The bombing of Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Coventry and other cities by the German Luftwaffe during World War 2 are often referred to as war crimes and was one of the allegations at the Nuremberg war trials.


However the bombings of , the four districts of Hamburg where 50.000 people died, the 1943 October firestorm in Kassel, the raid on Konigsberg, (134.000 people lost their home), 12.000 people killed in September 1944 when some 250.000 firebombs struck Darmstadt and the cities Bremerhaven, Brunswick and Heilbronn suffered similar air attacks, were justified by Allied air commanders as being sorties of “ progressive destruction and dislocation of the German economic and industrial system“.

Then of course the 14^th of February 1945 air attack on Dresden “ the Florence on the Elbe” at a time when the population of Dresden was estimated as 1.200.000 people ( nearly twice its normal population) including thousands of forced Belgian, French and other foreign labourers and thousands of Russian, British and American prisoners of war.

The excuse for this raid was that it would facilitate the Russian advance.

But none of the above mentioned air attacks were considered as being a war crime.

Yes , it is and always was the attitude from times immemorial that the victors of war would carry the crown, take the loot and that was the end.
　

And while on the subject of war crimes can anyone remember the story a number of years ago on the BBC forum about the incident in early September 1939 when a Royal Navy submarine torpedoed a German freighter in the Southern Atlantic and the RN submarine commander ORDERED the crew to machine gun the freighter’s survivors. The officers and crew of the submarine reported the incident on arrival in Gibraltar and the submarine commander was charged relieved of command and returned to the UK and for the rest of the war was located to a desk job.

The submarine crew were sworn to secrecy

Dirk Marinus wrote:

And while on the subject of war crimes can anyone remember the story a number of years ago on the BBC forum about the incident in early September 1939 when a Royal Navy submarine torpedoed a German freighter in the Southern Atlantic and the RN submarine commander ORDERED the crew to machine gun the freighter’s survivors. The officers and crew of the submarine reported the incident on arrival in Gibraltar and the submarine commander was charged relieved of command and returned to the UK and for the rest of the war was located to a desk job.

The submarine crew were sworn to secrecy

There was an allegation, made by historian Ludovic Kennedy in the 1980s, of something similar against Anthony Miers, commanding officer of HMS Torbay, but that was in the Mediterranean in 1942.

Miers won a VC during his time with Torbay


Anthony Miers

Dirk, the Dresden and Hamburg raids were awful - but I understand in some way why they happened. I suppose in war  much depends on who started it. Of those who did  so, in this case, I doubt that there would even have been trials had they reached victory.They had a  very bad reputation for huge retribution. In this case, the victorious - the British part of the allies, anyway, were war-worn. Without thousands of slaves to man our factories, with resources low and  after suffering  years of bombing, u-boat blockade of food convoys, V1's and then V2 rockets launched on indiscriminate targets, whether right or wrong, dealing out a hammering happened. Many condemned Dowding for it here too.
I , a smal child, then, recall hearing the Hamburg bombers go over -it took a very long time in low roaring waves and my mother whispering a prayer for the women and children who  would 'suffer that lot.' We were in our cellar with others who used it too, where we often slept and very familiar with enemy bombers coming over us . Making such decisions at that time must have been a very heavy load.

Harris - "Bomber" I think, not "Stuffy" Dowding - he commanded Fighter Command in 1940 so ha no role in deciding on those raids.

Gosh yes, of course, gulp!  Thanks, Gil. What of the rest I wrote? I have no idea what resources Nazis took from occupied countries - apart from man power -  quite a lot I assume. A more knowledgeable insight please, someone. I am not defending the action, just trying to get a hold on the mind set of the times.

Well, 699.01 Sir Drefaldwyn was built in France by Franco-Belge for the Wehrmacht. When it came to Welshpool (after decades of service on the Zillertalbahn in Austria) it was found that several welded components were attached only on the surface - possibly deliberately. The Germans also used French aero engines to power the Me 321 glider to become the Me 323 Gigant. The only armoured unit on the Channel Islands was equipped exclusively with French Char B tanks, half the armoured vehicles in the invasion of France were Czech in origin ........