Looting Normal Wartime Conduct Irving

The Destruction of Dresden, by David Irving.

The Dresden Firestorm. Wartime Looting is Common in Wartime, and Has Nothing to Do With Poles and Jews!

This book focuses on the mass fires raised by Allied bombing in February, 1945. The German death toll, cited in this 1963 book by David Irving, is 135,000. [Archival information now suggests a modest German civilian death toll of 25,000 at Dresden. To put this number in perspective for the reader, it is comparable to the civilian death toll, from German terror bombing, inflicted on the Polish civilians of Warsaw alone, in the 1939 war. Nobody laments that. What goes around comes around.]

WARTIME LOOTING IS EXPECTED BEHAVIOR EVEN FOR THE GERMANS AND THEIR PRESUMED INGRAINED SENSE OF SOCIAL ORDER

Looting knows no nationality in terms of perpetrator or victim. Irving makes this clear as he writes:
 Most of the British prisoners worked with a will at their allotted rescue and salvage tasks. Even before the orders were received several hundred prisoners had volunteered for the work. Several were to pay for their willingness with their lives when, after living for weeks on diminishing prison rations their rescue operations inevitably brought them within reach of food stores in wrecked shops and hotels. Thus an American from a camp in Dresden Plauen was found with a tin of food concealed in his uniform during a routine search; a young Canadian soldier was caught smuggling a looted gammon of ham into the camp in Dresden-Übigau. Both were shot by firing squads. German and non-German looters alike were given the same short shrift. A German labourer was found to have secreted between 150 and 180 wedding rings in his pockets in Grunaer Strasse; he was executed on the spot. ” So far seventy-nine looters have been arrested by police, in particular by special patrols,” stated Dresden’ s chief of police in mid-March 1945. ” A large number has already been executed.” ” (pp. 241-242).

INADVERTENT IMPLICATIONS FOR POLISH-JEWISH RELATIONS

Neo-Stalinist Jan T. Gross, in his GOLDEN HARVEST and through an uncritical media, has painted the Poles a greedy, exploitive, and (what else?) anti-Semitic people because they sometimes looted Jewish properties, bought post-Jewish properties at Nazi German auctions, and searched the cremains of Jews for valuables (or engaged in other forms of grave robbery). This is nonsense. The Poles were suffering severe want under the brutalities of the German occupation.

As Irving’s example of the Germans shows once again, looting is a completely normal wartime behavior. It has nothing to do with Jews as some kind of special victims and Poles as some kind of special villains!