ZGram - 1/25/2003 - "The Fire Last Time"
irimland@zundelsite.org
irimland@zundelsite.org
Sat, 25 Jan 2003 08:39:52 -0800
ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny
January 25, 2003
Good Morning from the Zundelsite:
Those of us who have been in the Revisionist struggle for years know
that Revisionism spreads and strikes roots in degrees. It is never
an either/or situation - you get a bit of Revisionism in this
article, and next month maybe in another, and the cumulative effect
is that sanity and reason replaces hysteria and falsehoods.
That is how I evaluate the book review/commentary below. It still
contains many of the platitudes and genuflections we have all come to
endure and ignore, but at least one taboo in Germany seems to be
melting: That one can write and talk of the very real suffering of
Germans under Allied assault and, later, occupation.
So far, the multitude of "Holocaust survivors" thought that they had
a copyright on victimhood. If ever there is such a thing as
impartial, universal judgment on people versus people, I will not be
afraid to take the side of Germany in what was done - and, worse,
what was endured.
With that in mind, read on:
[START]
The fire last time
A German bestseller sparks debate over the country's wartime suffering
By Jefferson Chase, 1/19/2003
IF YOU OPEN A COPY of Der Spiegel these days, you'll be treated to
image upon image of wartime horror. Germany's equivalent of Time
magazine, Spiegel is running a six-part series on the aerial
campaigns of World War II.
Of course, graphic reports about the Third Reich are nothing new in
Germany. But this time around, the focus is on the carnage wrought
not by but to the homeland. After some 50 years in which any
extended mention of German suffering during World War II was
dismissed as Nazi-apologist revisionism, Germans are taking an
interest in the estimated 600,000 civilians, among them some 75,000
children, killed in the Allied bombing raids. The recollection of
this lost bit of history has raised disturbing questions about that
most sacred of historical cows, even among Germans-the rectitude of
the war against Hitler. At issue in particular is what Winston
Churchill called "moral bombing," the indiscriminate bombings
spearheaded by the British RAF and supported by the US Air Force.
Interest has been building for some time. In a series of lectures in
1997, author W.G. Sebald criticized his fellow novelists for
ignoring the topic of German suffering, and in 2002 Nobel Laureate
Gnter Grass responded with a short novel about the Red Army's
massacre of German refugees in the waning days of the war. But the
person most responsible for the revival of suppressed memory is Jrg
Friedrich, an independent historian who previously specialized in
the Holocaust.
His book, "The Fire: Germany Under Bombardment, 1940-45," which has
been on the bestseller lists since last November, is both
painstaking and painfully detailed. It catalogues, city by city,
raid by raid, the razing of Germany, recording every lost
architectural masterpiece, every percentage of living space
destroyed, every death toll. It also depicts the human cost of the
firestorm: piles of suffocated victims in bunkers, incinerated
corpses shrivelled to the size of hand luggage, children boiled
alive in water used to extinguish burning houses.
Most controversially, "The Fire" uses a vocabulary previously
reserved for Nazi war crimes to characterize the strategy of
indiscriminate area bombing that was developed by Arthur T. Harris,
commander in chief of the RAF Bomber Command, and endorsed by
Churchill. While the book does not explicitly call Sir Winston a
barbarian, it characterizes the deeds he authorized as "massacres,
"acts of terror," and "campaigns of mass extermination."
Born in 1944, Friedrich is a jovial, aging left-winger who holds
interviews in, of all places, a British tea room on Berlin's
Kurfrstdamm, a posh boulevard almost completely destroyed in World
War II. When the conversation turns to the raids, he becomes deadly
serious. The idea for the book, he says, evolved from his work on
the Holocaust, which led him to examine the Nazi war-crimes trials.
"One of the military commanders accused of civilian massacres in the
Ukraine asked the question, 'What's the difference between lining
people up against a wall and dropping bombs on them?' I tried to find
an answer and couldn't, other than the fact that the one killing took
place horizontally, and the other vertically."
Predictably, the British aren't amused at the implications of such
words for the man recently voted the greatest Briton of all time.
The conservative Daily Telegraph reviewed "The Fire" under the
headline "Germans Call Churchill a War Criminal," and the book has
elicited criticism in liberal papers like The Guardian as well.
German historians like Hans-Ulrich Wehler have also taken Friedrich
to task for emotionalizing the issue and focusing on the gory
details instead of on the larger context. The wholesale destruction
of cities, they point out, was a staple of military theorizing in
the late 1930s, and was first practiced by the German Luftwaffe in
Spain, Poland, and Holland. In the wake of the evacuation of British
ground troops from the Continent at Dunkirk, the RAF was Britain's
only means of attacking the German war machine, yet precision raids
suffered high losses and rarely hit the intended military targets.
(The only casualty of the first precision air raid on Berlin, for
instance, was a suburban woodshed.) The advantage of indiscriminate
area bombing was that you were bound to destroy something, and it
was hoped that if ordinary Germans took enough of a pounding, they
would rebel against the government that had initiated the war.
Friedrich's critics add that the bombing was a strategy that worked.
While the RAF campaign did not inspire shell-shocked Germans to
overthrow Hitler, most historians agree that it did divert German
resources away from the Eastern Front, where the ground war was
ultimately won, and disrupt military production, which had to be
transferred underground or dispersed throughout the country,
creating a logistical nightmare. Finally, critics believe it's
relevant to remember that what Hitler would have done to a conquered
Europe would have been much worse than what the Allies did to
Germany. With that in mind, the end of defeating Nazi Germany
justifies a means of warfare which included the deaths of a small
city's worth of innocents-children, forced laborers, political
prisoners, etc.-as well as approximately half a million other
civilians who were complicit to varying degrees in Hitler's aims.
Friedrich claims he is not interested in apportioning blame, but
merely in describing what happened-a statement which is
simultaneously disingenuous and truthful. While he does discuss the
rationales for area bombing as a strategy and the risks taken by the
bomber crews, his studious refusal to invoke the evil of Nazism as a
justification for the raids is intended to make a moral point. "The
Fire" points up the uncomfortable fact that moralistic statements
about the Nazis do not resolve every ethical dilemma raised by World
War II. The conflict resulted in the defeat of a great evil; it was
also a total war in which all combatants behaved brutally.
One of the greatest achievements of the Enlightenment was to
redefine war from a holy crusade to a disagreement conducted via
military engagement with limitations-including, first and foremost,
mutual respect for civilian populations. With the rise of
industrialization in the 19th century, the line between the military
and the society that supplied its weaponry started to blur: railway
stations, blocks of working-class housing, and workers themselves
became military targets. In a ground war, at least, such targets can
only be reached by invasion, at which point the war itself has
practically been won. But no such practical constraint applies to
aerial warfare. Everything can be destroyed, and everything is a
legitimate target: a total war is, ipso facto, a dirty war, which
can only be justified as a moral crusade whose end justifies its
means.
The Allies in World War II had the good fortune of defeating an
enemy of such unique awfulness that ex post facto claims of having
fought the just fight were easy to make. Still, most historians
concede that firestorm bombings late in the war were wantonly
destructive. Meanwhile, when confronted with a proposal to destroy
the rail links to Auschwitz, the Pentagon deemed such a "moral
bombing" militarily irrelevant. Both examples illustrate how the
dirty means of total war can supplant its moral ends.
For Germans, the recollection of their suffering in World War II
signals a change of generations and the obsolescence of the idea of
collective guilt. If you want to find someone "guilty" of Nazism in
the broad sense, i.e., someone who actively or passively
participated in or profited from the Nazi regime, you should look in
retirement homes-the people in question are at least 75. By
contrast, there is a generation of Germans between the age of 60 and
75 to whom the term "innocents" does apply, directly and
legitimately: These people suffered in the war as children but had no
hand in fighting it. There is also the following generation, which
bore the social aftereffects of the bombing raids. These are the
readers who have made "The Fire" a best-seller. It does not amount
to historical revisionism or moral relativism to say that their
story should be told.
The chief reservation about Germans opening up such a discussion has
been the potential for, in Wehler's words, "a cult of
victimization." The published version of Sebald's lectures was
criticized on that account, even though it concentrated on the
relatively harmless topic of literature; with a work of history like
"The Fire," there is arguably more at stake. But such reservations
have thus far been misplaced. The second Spiegel article focuses on
Luftwaffe air raids-not just the raids against the English city of
Coventry, with their massive destruction but relatively low
casualties, but against cities like Stalingrad, where the numbers of
dead were comparable to those in Dresden. Moreover, the Spiegel's
main competitor, Der Stern, published an article entitled "Barbaric
But Sensible" by the leading British expert on the raids, Richard
Overy, reaffirming the military and moral rationale for the
bombings. Germans are examining themselves and their forefathers as
sufferers, not as victims.
Their self-examination has a couple of lessons for the rest of the
world as well. Whatever Jrg Friedrich's shortcomings as a historian,
and with all due respect to Winston Churchill, "The Fire" shows that
the heroism of political and military leaders in wartime pales in
comparison to the suffering of the people on the ground. It also
reminds us to question the probity of the means, even when the end
result seems desirable. War is hell-if you wage one, you should have
a damn good reason.
[END]
Jefferson Chase is a writer in Berlin.
For comments and suggestions, email ideas@globe.com
( http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/019/focus/The_fire_last_time+.shtml )