>>511409243If acts such as the Luftangriff on Dresden and other major German cities could be seen from the outside or from a third party as "mere" war crimes, for these enemies they were not individual transgressions that need not have occurred, but strategic genocidal action was the modus operandi. Rosario Romeo (1924-1987), professor of history at the University of Rome, MEP, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on April 10, 1986:
>The large-scale terror attacks against German cities, in which no distinction was made between civilian and military targets, had been planned and prepared by the British Royal Air Force years before the war.The lowest stated number of defenceless German civilians killed by the Allies through area bombing using 1.3 million tons of bombs is 593,000. Allied genocidal actions continued after the unconditional surrender, when the German Wehrmacht was no longer able to protect the population, until 1948. Now the victors of the war and their henchmen in the occupied zones exercised arbitrary rule over the Germans for years, which manifested itself in millions of murders (including in connection with the expulsion; Rheinwiesenlager), in torture, rape, robbery, deprivation of liberty, show trials and all kinds of dishonor. Under Soviet rule, 66,000 Baltic Germans were murdered, and at least 200,000 Germans living in Yugoslavia from 1944 onwards. Authorities, countless groups and individual perpetrators from the expulsion states killed 2,110,000 Germans in the course of the expulsion. Apart from the killings of German prisoners of war for which the Western Allies were responsible, 1,094,250 German prisoners of war lost their lives in the Soviet Gulag. After the surrender of the Wehrmacht only in the period from 1945 to 1950 at least 8.8 million - probably over 10 million - Germans were killed by the main war victors and by perpetrators from the expulsion states of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.