of the carnage that was taking place; and it was reported that, in many places, children could be heard shouting about the gassings in the streets.

Not surprisingly, families began to take their loved ones away from mental asylums, hospitals and residential homes. There were also instances in which doctors worked to protect the patients from their fate. In other cases, staff took bribes to save the patients from the gas chambers. However, on the whole, the entire German medical profession cooperated with the T4 programme, either because they held the same beliefs as the Nazis about eugenics and ‘racial purity’, or because they were too afraid to protest.

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ITLER JEERED

Despite the support for the programme from the medical profession, it’s not surprising that the T4 programme could not last. Rumours began to be circulated that even wounded German soldiers would be subject to the T4 criteria and gassed, giving rise to public protests and increased opposition from outspoken members of the Catholic clergy. Protestant church leaders, who had hitherto supported the Nazis, also joined in the chorus of disapproval. In one instance, a Catholic bishop, Clemens von Galen, preached a rousing sermon against the killing of ‘poor, unproductive people’, and followed it up with a diatribe against religious persecution.

Naturally, the Nazis would have liked to arrest von Galen, but he, and others like him, had immense support from the general public. Thus the authorities were nervous of causing open revolt among the population against the regime. Matters reached a crisis point when Hitler himself was jeered at a public event in the town of Hof – the first time this had ever happened to him. He was reportedly furious, but he knew that his hands were tied: the Reich was busy fighting a foreign war and could not afford a major confrontation with the Church at that time. Faced with the choice of arresting and imprisoning hundreds of high-ranking Church and other leaders, which would have provoked public opinion against the party, or ended the T4 programme, the Führer chose the latter option. On 24 August, 1941, he personally ordered the closing down of the programme.

Unfortunately, this was a short-lived victory for humanitarian standards and common decency in Nazi Germany. Within only a few months, the T4 team of doctors, nurses and administrators had been given a new task. They were to perform the same role in another killing programme, that of exterminating the Jewish population under the terms of the ‘final solution’. And, although the systematic murdering of the mentally and physically impaired ceased after 1941, the killings continued at a local level. Patients were no longer sent to the gas chambers, but were given lethal injections or starved to death.

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HE AFTERMATH

After the war, the full scale of the horror regarding T4 programme emerged. In December 1946, 23 doctors and adminstrative staff, including Hitler’s personal doctor Dr Karl Brandt, and the chief organizer of the programme Viktor Brack, were tried for their part in war crimes and crimes against humanity. The crimes included the systematic murder of physically and mentally ill people, and those with disabilities. Brandt and Brack, along with several others, were convicted and sentenced to death. They were executed in 1948. Philipp Bouler and Leonardo Conti, both leading Nazi medical officers, were also sent to trial, but they killed themselves while in prison.

In October 2006, skeletons of children and adults believed to have been part of the T4 ‘euthanasia programme’ were unearthed in what appeared to be a mass grave in a cemetery at the village of Menden-Barge. The cemetery was near to the site of a former hospital run by Brandt, where mental patients had been gassed to death.

The Bombing Of Dresden

February 1945

The bombing of Dresden in February 1945, during World War II, is considered by many to be a war crime, committed by the Allies against the German nation. This is because a heavily populated civilian area was specifically targeted and bombed on an enormous scale, using incendiary bombs to create a firestorm on the ground to maximize the death toll. So many bombs were dropped over the city by British and American aeroplanes that the area became a sheet of fire, drawing in cold air towards it like a tornado, and sucking in human bodies to be consumed in the flames. Eyewitness accounts of the bombing tell of extraordinary sights, such as seeing people reduced to cinders in front of their eyes, and whole streets blackened and burnt so badly that they were no longer recognizable.

The total weight of bombs dropped on Dresden was far greater than any bombing hitherto during the British air campaign and the bombing seems to have lacked any particular rationale, beyond creating sheer panic and terror in the population and thus destroying civilian morale. For these reasons, many doubt that it was necessary to wreak quite such appalling devastation on one of Germany’s most crowded cities, especially considering the chaos and confusion that its inhabitants were already experiencing as a result of refugees fleeing to it from other areas of Germany.

However, there are those who maintain that the bombing was necessary to hasten the end of the war, and that to that degree it may have saved lives, at least on the Allied side. After the war, Air Marshal Arthur Harris of RAF Bomber Command – the man who helped to introduce the policy of ‘area bombing’ (or ‘terror bombing’ as it was known in Germany) – came under intense criticism for his part in the attack. However, he argued that the city was an important military target, being a communications centre for German defence, and that it was fully justified in the context of the war.

The policy of ‘area bombing’ (that is, directly bombing German cities and towns) had been advocated since by Charles Portal of the British Air Staff, and there had been attacks on Berlin and other German cities. These had not been successful, but they had encouraged the Germans to switch their air attacks from British military targets to urban areas. Many argued that this had helped the British win the Battle of Britain but had also invited the Blitz, which ravaged London during the war. In 1941, in conjunction with Arthur Harris, the Head of RAF Bomber Command, Portal introduced the policy of blanket bombing of urban areas at night to cause maximum civilian casualties. The campaign targeted Cologne, Hamburg, Nuremberg and Dresden, and is thought to have killed 600,000 civilians; the deaths of pilots were high, too, and more than 50,000 airforce personnel were killed in the raids. Eventually, the death toll from the campaign became too high, and the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, ordered that it should be abandoned. This was partly because Churchill did not want the whole country to be destroyed by the time the British won the war, which seemed likely by 1945.

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ASSIVE FIRESTORM

The bombing attack on Dresden began on the evening of 13 February, 1945. First, British planes began to drop incendiary bombs, packed with magnesium, phosphorus, napalm and other combustible materials, onto the city, creating a massive fire that raged through the streets. Harris specifically intended this firestorm to be created, which shocked some of the pilots dropping the bombs. One wireless operator who took part in the raid, Roy Akehurst, recalled:

We seemed to fly for hours over a sheet of fire – a terrific red glow with a thin haze over it. I found myself making comments to the crew: ‘Oh God, those poor people.’ It was completely uncalled for. You couldn’t justify it.

On the ground, the scene was worse than the worst nightmare. High buildings caught fire, creating a mass of hot air rushing upwards like a tornado, sucking up people and throwing them into the flames. Citizens fled through the burning streets to cellars, many of them fainting from the fumes and being burnt to cinders in front of onlookers. All the electricity in the city was out, so people were stumbling about in the darkness, clutching their children, many of whom were swept up in the flames. Down in the cellars, the dead and dying lay next to those who were still alive, and many were trampled to death as more and more people tried to cram in to get out of the firestorm.

The situation for those on the ground became worse when the weather cleared and the bombers were able to see their target better. American bombers were now called in, and a second wave of bombing began during daylight hours, in which the city was almost totally destroyed. Thousands were killed in the process in a most agonizing and painful way, being burnt to death. It is difficult to put an exact figure on the number of people who died, because so many bodies were completely incinerated in the firestorm, becoming cinders and ashes, but it has been estimated that the total death toll was around 35,000. However, some researches put the figure much higher, at around 100,000.

Whatever the truth of the matter, there is no doubt that the bombing of Dresden was one of the most destructive events of World War II. Almost the entire population was killed or injured, and few buildings were left standing. Sadly, Dresden had been a beautiful city, dating from medieval times, with many fascinating buildings and monuments that were a testament to the glories of German culture. Thus, its destruction was regarded not only as catastrophe on humanitarian grounds, but as a blow to European architecture, art and civilization.

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ONTROVERSY

In the wake of the tragedy, there was great controversy about what had happened. After the war, the military personnel involved gave their side of the story, arguing that the bombing had been an effective way of bringing the war to a hasty close, thus saving the lives of hundreds of their men. In the view of Robert Saunby, Deputy Air Marshal at Bomber Command:

What is immoral is war itself. Once full-scale 

war has broken out, it can never be humanized or civilized, and if one side attempted to do so it would be most likely to be defeated. That to me is the lesson of Dresden.

Others, however, had a different perspective. It was argued that Dresden had not been a city that had any particular military importance, and that nothing was achieved by bombing it, beyond destroying thousands of innocent people and desecrating one of the great cultural centres of the world. The burning to death of over 35,000 people, they claimed, was a war crime comparable to what went on in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Moreover, they pointed out, when the bombing of Dresden took place, victory for the Allies appeared to be a certainty and was only weeks away. It was unnecessary and seemed to spring from a mood of anger and revenge on the part of the Allies rather than being a careful military strategy to inflict damage on the German war machine.

Critics also point out that Britain has never apologized to Germany for the bombing of Dresden. While German politicians have spoken in public of the nation’s guilt at the bombing of Coventry and other events during the war, there has been no public apology from Britain for similar attacks. Indeed, when the British queen visited Dresden, she did not lay a wreath for the dead at the cathedral there, or make a public apology about the bombing. She did, however, host a concert in Berlin to raise money for the rebuilding of the Dresden Frauenkirche, a building that was once regarded as an architectural masterpiece but was reduced to rubble in the bombing campaign.

At the end of World War II, Germany, Japan and other nations from the Axis powers became the focus of many investigations for war crimes and crimes against humanity. However, the Allies were not investigated for the simple reason that they had won the war and therefore became the legislators of the settlement made after the conflict. To many commentators, this seems a patently unfair situation, allowing Britain, the USA and the other Allied nations to get away with war crimes, atrocities and revenge killings of all kinds, while prosecuting the Germans and Japanese for their part in the war. Of course, it can be argued that Germany was the aggressor in World War II, and that the Third Reich was the most evil regime to come to power in modern history; but even so, it seems that the Allies were far from blameless in their conduct and that it is hypocritical to ignore this. Thus, in recent years, there have been several journalists, historians and researchers who have debated this state of affairs, claiming that the time has now come to redress the wrongs suffered by the losers in World War II, and that the bombing of Dresden must be regarded as one of the great war crimes that, to date, has gone unpunished.