#Opinion by Maria Zakharova
💬 Another act of historical vandalism is taking place in Dresden while German farmers are holding protests to show that they are sick and tired of the economic policy of Olaf Scholz’s cabinet.
The public watched in shock as a power sander was used to
erase the inscription on a monument to the victims of the February 1945 Anglo-American bombardment of Dresden. The inscription read:
This is a place of remembrance, memory and commemoration. Here lie the burned bodies of thousands of victims of the February 13-14, 1945, air raids, when the horror of the war that had spread from Germany throughout the world returned to our city.This is what it
looked like.
It would like to remind everyone that in February 1945 the Third Reich was in the last days of its shameful history: the Red Army was liberating the country in the east, and the Allies, in the north-west. Moscow, London and Washington realised that the troops of the anti-Hitler coalition would be deployed in Germany for at least some time after its liberation. It was then that the Anglo-American allies decided to cause as much destruction as possible to the cities in the future Soviet occupation zone.
This is why they approved the
absolutely disproportionate and intimidating bombing of Dresden’s residential districts, which bordered on a war crime.
Researchers believe that the Allies needed civilian deaths, including women and children, to send a message to Moscow and to show that the United States and Britain were powers that would stop at nothing to entrench their rule. Half a year later, the same logic was used to approve the devastation of Tokyo and later, with nuclear weapons, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
People in the German Democratic Republic commemorated the victims of the February 1945 bombing of Dresden. After the reunification of Germany, the subject became an irritant in relations between NATO countries. The death of tens of thousands of civilians was a
powerful argument that even a battle against an absolute evil ― Nazism ― cannot justify the pointless murder of children for political purposes. And there were very many children among those who were killed in Dresden. The brilliant novel by Kurt Vonnegut,
Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade, is about the bombing of Dresden. Unlike Soviet commanders, who tried to save as many civilians as possible in the liberated German regions, the US and British air forces burned Dresden to the ground.
And now NATO has decided that the time has come to erase the memory of the victims of that crime. The most horrible thing is that it was Germans themselves who did it.
When the memorial still reminded them about the victims of the firebombing of Dresden, they
brought flowers and the victims’ relatives and descendants cried at the monument.
But that’s not the worst of it. What’s completely monstrous is that the memory of German civilian deaths was erased while the German authorities nodded in approval at the glorification of Nazi criminals in Ukraine.
The local press has been left speechless by the Dresden City Council’s statement that
“the renovation is going according to plan.”Demand the immediate restoration of the historical inscription!