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GRUESOME HARVEST The Costly Attempt To Exterminate The People of Germany By Ralph Franklin Keeling Devastation of the Reich by total warfare was
alone enough to cast serious doubt on Germany's
postwar ability to survive. The demand for unconditional surrender had
forced the desperate Germans to fight to the bitter
end, until their cities had been pulverized into
death-ridden rubble and their factories, railroads,
canals, dams, power installations, communications,
buildings, homes - all their exposed facilities -
had been converted into heaps of twisted,
smouldering ruins. Allied fervor to destroy everything German had
been expressed by General Eisenhower with the
opening of the Ruhr drive. "Our primary purpose,"
he declared, "is destruction of as many Germans as
possible. I expect to destroy every German west of
the Rhine and within that area in which we are
attacking."[2] Allied capacity to destroy became overwhelming
after the American industrial colossus had been
converted from peace-time to war production.
American output soon surpassed that of all other
belligerents in the war combined and became twice
as great as the capacity of the doomed
Axis.[3] A glimpse of America's smashing force when
devoted to the grim business of mass production of
death and destruction is provided by the following
description written by a front line war
correspondent: Great though it was, the destruction resulting
from ground fighting pales in comparison with that
caused by our gigantic air raids. The two atom
bombs dropped on Japan may have been more dramatic,
but they could hardly have been more destructive
than the millions of phosphorous, fire, and
"blockbuster" bombs dropped on Germany. Near the
end we were using 11-tonners which crews said
caused their planes to bounce up over 500 feet when
the huge 25-foot missiles were released, sending up
"a tremendous pall of black smoke and a fountain of
debris" which "dwarfed the terrific explosions of
the six-ton 'earthquake' bombs." During the war, more bombs by weight were
dropped on Berlin alone than were released over the
whole of England. So great was the ruin that
General Eisenhower was constrained to say: An American writer, among the first group of
correspondents allowed to spend more than 24 hours
in the smashed metropolis, wrote: All German cities above 50,000 population and
many smaller ones were from 50 to 80 per cent
destroyed. Dresden, as large as Pittsburgh, was
wiped out and nearly all of its 620,000 inhabitants
buried under the ruins.[7] Cologne, with a
population of 750,000, was turned into a gigantic
wasteland. Hamburg, with its 1,150,000 people, was
blasted by huge attacks, in one of which the flames
rolled a mile into the sky and roasted alive
hundreds of thousands of civilians in street
temperatures of a thousand degrees.
Frankfurt-on-Main, a city of 500,000, was reduced
to a mass of rubble. All cities and industrial
areas, such as the Ruhr and Saar regions, were laid
waste.[8] The story of Kassel typifies the tragedy which
befell the others: This wholesale destruction of the cities and
production facilities of the most highly
industrialized nation in Europe was successful from
a strictly military point of view; however, it was
also an attack against the livelihood of millions
of workers, for the wrecking of factories and
machines is also destruction of jobs, the basic
means of life. Some of Germany's jobless millions have found
temporary employment in clearing rubble and similar
work. But genuine reconstruction is impossible
without production of vast amounts of building
materials and new equipment, neither of which can
be produced in Germany today, because the necessary
facilities no longer exist. It takes factories and
machines Germany lacks to build the factories and
machines Germany needs. To get the German economy off this dead center
demands external assistance. And meanwhile the
people, unable to produce the necessities of life
for themselves, must either be allowed to die in
masses or be given outside help until recovery has
gone far enough to enable them once more to take
care of themselves. Reference Notes: |