Posted on 11/18/2002 5:07:02 PM PST by MadIvan
was effectively a war criminal who sanctioned the extermination of Germany's civilian population through indiscriminate bombing of towns and cities, an article in the country's biggest-circulation newspaper claimed yesterday.
You have some bloody nerve, Fritz. Perhaps we should ask the Jews what they think of you getting all huffy like this? - Ivan
In an unprecedented attack on Allied conduct during the Second World War, the tabloid Bild has called for recognition to be given to the suffering inflicted on the German population during the strategic air campaign of 1940-45.
The suffering of the population in London is far more relevant. After all, the citizens of London didn't vote in Hitler. Same goes for Jewish civilians in the occupied countries the Germans brutally slaughtered - Ivan
The newspaper's campaign, provoked by a new German history of the bomber offensive, breaks six decades of virtual silence on the subject, and is being seen as the latest manifestation of a belief among Germans that they too were victims of the war - albeit a war started by their country.
The newspaper is serialising Der Brand (The Fire: Germany Under Bombardment 1940-45) by the historian Jorg Friedrich, which claims to be the most authoritative account of the bombing campaign so far.
Mr Friedrich claims the British government set out at the start of the Second World War to destroy as many German cities and kill as many of their inhabitants as possible. Civilian deaths were not collateral damage, he says, but rather the object of the exercise. He argues that Churchill had favoured a strategy of attacking the civilian population centres from the air some 20 years before Hitler ordered such raids.
Britain's war leader is quoted during the First World War as saying: "Perhaps the next time round the way to do it will be to kill women, children and the civilian population."
Friedrich goes on to quote Churchill defending the morality of bombing: "Now everyone's at it. It's simply a question of fashion - similar to that of whether short or long dresses are in."
Der Brand is far removed from the dry style of most German histories, and is filled with emotive accounts of the horrors of bombing, but carries few references to the man who brought retribution on Germany, Adolf Hitler.
Friedrich argues that the Allied policy of seeking to break German morale through bombing proved mistaken, the attacks merely serving to weld together the German population.
The debate is certain to anger those in Britain who see the strategic air campaign as a necessary evil.
The British, led by Sir Arthur Harris, C-in-C Bomber Command, were the leading proponents of "night area bombing", involving the systematic destruction of German industrial capacity and housing. The policy resulted in the laying to waste of city after city, including Hamburg, Cologne and Dresden, and the deaths of some 635,000 Germans.
The policy was to some extent forced on the RAF by the failure of daylight operations against pinpoint targets early in the war. It also reflected the fact that, for much of the conflict, bombing was the only method by which Britain could attack Germany.
German raids on Britain in the Blitz of 1940-41 were seen to have freed the British from the obligation not to attack civilian centres.
The serialisation of the book will furnish the far-Right in Germany with arguments to back its revisionist claims. It is also likely to overshadow recent reconciliation attempts between Britain and Germany over the bombing of Dresden in February 1945 in which tens of thousands died.
In a symbolic sign of friendship, British businesses have paid into a fund to reconstruct the Frauenkirche or Church of Our Lady which was destroyed in the raid and is set to be reopened in 2006.
Yesterday Antony Beevor, the British historian and author of the bestselling Berlin: The Downfall, 1945, criticised the German claim that Britain's war of attrition was unnecessarily brutal. "The trouble is this argument is removed from the context that they were the ones who invented terror bombing," he said, referring to German attacks on Coventry, Rotterdam and Warsaw.
"They literally obliterated whole cities and that certainly preceded what the British did," he said. "What we did was more terrifying and appalling, but it was a natural progression in this war.
"One can certainly debate the whole morality of bombing, but for Germans to say Churchill was a war criminal is pushing it a bit," he said.
Friedrich, 58, said his two years of research prompted him to change his views radically on the Allied bombing.
"Previously it appeared to me to be a just answer to the crimes of the Third Reich, but I've since changed my mind," he said. "Until the Second World War there was a common consensus that the massacre of civilian populations was illegal."
For the past year Germans on both the Left and Right have been locked in a new and intense debate about the war and their role as its victims as well as perpetrators. The debate was sparked by Gunther Grass, the Nobel prize winner, in a novel fictionalising the wartime account of a passenger ship torpedoed by the Soviet navy killing thousands of Germans on board.
Yup, I heard that yesterday for the first time, and I couldn't believe what I was reading. It's a safe bet that 99.999 percent of the Islamic world has absolutely no idea what The Kyoto Treaty is, and the ones who do know don't give a chit about it.
The Euros have committed suicide by allowing Muslims to spread over their continent like the black plague, and they desire that we share the same fate. They [the EU] has been encouraging the Jihadists of the world for decades now.
His wife said to him: "Perhaps it's a blessing in disguise."
Winston replied, "If it's a blessing, it is certainly very well disguised."
Regards, Ivan
There were those who saw what was happening and got out. The tactic of bombing cities grew as planes became powerful enough to safely fly considerable amounts of explosives over a city.
Air battles came into being with WWI.
Disney has an animated film called Victory Through Airpower that generally gets omitted from the list of "animated features" (it has been preserved, it was shown from a reportedly pristine archive print at a private retrospective for one of the animators around 10 years ago).
Its odd that a publication would choose now to lash out at England for bombing cities (and colateral damage). The juxtaposition would seem to be to paint Great Britain (and more specifically, Churchill) as war criminals. Demoralize England before we start bombing Iraq. The article becomes offensive when it omits the details of Germany's bombing operations (and missle program), Japan's biological warfare development, WWI's chemical warfare, and sidestepping completely the Holocaust and treatment of POWs.
I thought that the fire bombing of Dresden was supposed to have done more damage (but without the radioactive fallout).
Bartender! Medic!
I wasn't alive during segregation; I can't get a genuine feel for how things were or why some people were so adamant that some people be excluded from using a bathroom or drinking fountain (or sitting in a restaurant, etc). I can make a judgement call that it was wrong, feel some remorse over the past but I did nothing to effect those wrongs and there is nothing I can do to make up for it. I can make every effort to not step on peoples' toes and commit my own transgressions.
There are those educators in America who want to dwell on the scandalous elements of America's past while ignoring the basic details or setting things into perspective in a total world view of how things were in 17xx, 18xx, 193x...
There are those who are outraged that founding presidents of this nation held slaves. There are slaves in the world today but those who hold rage can't be bothered to work at changing this.
I do not fear invasion from Japan or Germany. But at the same time, I have an "uncle" who immigrated to the US and was a paratrooper into Europe in WWII. He has a brother who remained in Poland to sympathize with the Nazis. He wrote him off during the war and still refuses to try to meet with him.
International communism no longer appears to be a threat (although we've had creeping socialism here since the 1920s). The global socialist-anarchists are growing in number (they are the ones rioting in the streets around the world raging against capitalism). I don't see them acting on behalf of any country but they are working from inside this country and out (I don't know why our government grants the foreign nationals in this cause travel visas).
The Italians use Germania when referring to the country of Germany, and Tedeschi when referring to the German language, IIRC.
longjack
Texas won its independence from Mexico but there are those today who want us to honor all of the war dead (from both sides) at the San Jacinto Monument (buried in unmarked graves). When Reagan went to a German cemetary where there were nazis (including SS officers) he committed a major blunder. Multiculturalism would now appear to permit such activity.
I mentioned this article to Agnieszka (my wife), who happens to be Polish: she couldn't stop laughing at their cheek. Well, laughing, then angry.
This time last year we visited Warsaw and she was showed me the various places that massaces happened and the photos in the museum showing what was left of the city after the Germans had finished with it. I have no sympathy for the Germans.
Yes, the 'Bild Zeitung" has a sleazy side. The German's will tell you that "when you roll it up to put it in your pocket, blood drips out".
On the other hand, the sport's section is good, and the entire paper is written to give people a quick, albeit sensational, view of current events. This paper is what Germans would buy to read on the commute, etc., while waiting to read the more detailed Local papers when they got home.
"Bild Zeitung" usually has a novel or something like this as a serial. A reader can read a chapter a day on the way to work.
Regardless of the quality of the paper, a lot of Germans are reading this.
longjack
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