Title: The beautiful city Tehran Source:
[None] URL Source:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmVvKRm9JdU Published:Dec 23, 2011 Author:youtuber Post Date:2011-12-23 12:06:25 by CadetD Keywords:civilization Views:774 Comments:10
Thanks for posting those pictures of Dresden. Dresden was known as the "Paris" of Northern Europe. I've always wondered why Paris was "spared the rod" due to it's cultural significance while Dresden got firebombed despite it's cultural significance and lack of military importance.
Adolf Hitler's famously asked his chief of staff Alfred Jodl on the eve of the liberation of Paris in August, '44, "Is Paris burning?") Hadda look up the name of the military governor of Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz. Couldn't remember the name. He was ordered by Hitler to destroy Paris rather than let it fall into the Allied hands. Von Choltitz disobeyed his orders.
Interesting notes in Wiki:
He and 17,000 men under his command surrendered to French general Philippe Leclerc de Hautecloque and the Resistance leader Henri Rol-Tanguy at the Gare Montparnasse on 25 August 1944. For preventing a second Stalingrad, von Choltitz was regarded as "saviour of Paris"[2] by some. Refer to this page for discussion of the evidence for and against von Choltitz's claims that he saved Paris.
[edit]Captivity and after
He was held for a while at Trent Park in North London, a prison camp for senior German Officers. Unknown by the inmates, many of their conversations were recorded.[1][3] Selected transcripts were dramatized in the 2008 History Channel 5-part series The Wehrmacht. In the episode The Crimes, General von Choltitz is quoted as saying in October 1944:
We all share the guilt. We went along with everything, and we half-took the Nazis seriously instead of saying, "to hell with you and your stupid nonsense". I misled my soldiers into believing this rubbish. I feel utterly ashamed of myself. Perhaps we bear even more guilt than these uneducated animals. (apparently in reference to Hitler and other Nazi Party members)
After a spell in Camp Clinton, Mississippi he was released from Allied captivity in 1947. Dietrich von Choltitz died in November 1966 due to a longstanding war illness in the city hospital of Baden-Baden. He was buried at the city cemetery of Baden-Baden in the presence of high-ranking French officers. Baden-Baden was the post-World War II French headquarters in Germany.
