ALT-RIGHT LIES: THE DRESDEN MYTH

What the Alt-Right literally believes

by Colin Liddell

One of the myths commonly trotted out on the Alt-Right at this time of year is the Dresden Myth.

According to this meme, trope, narrative, or whatever you want to call it, the bombing of Dresden (13th-15th of February, 1945) was one of the most horrendous war crimes ever. Indeed, it was so bad that it stands right up there with the Holocaust—which, of course, many in the Alt-Right deny—and the atom bombing of the Japanese as some kind of ultimate and delegitimising evil.

Of course it was bad, but in war all sorts of terrible things happen as a matter of course. So, using Dresden in this way is rather a hard sell. The normies just don't get it. To them it's just one more example of a bombing raid, hardly a rare occurrence in WWII.

Even when the Alt-Right exaggerate the casualty figures and throw in some colourful details about low flying bombers machine gunning fleeing civilians, etc., the reaction is still pretty much "meh."

This doubtlessly has something to do with the fact that the Germans were pioneers in the mass bombing of civilian centres themselves. Here's a screenshot of an interactive bomb map of London from the Blitz. Go to the site and check it out for yourself.

So, everybody bombed someone. So what?

But this is where the second part of the myth kicks in. In order to make you care about this particular bombing, we are told that the war was already over when Dresden was bombed, so that, unlike Warsaw in 1939, Rotterdam in 1940, and London, the bombing of Dresden was not a "normal" act of war, but instead just an act of gratuitous cruelty and sadism.

Here is a typical anonymous comment from a Facebook group putting forward this point of view:

Dresden was a civilian massacre. Call it what it is man, the war was OVER....germany's infrastructure was finished a year before Dresden was torched. Germany's rail system was bombed to shit, they had no resources and the army was done.

Yes, indeed, if the war was truly over by February 1945, that would make Dresden somewhat worse. Although, it could also be argued that even if the war was "effectively over" it would have been quite hard for people to just shrug off years of war conditioning and start acting normally as rational, humane beings in the flick of a switch.

But was the war effectively over as is claimed?

Of course, in the sense that Germany could no longer win against the massive forces arrayed against it, or even achieve some kind of negotiated peace, the war was definitely over. But in terms of brutal fighting and high casualties for both sides, it was still very much an ongoing affair.

This can be proved quite simply by looking at data—y'know that old-fashioned way of resolving arguments and variant viewpoints.

First here is a map of the military situation in the middle of February 1945. As you can see, the Nazis still control almost all of Germany and large areas of other countries. Millions of men were still under arms, and the Western allies had yet to cross the Rhine.

Germany, February 1945: Notice that Dresden is on a direct line between the most active parts of the Western front and the most active parts of the Eastern front, revealing its strategic importance.

 Now, in case someone thinks this is just a big map of nothing, and that the millions of German soldiers under arms were just wandering aimlessly around looking for someone nice to surrender to, let's look at the monthly casualty figures just for the US Army. The figures for the Soviet army, if they were available and reliable, would probably paint an even more convincing picture that the war was still very much at its peak.

Starting from June 1944, when the D-Day landings took place, here are the month-by-month casualty figures of the US Army in Europe (including the Army Air Corps). These figures come from the Department of the Army’s final report on "Army Battle Casualties and Nonbattle Deaths in World War II (7th December 1941 - 31st December 1946). You can download a copy of the report here Note, casualties include killed and wounded at roughly the proportion of three wounded to one killed.

1944
June  49,061
July  61,454
August  49,458
September  54,937
October  47,725
November  65,918
December  80,994

1945
January  70,560
February  43,603
March  56,282
April  49,706
May  2,201
June  82

As we can see from these figures, US Army casualties were at their highest in December 1944 and January 1945, the months preceding the bombing of Dresden, which occurred in the middle of February. In those months the Western allies had received a nasty shock with a surprise German offensive in the Ardennes (The Battle of the Bulge), when German forces threatened, albeit briefly, to break through to the Channel again.

Also note that US casualties were higher in March and April 1945 than they were in June 1944, the month of the famous D-Day landings and subsequent battles in Normandy, when German forces were supposedly at their peak in opposition to American forces. This is so counter-intuitive to what most people know about the war that it needs emphasising: In both the months following Dresden, German military efforts against the Americans were more intense and took a higher toll than they did in June 1944.

The idea that Germany was "militarily finished" when the Dresden bombings happened is thus clearly absurd.

So why does the lying Alt-Right push this retarded myth? The most obvious answer is that they want to evoke sympathy for Nazi Germany. But this raises a further question: Why do they want to evoke sympathy for Nazi Germany?

Knee-jerk hatred of Jews is the obvious answer, but another possible and highly nefarious possibility is that they want to attach White identitarianism, White nationalism, and European self-determination to what is an extremely toxic brand in order to poison it.

They know that people who are attracted to these healthy forms of self-determination are likely to be more open-minded about history and less inclined to believe establishment narratives. Thus they are more likely to be taken in by blatant lies like the Dresden Myth. If that is the intention, then it is clearly an evil one, designed to keep nationalism on its knees as a pathetic victim identity and confined to a Nazi ghetto.

The Alt-Right's brilliant and carefully thought-through
position on the bombing of Dresden.

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Affirmative Right and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here.