Worked at what? Hampering the war effort by killing civilians and refugees? Not likely. In fact, you can make a decent argument that the fewer refugees around the easier it was for the Wehrmacht to operate.
But long after the fact moral denunciations give me a pain. Which is why I thought the Demanjuk persecution was so over the top.
It was a terrible event. Maybe completely unnecessary, but I’m looking back from the safety of 2013, so I just don’t know what I would do in the same place.
But they did have it coming to them. That I cannot deny.
Dresden was a transportation hub and despite being considered an ‘open city’ the city was home to over 300 small-to-large factories that were turning out war materiel for the German forces. The rail yard was full of arms and ammunition as was evidenced by multiple observed secondary explosions during the bombing raid. The synthetic oil refineries were also valid military targets. Add to this the presence of flak units deployed around Dresden as seen in the German newsreel, “Die Deutsche Wochenschau”, of 8 September 1943 and it is clear that the city was a valid military target.
That a bunch of Germans perished in the attacks bothers me not in the least given that had the Germans been able to do the same to an American city there is no doubt that they would have.
Cruel and hard as it may have been, the unspoken rationale (and the only one that could justify the utter destruction of an open city that was also one of the most beautiful in all of Europe) for the incineration of Dresden was to give the Soviets, who were close enough to see the smoke plume and maybe even feel the heat, pause if they happened to be thinking of rolling past the agreed demarcation line and on to the English Channel. During the Cold War they made solid propaganda use of Dresden as an example of Capitalist cruelty, but the point was definitely made. “This could be Moscow”.
Dresden was as ideologically pure as a German city could get. Untouched by the ravages of war, its citizenry remained as fanatical as could be by that point in the war.
Just as Eisenhower paraded German citizens through the concentration camps, Dresden had to pay its own price.
Saturation bombing of cities worked to break the fighting spirit of the German (and Japanese) people so completely that once their nations had surrendered there was nary a peep of resistance or any kind of serious insurgency. The civilian population knew that the allies wouldn't bat an eye at taking out population centers to end any continued fighting. Unlike in places like Iraq or Afghanistan, there was no real effort to hide combatants or terrorists as the people knew the result would likely be collective destruction of any population responsible. When the war was over, they were done.
We fought WW2 properly and when we won it was over. Where we have gotten in trouble since then are these attempts at separating a population from their government. This is a fools errand. It is why we struggle to really bring our conflicts to any clear conclusion now. People are responsible for their leaders. Period. That doesn't mean kill civilians that would support or otherwise welcome us. Nor does it mean we should kill just for the sake of watching bodies drop. But it does mean we should sometimes rain death and destruction on enemy populations when it seems clear this will help us win a war where the goal is total defeat of the enemy - and with no painful, bloody insurgency after the surrender documents are signed.
Make no mistake, flattening German cities caused absolute chaos through Nazi Germany. The revisionist history in modern textbooks is bunk. Those saturation bombings caused mass transportation disruptions, wreaked havoc on German soldiers morale who had families in bombed out areas, forced Germany to stack valuable anti-aircraft equipment at population centers rather than the front, wasted endless manpower hours rebuilding routine yet still vital infrastructure, and just generally impressed it upon the Germans (and Japanese) that we were prepared to do whatever it takes to win.
I guess you skiped the class (smoking Pot) the day they discussed the bombing of London by your Nazi Comrades