Forgotten Germans
More than half a century on, the allied bombing of Germany’s cities during the second world war remains a controversial topic.
On Wednesday, Britain’s ambassador to Germany, Sir Peter Torry, travelled to the city of Kassel to mark the 60th anniversary of its destruction by British warplanes. Around 10,000 people died on the night of October 22 1943, when an immense firestorm swept the city.
“In the peaceful Europe which we live in today, it is hard for those who did not experience the second world war to understand the bitter emotions to which it gave rise,” the ambassador said.
There is nothing new about senior British officials touring German cities that were destroyed by British bombs: the Queen and Prince Charles have visited Dresden and Hamburg in recent years.
However, Sir Peter’s speech comes at a time when the role of the RAF during the second world war is being debated afresh.
Last week, one of Germany’s most controversial historians, Jörg Friedrich, published a new photo book about the issue. Called Brandstätten, or Fire Sites, it contains some of the most grisly images from the war ever to be published. None of them have been seen before.
The victims are not Jewish, but German. The charred, mutilated bodies of women, children and babies are all civilians who perished during the allies’ bombing campaign against Germany’s cities.
In his book, Friedrich argues that the RAF’s relentless campaign against Germany during the final months of the war served no military purpose. Instead, he says that Winston Churchill’s decision to drop more bombs on a shattered Germany between January and May 1945, most of them on small German towns of little strategic value, was a war crime.
“The bombing left an entire generation traumatised. But it was never discussed. There are Germans whose first recollections are of being hidden by their mothers. They remember cellars and burning human remains,” Friedrich told the Guardian in an interview in Berlin last week.
”It is only now that they are coming to terms with what happened.”
Around 600,000 German civilians died during the allies’ wartime raids on Germany, including 76,000 German children, Friedrich says. In July 1943, during a single night in Hamburg, 45,000 people perished in a vast firestorm.
But in the immediate post-war period, the German victims of British bombing were scarcely mentioned, being overshadowed by the far greater evil of the Holocaust.
Friedrich believes that most Germans refused to discuss what had happened because they regarded the British destruction of their cities as a sort of retribution for the crimes of the Nazi era.
The same point is made by writer WG Sebald in On the History of Natural Destruction, an elegant philosophical meditation on why the bombing occupies so little space in Germany’s cultural imagination.
“The Second World War is traditionally portrayed as a struggle between good and evil. Bombers were the weapons of the winners. But what actually happened on the ground wasn’t very heroic,” Friedrich said last week.
The historian’s previous book, Der Brand, or The Fire, published last year, created a storm of publicity in both Britain and Germany. In it, he came close to accusing Churchill of being a war criminal just weeks after a BBC poll had voted the wartime prime minister the greatest-ever Briton.
Reaction to Friedrich’s latest book has been critical, and one reviewer, for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, even suggested that it should be thrown in the bin.
Friedrich is unrepentant. “Churchill was the greatest child-slaughterer of all time. He slaughtered 76,000 children,” he said.
Leave a Reply