writer Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden during the bombing Allies and was later forced to remove corpses from the city in ruins. In papers discovered by his son after his death in 2007 he provides a disturbing eyewitness account of the 'obscene brutality' that inspired his novel Slaughterhouse # 5.
Translated by Andrea Carancini
was a routine speech we heard the first day of our training base, made from a small muscular lieutenant: "Soldiers, you have so far been good, clean, American boys with American's love for sportsmanship and fair play. We are here to change.
"Our job is to make of you a lot of more bad and dirty bastards in the history of the world. From now on, forget the Marquess of Queensberry rules and every other rule. Everything is permitted.
"never hit a man above the belt when you can hit him below. Make the bastard scream. Kill him whenever you can. Kill, kill, kill - do you understand? ".
His speech was greeted with nervous laughter and the general idea that he was right." They did not say Hitler and Tojo that the Americans were a bunch of debolucci? Ha! I find ".
And of course Germany and Japan it was discovered: a democracy hardened pulled out a seething rage that could not be stopped. On the surface was a war between reason and barbarism, with the issues at stake so high that our fighters unleashed had no idea why they were fighting - as well as what the enemies were a bunch of bastards. It was a new kind of war, which was approved each destruction, all killing.
Many endorsed the idea of \u200b\u200btotal war: it had at its disposal a modern ring, keeping pace with our spectacular technology. For them it was like a football game.
[Back home in America], three wives of shopkeepers in a small town, middle-aged and plump, they gave me a ride while I was hitchhiking back home from Camp Atterbury. "You have killed many Germans? "asked the driver, making nice conversation. I told her I did not know.
This was taken for modesty. As I left the car, one of the ladies gave me a pat on the shoulder in a motherly way, "I bet you'd get it over now and kill some of those dirty Japanese, is not it?"
We exchanged a wink. I did not say those simple souls who had been captured at the front after a week, and especially what I knew, and I thought, about killing the dirty Germans, on the war. The reason for my bitterness, then and now, it has to do with an incident that took attention from the surface American newspapers. In February 1945, Dresden, Germany, was destroyed, and with it over 100,000 human beings. I was there. Not many people know what it was brutal, America.
I was in a group of 150 infantry soldiers, captured in the background of the Bulge, and put to work in Dresden. Dresden, we were told, was the only major German city to be so far escaped the bombing. It was January 1945. He had his fate to his benign countenance peaceful hospitals, breweries, food factories, enterprises of medical supplies, pottery, musical instruments factories, and so on.
Since the war began, the hospital had become his first effort. Each day came in this peaceful retreat hundreds of wounded from the east and west. At night we could hear the dull rumble of distant air raids. "Chemnitz is under fire tonight," we said among ourselves, and we were playing to put ourselves in the shoes of bright young men with their dials and their viewfinders.
"Thank God we are in an" open city ", we thought, and so thought the thousands of refugees - women, children and elderly people, who flocked from abandoned smoking ruins of Berlin, Leipzig, Braslau, Monaco. Into the city up to twice its normal population.
There was no war in Dresden. It 's true, the planes came almost every day and the sirens howled, but the planes were always somewhere else. The alarms provided a moment of relief in a boring day at work, an opportunity for socializing, gossiping in the possibility of air-raid shelters. The shelters, in fact, were not much more than a gesture of recognition of national emergency casual, wine cellars and basements with benches and sandbags blocking the windows, mostly. There were few at the bunker, in the city center, near government offices, but nothing comparable to the trusted underground fortress that rendered Berlin indifferent to her daily pounding. Dresden had no reason to prepare for an attack - there is a story about it.
Dresden was surely among the most delicious city in the world. Its streets were broad, lined with shady trees. It was dotted with numerous small parks and statues. He had wonderful old churches, libraries, museums, theaters, art galleries, gardens, a zoo and a famous university.
was also a paradise for tourists. Would be much more knowledgeable than me on the beauties of the city. But the impression I have is that in Dresden - in his physical presence - there were symbols of the good life: it was nice, honest, intelligent. These symbols were waiting in the shadow of the swastika, as monuments to the truth. Like a treasure accumulated over hundreds of years, Dresden eloquently expressed in the excellence of European civilization, of which we are deep in debt.
I was a prisoner, hungry, dirty, and full of hatred for those who had captured, but I loved this city, and saw the blessed wonder of her past and the rich promise of its future.
In February 1945, American bombers reduced this treasure to crushed stone and hot coals, and the gut with high explosives and incendiary bombs.
The atomic bomb can be a wonderful advancement, but it is interesting to note that the TNT and thermite managed to exterminate in one bloody night more people than died in all the blitz of London. The stronghold of Dresden exploded a dozen shots against our airmen. Once back at the base and sipping a cup of coffee, probably said: "An anti unusually light tonight. Well, I guess it's time to go to bed. " The British pilots captured by the unit combat tactics (which covered the front line troops) rebuked those who had led the heavy bombers in the raid on the city: "How the hell you endured the stench of urine and boiling wheelchairs burned?"
Here's a snippet of news absolutely routine: "Last night our planes attacked Dresden. All planes returned safely. " The only good German is the German dead, more than 100,000 men, women and children wicked (those with disabilities were at the front) have always taken for granted by their sins against humanity. By chance, I met a bombardier who had taken part in the attack. " "Odiammo do it," he said.
The night arrived, we went in the closet of an underground meat abattoir. We were lucky, because it was the best shelter in town. The giants walked the earth above us. At first light came the murmur of their dancing on the outskirts, then the rumble of their advance towards us, and then the deafening roar of their steps above us, and from there again on the outskirts. Were flooding back and forth: it was the saturation bombing.
"I was screaming and crying and I clung to the walls of our shelter," said an old lady. "I prayed to God saying," Please, please, please, dear God, stop them. " But I do not listen. No force could stop them. They came, wave after wave. There was no chance to surrender, nor to tell them that we were not more. There was nothing else to do but sit and wait for the morning. " His daughter and his nephew were killed.
Our little prison was burned to its foundations. We had to be evacuated in a far-field occupied by South African prisoners. Our guards were a bunch of sad and volkssturmer elderly and disabled veterans. The majority were citizens of Dresden and had friends and family involved in the Holocaust. A corporal, who lost an eye after two years on the Russian front, before we left he had learned that his wife, his two children and both parents had been killed. He had a cigarette. The split with me.
Our march to new quarters took us to the edge of the city. It was impossible to believe that anyone had survived in the center. Under normal circumstances, the day was cold, but occasional gusts from hell made us sweat colossal. And, under normal circumstances, the day was clear and bright, but a dull and oppressive cloud had turned the day into dusk. A procession left
obstructed exit routes; people with blackened faces furrowed with tears, someone who brought the wounded, some of the dead. They gathered in the fields. He did not talk anyone. Someone, with the end of the Red Cross did what he could for the victims.
grouped with the South African, spent a week without working. In the end, were re-established contacts with the command and we were ordered to walk seven miles to the area hardest hit.
nothing in the district had escaped the fury. A city of buildings reduced to shells, jagged, broken statues, tree split, and each vehicle was immobile, wrinkled and burned, reduced to rust or rot by the passage of furious force. The only sounds were those of the plaster as well as our falling and its echo.
I can not describe the desolation in an appropriate way, but I can give you an idea of \u200b\u200bhow we did feel, in the words of a British soldier who was delirious in a hospital for prisoners of luck, "I say it's scary. I walked into one of them bloody streets and felt a thousand eyes upon me, those of the dead. I could hear them whispering behind me. I turned to look at them and there was a soul. We can hear them and you can listen to but there's never anyone there. " We knew that he was saying was true.
For the job of "rescuing" We were divided into small groups, each with a guardian. Our macabre task was to search for the bodies. It was a rich hunting that day and others that followed. We started on a small scale - here a leg, there an arm, and an occasional baby - but we found an important trend, before noon.
We made our way through a basement wall to discover a smelly mess of more than 100 humans. It must have penetrated the fire before the building collapse ostruisse exits, because the flesh of those who were remembered in the texture of prunes. Our task, it was explained, was to make us way through the disaster and to take away the remains. Encouraged by slaps and insults, we started to work. We did exactly that, because the floor was covered with a nauseating brew made of pipes and burnt entrails.
A number of victims, not completely dead, had tried to escape through a narrow emergency exit. There were several bodies still trapped in the passage. Their leader had traveled halfway before being buried up to his neck from brick and plaster fell. I think he was about 15 years.
E 'with some regret that tarnish the reputation of our airmen, but, guys, you killed an awful lot of women and children. We had to exhume their bodies and take them to mass funeral pyres.
The funeral pyre technique was abandoned when it was discovered that had the largest number of deaths. There was not enough manpower to implement it well, so he was sent down a man with a flamethrower, to cremate them where they were. Burned alive, suffocated, crushed - men, women and children indiscriminately killed.
With all the nobility of the cause for which we fought, we created to secure our Belsen. The method was impersonal but the result was equally cruel and ruthless. This, I fear, is the nasty truth.
When we got used to the darkness, the stench and the carnage, we began to ask who it was, each of those bodies, when he was still alive. It was a sordid game: "Rich, poor, beggar, thief ..." Someone had swollen handbags and jewelry, others had valuable things to eat. One child had his dog on a leash still close to him.
of our work in the shelters themselves, were responsible for renegades of Ukrainians in German uniform. They were drunk by the wine cellars and seemed to greatly enjoy their task. It was profitable, because the body stripped of all valuables before you take them on the road. Death had become such a cliche that we could joke about our dismal burdens and choose in the midst of so much garbage.
Not so with them, especially the young: we had put on stretchers with care, placing it with some semblance of dignity funeral in their final resting place before the pyre. But our retention scared and gave painful, as I said, cynicism itself. At the end of a horrible day, we smoked and contemplate the impressive pile of dead who had accumulated. One of us threw the stub of his cigarette on the pile: "The bells of hell," he said, "I am ready for death every time he wants to come get me."
few days after the raid, the sirens screamed again. Survivors apathetic leaflets were thrown and crushed. I lost my copy of the proclamation but I remember saying something like: "The people of Dresden: we were forced to bomb your city because of the heavy military traffic that your rail installations were supporting. We realize that it did not always hit our objectives. The destruction of everything else belongs to military activity in relation to events of the war involuntary and unavoidable. "
That explained the massacre to the satisfaction of all, I'm sure, but it aroused no little contempt. It 's a fact that 48 hours after the last B-17 was swarmed westward for a deserved rest, the battalions of engineers arrived at railways damaged and brought to an almost normal. None of the railway bridges on the Elbe was knocked out. The pointing device manufacturers should blush to learn that their marvelous devices dropping bombs up to three miles off target compared to what the Army says it wants to strike.
The leaflet should have said: "We hit all the churches, hospitals, museums, theaters, your university, the zoo, and every public building in town, but I honestly did not want. C'est la guerre. We are very sorry. In addition, the saturation bombing is very fashionable these days, you know. "
There was a tactical significance: stop the railroads. Excellent transaction, no doubt, but the technique was horrible. The aircraft began to run from their compartments incendiary bombs and high potential on the edge of the city, and throughout the sequence of their shots must have been trained by a Ouija board. [2]
Try to classify the loss against the benefits. Over 100,000 civilians and a magnificent city destroyed by bombs dropped out of the declared objectives: the railroads were put out of commission for about two days. The Germans counted the largest loss of life suffered for each raid. The death of Dresden was a bitter tragedy, which was implemented in a free and deliberate. The killing children - children Germans or Japanese, or those of any enemy, the future may have in store - it can never be justified.
replication obvious to my complaints is the most hateful of all clichés: "It's war," or: "If they are looking for. All I understand is force. "
Who is that if you asked for it? All I understand is force? Believe me, it is not easy to identify the fields where they grow the fruit of anger when collecting babies in baskets or helping a man dig where he thinks we can find a wife. Of course, the enemy army and industrial installations to be easily affected, and woe to those foolish enough to seek shelter nearby. But the policy of 'America inflexible, "the spirit of revenge, the approval of each and every crime destruction, we have gained a reputation as a brutally obscene.
Our leaders have had carte blanche on what they could or could not destroy. Their task was to win the war as quickly as possible, and while they were admirably trained to do so, their decisions on the fate of certain priceless relics of the planet - as in the case of Dresden - were not always sensible. When the war ended, the Wehrmacht was in pieces on all fronts, our planes were sent to destroy this last major city, I doubt that it was asked: "What are the advantages we had by this tragedy, and how to hold these advantages in comparison with the negative effects in the long run?"
Dresden, a beautiful city, built in the spirit of art, a symbol of a remarkable legacy, so that anti-Nazi Hitler visited it only twice during his reign, a center now so bitterly in need of food and hospitals - was plowed furrows and were sprinkled with salt.
There can be no doubt that the Allies fought on the right side, and the Germans and the Japanese on the wrong side. The Second World War been fought for reasons almost sacred. But I remain convinced that the sword of justice with which we fought, the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations have been blasphemous. That the enemy has done for them first, it has nothing to do with the moral problem. What I saw of our air war, while the European war was ending, he had the mark of an irrational war for war. Delicate citizens of American democracy have learned to hit a man below the belt and to scream "bastard".
Russian troops of occupation, when they discovered that we were Americans, embraced us and congratulated us for the total ruin brought by our aircraft. We accepted their congratulations with good grace and modesty contrite, but I felt then, as I feel now, I'd give my life to save Dresden for future generations. This is what everyone should try in every city on the planet.
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