March in Dresden on 16.02.2008

[P.W.]

Funeral march on Saturday, 16-02-2008 in Dresden,
Beginning 13:00 Hrs behind the Semperoper.
To commemorate the victims of the allies' terror bombing of February 1945

Like in the previous years, the Junge Landsmannschaft Osdeutschland e.V., will organize a Funeral march, on 16-02-2008 in Dresden, in memory of the victims of the allies’ terror bombing.

We expect more than 5000 of our members to attend this ceremony. We are the youth generation of the expatriates from the eastern German territories. We are interested in politics and history and we love Germany. We ask all people who are interested to join and march with us on 16th February 2008 in Dresden.

We want to honour the victims of the bomb raids of February 13th and 14th 1945 and pay our last respect to them. Since the invasion of the red army in the eastern areas of Germany, the population of Dresden had doubled, with refugees from Pomerania, Silesia, east and west Prussia, up to 1.2, million people. Dresden was used as the main meeting point. For us Dresden is the showcase of a policy of destruction against eastern Germany.
With mass murder and unprecedented destruction of a culture, a piece of Germany was erased. But destruction is only definitive if the memory has faded out. So we will not stop reminding people of the millions of victims of the terror against the German civilian population. The death of innocent German people on a massive scale, and the destruction of German culture can be fully recognized here - in Dresden. We should remember the destiny of those millions Germans. The end of the war was no liberation for them. Therefore, we demand over and over again: “Make February 13th an official commemoration day for the Federal Republic!"

Senseless destruction and unnamed mass murder hit almost every town in Germany. An official ideology that hides unsavoury truths is the base for recurring catastrophes. Only the complete truth creates a fair and long-lasting peace. Such a peace is the basis for the self-confidence of a nation. Grief cannot be changed. But the permanent and one-sided contempt for the victims is wrong. It was a war crime to bring a town down to rubbles and ashes, a town that was without any air protection measures and defenceless, which was overfilled with refugees. And these war crimes have been left unpunished to this day. On the contrary, today German politicians approve those war crimes as a necessity. This cannot be in the interest of the German people. Today they send German soldiers in wars which are made in the name of democracy and freedom. Will German soldiers have to stand in front of a real people's court tomorrow? The dead people of Dresden and of all the other German towns do not ask for revenge, of course this is not the way of the Germans. They demand truth, justice and to honour their memory, so that, to us and our descendants, a similar destiny will not be repeated.

So come to Dresden and take part in the funeral procession of the JLO.
Saturday, 16-2-2008,
Beginning 13:00 Hrs behind the Semperoper (near the theatre square)

You find more information here: JLO Sachsen
(Also about the demonstrations of the previous years)

To correct misleading reports which are spread by newspaper, radio, teletext and Internet, every year we give the following tip: The city of Dresden has not forbidden the demonstration! There will be, as well as for the previous years, a ban (general ban) which applies to all demonstrations in the city area. The place before the Semperoper will probably be included, but not the place behind the opera!!! So nothing will be in way of a peaceful, regular demonstration.

Junge Landsmannschaft Ostdeutschland e.V.
Landesverband Sachsen-Niederschlesien
PF 500208
01032 Dresden
www.jlosachsen.de

Information telephone: 0174 - 463 22 88, 0173 - 95 55 980, 0163 - 444 11 44

Bus coordination: 01 78 - 464 35 27

[Big Bwana]

Just out of interest....is there a memorial or mass grave for the victims of the bombing.....?....names etc.

[Menydh]

I don't know if there are mass graves, but many were cremated to avoid an epidemic spreading from the quickly rotting corpses. As for names, official records tell that some 25-30,000 were reported missing by relatives or friends. But even if they are correct, those figures don't take into account that Dresden was a city with plenty of refugees at the time. Apparently some corpses were found still as late as 1966.

Edit: on his book Apocalypse 1945: The Destruction of Dresden, David Irving apparently writes that the bombs killed 100,000 civilians in only two hours.

There is a mass grave at Johannes-Friedhof cemetery.

Some pictures of the pyres





The Altmark pyre, burning

[Big Bwana]

I read somewhere that Irving found some documents that revealed the death toll as something like 16'000 or 20'000.......i cant remember where i read this but ill dig it up.
Anyway it wasnt as high a death toll as first thought.......i think he found these documents in a German archive.

[Menydh]

I don't know, really. It is from his site that I've taken the figure of 100,000 ( Free Download: Apocalypse 1945, The Destruction of Dresden ) or between fifty and a hundred thousand ( Real History: Apocalypse 1945, The Destruction of Dresden ).

Of all revisionists of the Hitlerian regime and of the WWII, David Irving is the only one that I know of who I give credit.

[Big Bwana]

Im sure i read it on here somewhere.....but i cant remember where.
Institute for Historical Review

It was included in an article about something else....anyway the jist of it was that apparently Irving has un-earthed some documents in a German archive that were thought to be lost....and they include the numbers of victims at Dresden.

[Heimdallr]

.
The bombing of Dresden, the capital city of the German Federal State of Saxony, by the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) between 13 February and 15 February 1945, easily remains one of the more controversial events of World War II...

"Dresden has a long history as capital and Royal residence for the Kings of Saxony with centuries of extraordinary cultural and artistic splendor. The destruction of Dresden has an epically tragic quality to it. It was a wonderfully beautiful city and a symbol of baroque humanism and all that was best in Germany... In that sense it is an absolutely exemplary tragedy for the horrors of 20th Century warfare." [~ Wikipedia]


..Dresden (Saxony, Germany) - Old Town and Augustusbrücke, seen from the Ministry of War

[P.W.]

I was in Dresden - over 6000 comrades was there (press write 8.000 till 10.000 comrades) - exactly I don't know

any clips:

YouTube - Dresden - Gedenken 2008 (MDR-Mix)

ARD - Tagesthemen
YouTube - ARD Tagesthemen - Trauermarsch Dresden 16.2.08

Postplatz
YouTube - 8000Deutsche lassen sich nicht länger belügen.Dresden!!!!

Pictures HERE

[Breogan]

Congrats to all.