ZGram - 1/25/2003 - "The Fire Last Time"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

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 )