OK, you convinced me. “Carpet bombings” may not be that bad after all, even the already named Bomber Harris said: “In spite of all what happened in Hamburg, bombing remains a relatively humane measure”…
-Guernica was a misdrop due to bad sight, disadvantageous winds and crappy aiming devices of the JU52 (!) bombers of the still unexperienced german Luftwaffe. The actual target of the attack were bridges and street crossings eastwards of Guernica. Any civilian victim is one too much, but the Guernica air raid caused the death of 226 people, so it was not by far the mass terror bombing enemy- especially communist voices tried to make it.
-Rotterdam was a defended town, the city centrum was packed with strongholds. The only german units fighting in the town were some paratroopers, since own artillery was not available they called in the airstrike as “vertical artillery” (not my term). Article 25 of the Hague Convention says it’s forbidden to attack or shell UNDEFENDED towns, villages and homeplaces. Rotterdam lost this status since defended by the dutch army.
-Belgrade was attacked without declaration of war, right. As I said I can’t and don’t want to justify everything committed by Germany. But IIRC there was an attack of the RAF the very next day after the Belgrade bombings hitting the town of Sofia/Bulgaria. This attack was described as an act of reprisal by the UK itself.
Oh, now it’s the Wehrmacht as well. Man, that’s a tough one. I now have to handle that I actually descending from a bunch of war criminals since every male member of my family with the fitting age served in the Wehrmacht. Seriously: “war crimes were practically standard operating procedure”, that’s as cheap as it is wishy-washy.
The NKVD wasn’t called an illegal organisation at Nuremberg either, right? In place of Katyn I give you Nemmersdorf or hundreds of other east-prussian, silesian, pommeranian, hungarian villages for the Red Army…
No evidence for Katyn which would stand up in court to prove their culpability? Well, what evidence DID they need. What about the statements of the commission of 12 foreign official medicolegal expert from all over Europe plus an unknown number of british and american POWs as well as several members of the polish Red Cross? All these people have been “in situ” on invitation/request of the german government to prove that the killings actually took place in 1940 meaning under soviet domain. Honestly, the IMT hadn’t the balls to accuse Uncle Joe and his clique for anything!
Ah, this is generalizing crap again. You’re discrediting millions of decent front soldiers here. But WTF, they were only “krauts”, right?!? Do you think there was some kind of selection by the Wehrmacht leadership like “good guys westwards, bad guys eastwards”???
“Le Paradis” was a flawless war crime and the CO, SS-Obersturmführer Fritz Knöchlein, got what he deserved in 1948.
I am sure as a former concentration camp inmate (cologne fair grounds) Adenauer thought nothing but the best of the Wehrmacht and the Third Reich without forming his own picture of things. Surely, the IMT at Nuremberg was impeccable…but how bout this little differences in the Jodl judgement? Didn’t one of their own call it a miscarriage (french judge Henri Donnedieu de Vabres)?
Why did I just know you’d come up with that? I will immediately start searching the net for any NKVD-, Khmer Rouge- or Manson Family-reenactor groups.
