Dresden, Feb. 13, 1945

[dream_labyrinth]

Politically, this post is difficult.
While it is okay to remember all the victims of the Nazi regime, it is still not really okay to remember the victims of allied attacks. Because we were the bad guys who started the war, so we only got what we deserved.
Personally, I think the thousands of people who died in Dresden 60 years ago did not deserve that. Bombing a city full of Civilians, with no military actually stationed in the town, full of refugees from other areas (Dresden had never been bombed between 1939 and this day in 1945, it was considered safe) was not necessary.
It was revenge, maybe. It would be understandable. It wouldn't be right.
I don't know what the allies do to commemorate this day, whether they do anything at all.
I think I'll put a candle in the window tonight. I won't be in Dresden and can't join the demonstration there (and I am not talking about the neo-nazis gathering there, but the people who simply don't want to forget that terrible things happened during the war and the Germans were victims just as much as everybody else), so my candle might be a lonely gesture. But I will still do it and remember.

Dresden 1945 from http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/dres/bw19.jpg Copyright by Sächsische Staatsbibliothek, Landes- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden, Fotothek

For more info on Dresden, pictures and whatnot, go here

Comments

[call-me-harmony.livejournal.com]

I agree with you it is important to recognise all victims of wars, to me that even includes those soldiers on both sides who felt they had to fight, even more it includes the civilian casualties on all sides.

[dream-labyrinth.livejournal.com]

You know, I had the most interesting experience a while back, when the war in Afghanistan had started. We were having regular prayers in our church, where everybody could just tell the others for whom we wanted them to pray. Everybody was like "the civilians", "the children", "the Afghans", whatever, and I said "the soldiers". They took about five minutes of total silence before they could accept that the soldiers had the same rght to be considered as everybody else.

[ex-bleodswea521.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

*lights candle*

I so agree with you that there are untold victims of war - how about Germans today still carrying HUGE amounts of guilt for something that happened decades before they were EVEN born??? - and not all of them are always remembered with compassion.

[dream-labyrinth.livejournal.com]

Ouch, now you hit on something.
To me, it always seemed as if we Germans expect it from ourselves to carry that guilt for the Nazi times. As if we, even my generation, should apologize all the time for it, and never dare to critizise anybody anywhere, because after all we had Hitler.
IMO, this is dangerous because patriotism in the sense of looving your own country, not in the sense of believing you're the best and everybody else should go to hell, is a very important feeling and people who don't have that might turn to something like Hitler, a person who gives them what they are missing. I believe that is how Hitler came to power in the first place, giving people the value they were missing, telling them that they were great.

[knight0fswords.livejournal.com]

When my grandfather came home from Europe in World War II, he brought back a German watch as "spoils of war." He gave it to my grandmother, and my mother now has it. I've always wondered about the German lady that had worn it and what had happened to her. Wars create so many victims in so many ways we never think of.

[dream-labyrinth.livejournal.com]

My grandparents (at least on my father's side, I never knew the others well enough to ask them) did come out of the war surprisingly unscathed, for what they had experienced.
But even though they and most of their relatives and their close friends survived the war, it left traces in them and through them in my parents also.
I think experiencing a war like the people in Europe did leaves scars that last longer than just one generation, even though it might not be possible to logically explain it.