Hellstorm Page #3

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to become mired in melting asphalt or sucked

into the roaring furnace. Copper roofs melted,

sending down streams of molten metal upon

the people below.

Throughout the night, the fiery hell that

was Dresden claimed victims by the thousands,

by the tens of thousands, and

by the hundreds of thousands.

The following day, when the fires had

cooled, rescue workers went to work.

Rescue worker:
Never would I have thought

that death could come to so many people in

so many different ways. Sometimes the

victims looked like ordinary people apparently

peacefully sleeping; the faces of others were

racked with pain, the bodies stripped almost

naked by the tornado; there were wretched

refugees from the East clad only in rags,

and people from the Opera in all their

finery; here the victim was a shapeless slab,

there a layer of ashes. Across the city, along

the streets wafted the unmistakable stench

of decaying flesh.

Indeed, of all the hideous scents wafting

through Dresden - sulfur, gas, sewage -

the heavy stench of

cooked flesh blanketed all.

What were at first mistaken to be thousands

of burnt logs scattered about the streets

were soon found to be charred corpses glued to

the surface, each reduced to roughly three feet.

Rescue worker:
One shape I will never forget

was the remains of what had apparently been

a mother and a child. They had shriveled and

charred into one piece, and had been stuck

rigidly to the asphalt. They had just been

prised up. The child must have been underneath

the mother, because you could still clearly see

its shape, with its mothers arms clasped around it.

Aware that those in the old city would flee

the flames to the open spaces, the RAF had

hurled hundreds of high explosive bombs into

the huge central park. Here, the slaughter

was ghastly - torn-off limbs, mutilated torsos,

heads blown from their bodies and hurled away.

The nightmare was everywhere.

Red Cross Worker: I went down on my knees,

trembled and cried. Several women lay

there with their bellies burst open, and one

could see the babies for they were hanging

half outside. Many of the babies were

mutilated. Scenes like that one I saw everywhere

and very slowly one became

numbed. One acted like a zombie.

The next morning, word spread that survivors

should assemble in the city park. As the suffering

mass climbed over the debris and the dead,

they reached the park as well as the grassy

banks of the Elbe. Some found missing

loved ones. Most, however, did not.

And then, shattering the calm, came the sounds once more

- the roar of engines overhead.

As US bombers began blasting the rubble to dust,

American fighter planes zeroed in on the thousands

of refugees at the park, along

the river and in other open spaces.

Even zoo animals which had miraculously

managed to survive the bombing raids,

were strafed and slaughtered. A weeping zoo

keeper watched as an American pilot chased down and

shot his last remaining giraffe.

Although the raid lasted only ten minutes, the

Americans returned the next day, and the next,

and the next, seemingly determined that not a

single living thing should survive in Dresden.

One of the horrors for those who had survived

the nightmare was recovery of the dead.

Initially, bodies were pitchforked onto trucks

and wagons, and then take to shallow graves on the

outskirts of Dresden. It soon

became clear that such a slow process

could never handle the enormous amount of

bodies, so huge grills were fashioned from

girders in various parts of town and corpses

were stacked on them like logs. When the piles

reached roughly ten feet high and thirty feet

wide, flame throwers were used to ignite the mass.

One month after the massacre, the Dresden Chief

of Police reported that over 200,000 bodies

had been recovered from the ruins. Later,

the International Red Cross estimated

that 275,000 had died in the raids. Because of

the incredible density of Dresdens population

on the night of February 13th14th, because

thousands of victims were refugees with no

records, and because many bodies either lay

buried forever in the ruins or had simply

melted like wax, other estimates, which place

the death toll at 300,000 to 400,000 may well

be closer to the mark.

More people died during the

firebombing of Dresden than during the

nuclear bombings of Hiroshima

and Nagasaki combined.

RAF crewman:
To just fly over it without opposition

felt like murder. I felt it was a cowardly war.

Working in tandem with the terror bombing of

German cities was the "targets of opportunity"

policy upon the countryside. Under this order,

anything moving in the Reich was fair game

for Allied fighter planes. Ships, trucks,

cars, trains, ambulances, women shopping on

bicycles, farmers in fields, animals in pastures,

even children in school yards, were targets

of Allied aircraft.

In a flagrant attempt to widen the war, American

bombers even attacked Zurich, Basel, and other

targets in neutral Switzerland. Additionally,

Winston Churchill made plans to saturate German

cities with poison gas and kill those women

and children yet alive amid the rubble.

When advisers pointed out that Adolf Hitler might

reply in kind with his own stockpiles of chemical

weapons, the murderous plan was shelved.

Meanwhile, the hell raining from the clouds

mirrored an ongoing hell rising from the mud.

As Germans soon came to realize, the Allied

powers sought not only the physical destruction

of Germany, but the spiritual

massacre of the nation as well.

THE RAPE OF GERMANY

The evil swept in from the East. There were

constant rumors and hints about what might

be expected should the Soviet Union overrun

Germany. Most Germans, however, remained hopeful.

Such notions of "Asiatic hordes", many

felt, were merely the governments attempt

to harden their will to resist.

Thus it was, that on the night of October

20th, 1944, as the village of Nemmersdorf and

other communities nearest the front slept in

imagined security, the unthinkable occurred.

After punching a hole through the German line,

the Red Army suddenly burst into the Reich

and swarmed over the countryside. After several

days of desperate fighting the German Wehrmacht

regrouped, launched a furious counterattack,

and eventually drove the Red Army across

the border. What German troops soon found

was staggering. It was at Nemmersdorf where

stunned soldiers first

viewed hell on earth.

Along the roads, fleeing refugees had been

overtaken by the communists; the people were

pulled from their carts, raped,

then murdered on the spot.

A witness:
In the farmyard further down the

road stood a cart, to which four naked women

were nailed through their hands in a

cruciform position. Beyond stood a barn

and to each of its two doors a naked woman was

nailed through the hands, in a crucified posture.

In the dwellings we found a total of seventy

- two women, including children,

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