Theater of Cruelty (10 page)

This unarticulated sense of guilt may have played a part, even though the guilty German conscience about the Holocaust only emerged slowly and partially about twenty years after the war. The reason German liberals, scholars as well as artists, have shied away from German victimhood is also political. The bombing of Dresden, for example, has long been a favorite topic of German revanchists and guilt-deniers on the extreme right. A common rhetorical trick in far-right websites and such publications as the
National-Zeitung
is to turn the language used about Nazi crimes against the Allies. Thus, there is talk of the Allied “
Bombenholocaust
,” and the annihilation of German civilians, “just because they were Germans.” The figure “six million” is bandied about, as though that were the number of
German civilians killed by Allied bombs. “There was also a Holocaust against the Germans,” concludes the
National-Zeitung
. “Yet in contrast to the denial of Nazi crimes, the denial of this Holocaust against the Germans is not threatened with punishment.” This is not the kind of thing most Germans would wish to be associated with.

And if Dresden, which even Winston Churchill (rather hypocritically) condemned in hindsight, was easily harnessed to a malign cause, this was all the more true of such horrors as the ethnic cleansing of Germans in Silesia and Sudetenland at the end of the war. And so the very idea of Germans as victims acquired, as Sebald puts it, “an aura of the forbidden,” but not so much, as he argues, because of guilty “voyeurism” as because of the rancid stink of nasty politics. Extremes, of course, provoke other extremes. To counter neo-Nazi demonstrations against the “Allied Holocaust,” the “Anti-fascist Action” group in Berlin gathered in front of the British embassy for a “Thank You England” party, while chanting: “New York, London, or Paris—all love Bomber Harris!”
⁴

Perhaps the author and former student leader Peter Schneider was right to contest Sebald’s claim by stating that it “was too much to expect [of the postwar generation] that they should break the stubborn silence of the Nazi generation at the same time as they considered the fate of German civilians and refugees.”
⁵
But Sebald was surely right to think that paying such attention was long overdue. It was time to take the subject of German suffering out of the hands of the
National-Zeitung
and its bitter sympathizers.

The silence was broken with a bang with the publication of
The Fire
, by Jörg Friedrich.
⁶
This exhaustive and harrowing account, city by city, month by month, of Germany’s destruction became a best seller in Germany and provoked an endless round of TV discussions, polemics in magazines and newspapers, radio debates, and books, taking one position or another. It was as if Germans, having been mute for so long, needed to talk and talk and talk.

Friedrich is anything but a revanchist or a Holocaust denier. Quite the opposite: he is a bearded member of Peter Schneider’s 1968 generation who spent much of his journalistic career exposing crimes of the Third Reich and detecting signs of neo-Nazism in the Federal Republic of Germany. Perhaps he felt that his work on the Nazis was done, and it was now time to look at the other side. In any case, his study of Allied “morale bombing” is every bit as passionate and filled with righteous indignation as his earlier contributions to such works as the
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust
. As a kind of visual companion to
The Fire
, Friedrich has also published
Brandstätten
(Sites of Fire), a book of photographs of ruined cities, burned corpses, and other images of what it was like to be at the receiving end of area bombing.
⁷

Friedrich has been accused by some British commentators, who may or may not have actually read
The Fire
, of calling Churchill a war criminal and excusing German war crimes by indicting the Allies. In fact, he neither calls Churchill a war criminal nor excuses German crimes. He mentions, albeit in passing, the fact that the Germans were the first to firebomb great cities, namely Warsaw and Rotterdam. He also observes that Göring’s Luftwaffe killed 30,000 British civilians in 1941. And he makes sure the reader knows that “Germany’s ruin
was the result of Hitler.” Of course, this leaves the responsibility of other Germans out of the picture. But that is not the subject at hand.

Friedrich does, however, draw a sharp distinction between bombing cities as a tactic to assist military operations on the ground and bombing as a strategic doctrine to win the war through terror and wholesale destruction. The Germans, he claims, always stuck to the former, while the Allies opted for the latter. Whether this distinction is quite as clear as he claims is open to doubt. The Luftwaffe surely aimed at working-class areas of London during the Blitz as a strategy of terror and not just as a battlefield tactic. But the Allies took this doctrine to its limit, culminating in the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Bombing civilians was not in itself a new phenomenon. Friedrich mentions the German Zeppelin raids on Britain in 1915. Five years later Churchill, as air and war minister, decided to put down an uprising in Mesopotamia with bombs. In 1928 Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard, who had taken part in those raids against Arabs and Kurds, proposed that the best way to destroy the enemy in future wars was not to attack his military forces directly but to destroy the factories; the water, fuel, and electricity supplies; and the transportation lines that kept those military forces going. This is what the RAF tried to do in the first half of 1941. But its Wellington bombers had little chance of hitting factories or shipyards. It was hard to spot any target except by day or on bright moonlit nights, and even then it was almost impossible to drop bombs with precision. The price of trying was also very costly. More than half the bomber crews lost their lives. Only one bomb in five landed within a five-mile radius of the target. Indiscriminate bombing of city areas was an easier option.

Already in 1940, when Germany appeared to be invincible, Churchill believed that there was only one sure path to winning the
war and that was “an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.”
⁸
One reason men of Churchill’s generation thought of such desperate measures, apart from their desperate situation, was the traumatic legacy of World War I. The idea of another war of attrition with armies butchering one another for years was intolerable. Better to get it over with fast.

However, the RAF had the wherewithal to attempt this only three years later, by which time the strategy had been fully developed out of a sense of impotence and failure. The main thinker behind it was Air Marshal Charles Portal, who had already had experience of bombing unruly tribesmen in Aden, where he was posted in 1934. Harris, his successor as head of Bomber Command, and another veteran of the bombing in Mesopotamia, was the man who carried it out. What had changed since the idea was first introduced by Trenchard was that war had expanded to all industries, including the workforce itself. Civilians, so it was hoped, would turn against their leaders if they were bombed out of their homes and had no means of survival. Hit them hard enough and their morale would crack. Londoners had already demonstrated that the opposite was true by their show of defiance under German bombing, but Portal dismissed this by claiming that the Germans, unlike the plucky Cockneys, were prone to panic and hysteria.

In fact, of course, the Germans did not turn against their leaders at all. Instead, as my father observed in Berlin, they pulled together pretty much as the Londoners did. It is impossible to know for sure, but there is little evidence that morale bombing, at least in Germany,
made the war any shorter. Lord Zuckerman, himself a proponent during the war of hitting transportation lines and thus a fierce critic of strategic bombing, has argued that the war might even have ended sooner if his tactic had been adopted.
⁹
If so, this was certainly not obvious in 1943, when Albert Speer told Hitler that six more bombings on the scale of Hamburg would bring Germany to its knees.

Zuckerman’s transportation bombing might sound more humane than Harris’s terror, but to judge from Friedrich’s account, raids on transportation centers and other forms of tactical bombing were not necessarily less costly in human lives. Railway stations were usually located in the center of cities. The bombing raids on transportation lines in France and Belgium, in preparation for D-Day, killed 12,000 French and Belgian citizens, double the number of Bomber Command’s victims in Germany in 1942. Yet all these attacks had a clear military purpose.

It is hard to see, however, what purpose was served by bombing German cities and towns long after much of Germany had already been reduced to rubble. As late as 1945 huge US and British air fleets still went on dropping bombs on destroyed cities, as though they wanted to kill every rat and fly that remained in the ruins. The RAF dropped more than half its bombs during the last nine months of the war. From July 1944 until the end of the war 13,500 civilians were killed every month. And this at a time when the Allied air forces refused to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz because that was not a military priority. Why? Why did Würzburg, a town of baroque churches and medieval cloisters, a place without any military importance whatsoever, have to be obliterated in seventeen minutes on March 16, 1945, less than one month before the German surrender?
And why, for that matter, did Freiburg, or Pforzheim, or Dresden have to go?

Zuckerman believed that “Bomber” Harris liked destruction for its own sake. Possibly that was it. There were also those, in Washington and London, who believed that Germans had to be taught a lesson once and for all. General Frederick Anderson of the US Air Force was convinced that Germany’s wholesale destruction would be passed on from father to son, and then on to the grandchildren, which would suffice to stop Germans from ever going to war again. That, too, may have been part of it. No doubt there were feelings of revenge and sheer bloody-mindedness as well.

But a more mundane explanation might be a combination of bureaucratic infighting and inertia. Once a strategy is set in motion, it becomes hard to stop or change. Zuckerman drew attention to the struggles before D-Day between Harris and USAF General Carl Spaatz on one side and, on the other, proponents of transportation bombing, such as Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory. He wrote:

Such petty quarrels have consequences. And Friedrich has surely done us all a service to chronicle just how severe they were.
Something can be true even if it is believed by the wrong people. The fact that Friedrich’s book was hailed in some very unpleasant quarters, such as the already mentioned far-right
National-Zeitung
, is not proof that he is wrong. Nor is the fact that Martin Walser, the controversial novelist who believes that the Germans have repented enough, endorsed
The Fire
by comparing it to Homer’s description of the Trojan War. In both cases, Walser says, the narrative is above distinctions between killers and victims. This kind of statement should be treated with care. There is still a difference between a state bent on conquering the world—and exterminating a given people on ideological grounds—and a state fighting to stop that. And although most German citizens may have been innocent of atrocities, there is a difference between concentration camp victims and a people that followed a leader bent on mass murder.

Again, Friedrich cannot be accused of nostalgia for the Third Reich or excusing its crimes. But he has done little to distance himself from the wrong supporters either. First of all, he chose the right-wing, mass-market tabloid
Bild-Zeitung
to serialize parts of
The Fire
. It is as though he deliberately aimed his message at the crudest readership—not neo-Nazi, to be sure, but relatively ill-informed, mostly illiberal, and prone to sensationalism. More serious is Friedrich’s odd terminology, which comes uncomfortably close to the rhetorical tricks of the
National-Zeitung
. Cellars are described as
Krematorien
, an RAF bomber group as an
Einsatzgruppe
, and the destruction of libraries as
Bücherverbrennung
, or book burning. It is impossible to believe that these words were chosen innocently.