The Third Reich deliberately bombed hospitals

Quoting Janusz Gumkowkski and Kazimierz Leszczynski’s Poland Under Nazi Occupation:

In its first raids on Polish towns, the Luftwaffe had bombed residential areas without any delusion that they were military objectives. Any idea that perhaps these were mistakes was dispelled by the dropping of fragmentation and incendiary bombs on small suburban settlements and on hospitals and hospital trains clearly marked with red crosses on their roofs.

Halik Kochanski’s The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War, page 62:

Wieluń, a farming town 60 miles east of Breslau, had the dubious honour of becoming the first town in Poland to be flattened by [Fascist] bombs. The hospital, school, churches and shops were all bombed and over 1,600 people, 10 per cent of the town’s population, were killed on the first day of the war. […] Ryszard Zolski, working in an ambulance unit, witnessed hospitals, ambulances and ambulance trains being bombed despite being marked prominently with a red cross.

Richard C. Lukas’s Did the Children Cry?: Hitler’s War Against Jewish and Polish Children, 1939–1945, page 208:

Only a fraction of the sick and injured Polish children could receive medical care because there were no more than 6,000 physicians in the entire country. For the 90,000 children in Warsaw after the war, there was only one hospital with 50 beds; the [Fascists] had destroyed all the other children’s hospitals.

Many Soviet hospitals likewise went unspared. Jonathan Trigg’s The Defeat of the Luftwaffe: The Eastern Front 1941–45, A Strategy for Disaster:

At a field hospital near Smolensk, the medical orderly Very Yukina described the horrific scenes: ‘The enemy’s planes were bombing our military formations at will […] more and more wounded began arriving at the hospital […] We tried to evacuate some of them to hospitals further from the front, but although the trains were marked with the Red Cross the [Axis] methodically bombed them.’⁶¹

\ There were other examples of the Luftwaffe destroying hospitals in, for example, Britain, but Poland was the first subject that came to mind, followed by the Soviet Union.

Short post today, but to tell you the truth I don’t feel up to discussing something more complicated.