From The Metro:
The Mayor of Dresden, eastern Germany, will call on Mayor of London Boris Johnson to stop plans to build a memorial to RAF bomber crews. Germany's biggest daily newspaper, Bild, is backing the plans as they say that the idea is offensive to the 25,000 victims of the raid in Dresden in 1945. Holger Zastrow, a Liberal party councillor in the city, said: 'This memorial injures the feelings of Dresdners and is utterly tasteless.'
Dresden, you will note, is (or was) in East Germany, so special pleading has become second nature to them*.
And 25,000 is a heck of a lot of deaths, but it's a lot less than we** achieved in Hamburg (50,000 dead) but Hamburg is in the north of [West] Germany so tends to be more Anglophile (stiff upper lips and all that) and they've been busy with other things for the past sixty-five years, like rebuilding the economy, making money etc.
* As Boris Johnson might put it, if Dresden were in England it would be Liverpool.
** I use the term 'we' loosely. One of my granddads worked in aerial reconnaissance for the Luftwaffe (him being German and all).
Stormlight
4 hours ago
7 comments:
Thought everyone knew it was Heffer that wrote the Liverpool piece my now MW!
Allegedly Boris managed to tone down the original a tad, but Heffer 'felt very strongly' about it.
SL? Did he? That's even more obscure.
As I said on another blog, does this mean that Nazis now outrank the RAF in Victimhood Poker?
ps. the word verification is "elites" today. I like it when it spells out a real word.
Ross, it's more subtle than that - it is 'the long suffering people of East Germany' who come up trumps. Nazis are still bottom of the heap.
I visited Dresden last year while touring on the bike. Yes, Dresden got wiped out in WW2; I know this because I read it in the history books (and yes, I read "Slaughterhouse 5"). Similarly I was in Coventry a few years ago and I know it got wiped out,too.
The Germans replaced Dresden with another beautiful city which largely recreated the one destroyed. We replaced Coventry with concrete.
FFS. Another triumph of British Socialist Planning.
I do agree with that mayor though - we wouldn't like a memorial to the Nazis.
FT, Munich is especially nice. It really looks like over a hundred years old.
JH, firstly, they demolished all those in 1945 (and rightly so) and secondly, why? Would you object to a statue of Gandhi in India; a statue of George Washington in the USA or of Chaim Weizman in Israel? All these people were originally sworn enemies of Britain, don't forget.
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