'It was massacre. Look your past in the face' (GERMANS, CHURCHILL, BARF ALERT, AND HOLD MEIN BIER)

The German historian whose book has sparked a debate over whether Winston Churchill was a war criminal for ordering the bombing of German cities yesterday challenged the British to re-examine their war history.

And I challenge you to eat excrement and die, you sick twisted blighter - Ivan

Jörg Friedrich, the author of Der Brand (The Fire: Germany Under Bombardment 1940-45), has said that the fire storm which consumed large parts of Hamburg and killed 45,000 people after bombing raids in July 1943 should have prompted Allied leaders to stop and reconsider tactics.

The book's serialisation this week in the mass circulation tabloid Bild has sparked a vigorous debate in Germany. It has left Germans asking whether Churchill deliberately set out of kill large numbers of civilians in apparent defiance of the rules of war.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Mr Friedrich asked: "Do you want to live in a nation which doesn't know its own past? Do you want to live in a nation which has to hide its own past because it cannot look into the face of its past? Is this the way of honest men? No.

You're revising the past to create an illusion of poor innocent Germany, and you have the nerve to tell us to fall in line? Get stuffed. - Ivan

"You have to look into the face of the past. Then you can ask if it was a heroic one, or a tragic one or perhaps a criminal one, or if it included necessary evils in a tragic time. You have to look into this face even if it has a Medusa face, and in the British case the Medusa's face is the bombing campaigns."

A self-confessed veteran of Germany's 1968 Left-wing generation which forced its parents to examine their role in the Third Reich, Mr Friedrich has previously written books on the crimes of the Nazi judiciary and the laws of war as seen in the Nuremberg trials.

He said: "I do not discuss the war criminal question in the book. The first thing you have to do in such a debate is to get the facts and these are generally not known. Even British authors like Max Hastings [the former editor of The Daily Telegraph] who wrote about the bombing campaigns stopped in their books when the bombs left the planes.

"I have deep respect for Max Hastings. His book was most courageous when he wrote about the War Cabinet knowing about casualties and he did go into detail on what happened in Darmstadt for example.

"But 95 per cent of my book deals with what happened after the bombs left the planes. You have to look at what happened on the ground. This is a new contribution to the discussion, the depth of the suffering which happened on the ground."

Fine. But what about the people you stuffed into the ovens at Dachau, at Bergen Belsen, at Auschwitz. Why the hell should we care about a country that did that and declared total war? Perhaps we should also ask the Russians what they think of this? - Ivan

Mr Friedrich said of the Hamburg bombings: "The summer of 1943 marked a qualitative step from warfare to massacre. That was the moment to pull back and ask whether that was comparable to what Hitler had been trying to do.

"It was the same after Coventry and Hamburg. Hitler talked of Coventry-isation while Churchill talked of Hamburg-isation. He wanted to do the same to Berlin, to kill 100,000 people there, although he didn't manage it. That would have been more than the number who died in Hiroshima - that was 88,000."

He said the Hague and Geneva conventions had set up a civilised form of war intended to protect civilians and grant rights to prisoners, but that as the Second World War developed, they were disregarded by all sides, not just by Churchill and Hitler.

Armaments developed and used to massacre civilians barbarised warfare, "abolishing the principles and traditions which protected civilians from war since the Christian Knights. The development of total war which was designed after World War One was done by the strategists.

"Total war was not a fight between armed forces, it was people against people, a fascist concept of war. But if you read the military theory of the 1930s this was a universal concept of war between industrialised nations."

Goebbels called for it and you shouted "Ja". Well you got it. Quit whingeing. - Ivan

Mr Friedrich said that the 1939-45 war leaders should all be judged using the same standards and that as victors the Allies had largely not been forced to ask whether their actions were justified because they had won.

But he added: "The friendship between our nations should be good enough for us to work together to unearth the truth.

"We have to tell what happened. Germany, with the horrors of the Holocaust and Russian campaign cannot in any way be self-righteous about this, but we should engage in a common fight for the truth."

First you're self-righteous, and now you're lecturing us about the truth and saying you're not being self righteous? - Ivan

He didn't manage it? I thought that Berlin was largely ceded to the Russians at Yalta. Flattening Berlin would've been nixed for the same reason that we stopped at the Elbe- no sense in losing western troops on something we weren't going to be able to keep anyway. Additionally, it likely would have been viewed as a provocation by the Russians: Zhukov's and Koniev's artillery notwithstanding, blowing it up in their faces might not have been well received.

Ivan - perhaps he should be addressing his countries major partner in the Axis - the Japanese. Seems they've managed to forget all about their past.

This is the second thread which has been opened on this subject, probably because a sequential article has been published in Britain. I presume to paste my comments from that thread here because I think they lend perspective:

Germans call Churchill a war criminal (HOLD MEIN BIER...YET AGAIN)

Posted by nathanbedford to MadIvan On News/Activism 11/19/2002 1:04 AM EST #116 of 170

Lets back off a minute and see what we are dealing with. This is an English newspaper article about a German tabloid's serialization of a history book.

The German tabloid, Das Bild, (The Picture)lives up to its name. It primary attraction is a revealing picture of a copiously endowed fraulein on the front page, below the fold, with statistics in case her charms are not evident enough from the picture. Das Bild is marginally more trustworthy than The National Enquirer.

I can tell you that right now German television is running a documentary on the SS which is unsparing it its presentation of the Hitler Time. Scarcely a week goes by without a similiar presentation on German television. To jump to a conclulion that such a history book represents mainstream thought in Germany is lecherlich.

Schröder's election shows that Germany,if anything, is suffering from a creeping, leftist, pacifist malaise which could not be further removed from a facist revival. Lets worry about something real, like why the Germans are more like the French than the English, instead of flying off the handle because of third hand reports contrived to get a rise out good honest Brits and Americans

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/791456/posts

Somewhere in Churchill's history of WWII, he characterizes WWII as just one more episode in Europe's 1,000 year problem: how to live with the Germans.

Barbara Tuchman begins the Guns of August with a note that WWI took place on the same turf as a stone commemorating the Emperor Claudius victory over the German hoards.

I do not believe WWII ended this problem. The recent lurch to a particularly ugly left in Germany is not encouraging.

In his book, graphic descriptions of trapped civilian populations being burned to death
by the fire storms of the later bombing campaigns and of people collecting the incinerated
body parts of their loved ones and leaving them at the gates of over-filled cemeteries
are combined with the numbers of those killed.

well, unlike most of the Jews of Europe, at least they had living relatives to collect
their remains...

This is distressing...to see Germans turn into Japanese in terms of denial and
self-delusion.

I now regret buying a Mercury Capri (made in Germany) when I was in college...

Looks like the revisionism has gone on-line as well.

During a couple of the dust-ups we've had here on freerepublic on Dresden, it's
been my pleasure to direct people to the website maintained by The City Of Dreden
which dispassionately mentioned that something (IIRC) 70% of the extensive indurstrial
plant of the city was destroyed in the raids.

Maybe that is still on the website, but it appears to me that that passage has been
replaced with a "25,000 people" were killed by the Dreden bombings.

To me that has been the revisionist approach to Dresden...people leaving the
impression that Dresden was not an industrial center.

And, as cruel as it sounds, and as hideous as the Dresden bombings seem IN RETROSPECT,
I hate to think what would have happened to the Dresdeners if the USA had been
bled as much as the U.K. during two world wars.

There would have been the possibility that there the term "Dresdener" would have
been a synonym with "extinct"...

Bingo! As I commented on the other thread, this is selective amnesia by idiots.

There's no doubt that the British night-time area bombardment was meant to kill and disrupt civilian population centers, which also are production centers. This was total war against a society fully mobilized for production of armaments and support for military operations.

Tough. You started it, Deutschers, and did much worse yourselves. Suck it up.

There's no doubt that the British night-time area bombardment was meant to kill
and disrupt civilian population centers, which also are production centers.

I'm definitely not in the "ends justify the means" crowd.
And I think it's good that these topics get discussed, even if there are divergent
personal feelings.

But I just won't give folks who neglect that Dresden was an industrial city...
and the sad truth is there are usually civilian workers and their families within
close distances of such places.
Collateral damage is sure to ensue.

In the same breath, I don't doubt that the U.K. forces did want to "send a message"
in the waning days of the war, not only to the Germans, but to the approaching Soviet Army.

And maybe to just tell the Germans that after two world wars, this is how this crap
is going to end!

An off-topic pondering of my own: I wonder just what it would take, in the way of provocation, for Israel to launch a massive barrage of sorties straight across the Mediterranean and absolutely waste Germany. Didn't a bunch of Israeli commandos once completely seize control of a German airport and exterminate a bunch of Palestinian terrorists, while flatly telling the Germans to blow them? Anyway, I don't have to think too hard which side America would be on in just such circumstances.

People can do all the Monday morning quarter backing the want, but there is no way to change history and try some else. The Allied theory at that heavy loss of civilian property would cause the population to turn against their leaders. Unfortunately it didn’t work that way and probably didn’t significantly shorten the war. Continued concentrated pressure on selected industries (ball bearings, petroleum) would probably have achieved more, but war is war. Once you are in it, you need to do what it takes to end it as soon as possible on your terms and with most of the casualties on the other side.

The British bombers did not have any superchargers as did the American planes. Thus they flew in amongst defending German fighters. Heavy losses caused a change in strategy and the Brits became night bombers. The Americans were able to fly higher and in the day time tending to use radar because of the cloudy nature of the continent. Neither practice was very effective in destroying individual small targets such as factories. City busting (fire bombing) was pretty much developed by the British because the cities were easy to find at night. Typically, the bombing was done in waves, one wave mostly incendiaries, another mostly block busters. Dresden was a combination British/American effort. The fires were set at night by two large waves of British planes (by this time there was little or no air defense). The Americans came the next day and bombed the rubble. Don't know about Hamburg.

Ever serve in the armed forces, punk? Evidently not, as you see fit to insult those who protect your freedoms from Islamic and German fascists alike.

You are obviously too ignorant to do basic research. Marines served in the Atlantic and European theaters. Leading the way during Operation Torch, the November 1942 North African invasion, Marines went ashore at Arzeu, Algeria, and moved overland to the port of Oran, where they occupied the strategic Spanish fortress at the northern tip of the harbor.

Another Marine detachment aboard the cruiser USS Philadelphia landed Nov. 10, 1942, at the port of Safi, FrenchMorocco, and secured the airport.

A brief history lesson for Jorg Friedrich and the people buying into his line:

The whole affair began with the fact that both sides had bomber wings. And both found out, soon enough, they could not operate their bombers safely by day. Accordingly, the bombers began to fly at night.

But to bomb in the dark meant that all pretense of precision had to be dropped. It wasn't easy to find blacked-out cities in the dark. It was impossible to direct the bombs to a "target" inside that city.

As a consequence, the Luftwaffe and Bomber Command both were reduced to bombing cities. It was the best they could do -- so that's what they did. It was, after all, a war.

First, there was Coventry and The Blitz. The survivors of these bombings also have stories to tell. Then, there was Koln. Eventually, there was Hamburg. And, toward the end, the most indiscriminant weapons of them all -- V-1s and V-2s.

Before they start bitching about the way the war turned out, the Germans should remember that Hamburg never would've happened had they not started it.

Most analysts agreed (well before the revisionists came along) that bombing the cities as opposed to factories and rail lines did not do much to harm the German war effort or to end the war sooner. But it did kill a lot of people unnecessarily.

Remember the London Blitz of 1940-41? The NAZIs bombed the shit out of Britain's capital city and its biggest population centre. How did that damage the British logistical war effort and weren't there a lot of unnecessary civilian deaths?

I'm not familiar with the bombing of Hamburg. Hamburg was an industrial city, so it's very possible that most of the bombing was justified on that basis. The bombing of Dresden is a different matter. That was pretty hard to justify.

The German people elected Adolf Hitler, knowing full well what he intended to do (remember Mein Kampf), they stood by and watched their "undesirable" fellow citizens get sent to concentration camps, occupied most of Western Europe, launched a genocidal war against the USSR and tried to break Britain. Hence it was very easy to justify the bombing of Dresden et al. The genocidal NAZI sods DESERVED IT. They started it.

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