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

The Daily Telegraph ^ | November 21, 2002 | Hannah Cleaver

[MadIvan]

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.

As a Left winger he probably felt all Hitler needed was therapy - Ivan

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."

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.

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.

Funny. I feel like nuking Berlin these days, not friendly. - Ivan

"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

[NeoCaveman]

Ivan me and my fellow American of atleast some German descent Glen Beck will therefor tell people we are part Danish not German.

[ffrancone]

I shall have to find the prccise quote. I'm pretty sure it is in Churchill's history of WWII, I think in Volume I. I probably won't get around to it in the life of this thread. But when I find it, I will try to remember to forward it to you.