Saturday » September 23 » 2006 Was Dresden a war crime? In February, 1945, Allied aircraft firebombed the German city of Dresden, killing an estimated 40,000 civilians. The scale of the bombing has caused some historians to ask:
Christopher Hitchens National Post
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
CREDIT: Walter Hahn, AFP, Getty Images The view from Dresden's townhall after the Allied bombings on Feb. 13 and 14, 1945.
The most important document from the era of National Socialism is Victor Klemperer's diary of survival under the Third Reich, I Will Bear Witness. It gives an account of every day of Hitler's 13-year dictatorship, written by a German-Jewish convert to Protestantism who had married a heroic Protestant woman, and who briefly imagined that his dual loyalty (to employ an otherwise suspect phrase) might win him some immunity. Swiftly disabused on that score, Klemperer resolved to depict his beloved Germany's collapse into barbarism.
The diary possesses three dimensions that are of great interest to us. By its portrayal of innumerable acts of decency and solidarity on the part of ordinary Germans, it seems to rebut the Daniel Jonah Goldhagen diatribe about "willing executioners." By its agonizing description of the steady and pitiless erosion of German Jewry, it puts to shame all those who doubt that Hitler's state had a coldly evolved plan of extirpation. And it forces one to reconsider the Allied policy of "area bombing."
By February, 1945, the Klemperers had been moved to a centre in Dresden to await the final transport to "the East," from which none of their friends had ever returned. They were among the very last; those married to "Aryans" had been permitted some latitude. But they knew very well what was coming. And then, beginning on the night of Feb. 13, the most beautiful city in Germany was suddenly set on fire from end to end, by a scientifically designed bombing pattern that swept away its architecture and roasted and melted and buried at least 40,000 of its citizens.
The Klemperers were not at the exact epicentre, but Victor was injured in the eye by debris and slightly scorched, and the couple were nearly separated. Finding Nazi authority destroyed after the departure of the Anglo-American bombers, they took off their yellow-star armbands and began to walk toward the Red Army.
Did the immolation of Dresden and so many other German cities liberate the Klemperers, or would the Royal Air Force (RAF) and United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) have equally happily burned them to death?
Hundreds of thousands of German civilians, including the flower of the German anti-Nazi labour movement, were burned or buried alive in these incredible bombardments. Churchill's advisers told him to blast working-class districts because the houses were more tightly packed together.
Some say that Dresden was not really a military target and that it was obliterated mainly in order to impress Stalin, while others argue that Dresden was indeed a hub city for Hitler's armies.
This leaves us with a somewhat arid and suspect antithesis: Were these bombings war crimes, and if so, were they justified on the grounds that they shortened the duration of the criminal war itself?
Anthony Grayling, a very deft and literate English moral philosopher, now seeks to redistribute the middle of this latent syllogism in his new book, Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the World War II Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan. He argues that "area bombing" was not really intended to shorten the war, and did not do so. And he further asserts that the policy was an illegal and immoral one by the standards that the Allies had announced at the onset of hostilities. Some of what he says is unarguable.
Many smaller German cities were of no military importance and were destroyed for no reason except to serve as bomb-fodder, and as practice for bombers. The British government had publicly forsworn any deliberate attack on civilian targets. Air Marshal Arthur "Bomber" Harris, who was criticized at the time in Parliament and the press, and within the Churchill administration, took the view that since Britain had starved hundreds of thousands of Germans by a naval blockade in the 1914-18 war, there was little moral difference in the precise way in which one took German life. He more or less admitted that he was incinerating German cities in 1944 and 1945, not because he had to, but because he could. It was what Bomber Command had trained to do. It was the only way he knew of taking the war to the enemy.
Winston Churchill wrote to his Chiefs of Staff in March, 1945:
"It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise, we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land. The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing."
Churchill here is still repressing his moral misgivings underneath pragmatic ones: Any more of this "terror" and there's not enough Germany to take over. But both impulses are still present.
Grayling quotes from the extensive debate that occurred in contemporary Britain. There were eloquent complaints in both houses of Parliament, in the press and among intellectuals. Some of these were honourable -- it was found that the inhabitants of badly bombed English cities did not want a policy of retaliation -- and some were based on a faintly spurious quasi-pacifism and moral equivalence.
Suppose we leave these moral qualms to one side for a minute The simple question would then become: Did it work? Grayling argues that only precision bombing of oil facilities either did work or ought to have been tried. The things that really "shortened" the war were "pinpoint" attacks on Hitler's fuel lines, and the remorseless advance of the Red Army after the titanic battle at Kursk.
If the Anglo-American effort was benefiting from Stalin's total war in the East, then what does mere bombing of civilians have to do with it? One might as well shift the centre of ethical gravity, and refocus on the mass Russian rape and pillage, followed by the incarceration of Eastern Europe and the partition and looting of Eastern Germany, that was also a price of Hitler's defeat.
In a recent exchange with him at the Goethe Institute in Washington, I offered a criticism of British policy that went further than Grayling's. Like him, I was brought up in urban areas of England that still showed the scars of Nazi bombardment. Like him, I began to doubt the official justifications for the policy imposed by Air Marshal Harris. But these misgivings ought to begin well before the horrible attack on Hamburg in 1943.
In 1938, the British government was contacted by emissaries from the Kreisau Circle, a group of courageous German oppositionists led by Count Helmuth von Moltke. They told Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax that if Britain stood adamantly by its guarantees to Czechoslovakia, and promised to make a stand against fascist irredentism, they could put Hitler under arrest. Their aim would be the restoration of German democracy, but their pretext would be that they had averted a war. This could only be done if the British maintained a belligerent policy instead of a capitulationist one.
Who knows if this would have succeeded? We only know that officers as highly placed as Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of German military intelligence, and many influential politicians and diplomats, were part of the plan. We also know that Chamberlain and Halifax refused to talk to them. There is something unbearable in the idea of a British regime, that would not fire or risk a shot against Hitler in 1938, later deploying horrific violence against German civilians instead.
On the other hand, once the battle had been joined, one has little choice but to regard it as an anti-Nazi war at last. And to me, this involves viewing it from the standpoint of a German anti-fascist, or a non-German slave labourer or other victim of German racism. It was important not just that the Hitler system be defeated, but that it be totally and unsentimentally destroyed. The Nazis had claimed to be invincible and invulnerable: Very well, then, they must be visited by utter humiliation. No more nonsense and delusion, as with the German Right after 1918 and its myth of a stab in the back.
Eva Klemperer, a staunch and principled German Lutheran, told her husband that, after what she had experienced under Hitler, she could not find it in herself to truly regret the firestorm of Dresden. And what of the Slav and Balkan and Polish and Jewish slaves in Albert Speer's underground hellholes, forced to dig out pits for the rocket-bombs that were being directed at London? Did they not cheer silently every time the very earth shook with revenge?
A "pinpoint" bombing of Dresden's railheads in 1945 would still have left the Nazi authorities in power and allowed them to send the last transports to the killing fields.
A time for the ultimate ruling sometimes has to come, or else Negro quasi-serfs might even now be selling ice cream to obese children on the still-wooden boardwalks of Atlanta.
Nonetheless, one should also acknowledge the absolute right of Germans to reconsider this subject. There have been some important recent examples. The best is that of the late W.G. Sebald, in his book On the Natural History of Destruction.
Grayling rightly insists that nothing he says should be construed as permission for any cheap self-pity among Germans, let alone equivalence. But he commits this error of judgment and taste, as if in tribute to today's "moral equivalence" ratbags:
"A surprise attack on a civilian population aimed at causing maximum hurt, shock, disruption and terror: there comes to seem very little difference in principle between the RAF's Operation Gomorrah, or the USAAF's atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York by terrorists on September 11 2001. To say that the principle underlying 9/11, Hamburg and Hiroshima is the same is to say that the same moral judgment applies to all three."
Well, the last sentence is a null and tedious tautology. This drivel is exactly what neo-Nazis utter, and its repetition by Grayling is a subversion of all the care and measure that he brings to the subject. In what declension of "just war" theory, on which he wastes a few pages, would Osama bin Laden be allowed into the argument? Proportionality?
I admit that I have never heard or read a justification for the hideous destruction of Nagasaki, and the late Edward Teller once told me that he always favoured a "demonstration" detonation to convince the Japanese leadership to surrender, which means that we might have avoided Hiroshima as well. Any argument that any action is moral, on the ground of its being "war-shortening," is thin and glib, and may also be hateful and false.
However, if we are to be allowed alternative historical courses and speculations, there is a "moral" that Grayling overlooks. What if the RAF had been in good enough shape to inflict "terror" on Berlin in the fall of 1939? What if the United States had struck the Imperial Japanese Navy first? What if the League of Nations had decided to stand by the Spanish Republic and Abyssinia, and had pounded Franco's and Mussolini's armies before they could get off the mark?
Those who oppose violence on principle are called pacifists. Those who oppose it until its use is too little and too late, or too much and too late, should be called casuists. Those who try to resist their own despotisms, and who appeal in vain to lazy democracies who are also among the potential victims, and who welcome the eventual arrival of the bombs and planes -- I am thinking of some courageous Serbian and Iraqi democrats -- should be called our allies now, and in Europe should have been our allies no later than 1933.
Moral crisis is the vile residue of moral cowardice, and Grayling has fully proved this without quite intending to do so. His book is a treatise, not on the dubiety of the retributive, but on the urgency and integrity of the "pre-emptive."