The Fire

by Friedrich, Jorg

• ISBN13: 9780231133814
• ISBN10: 0231133812
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-05-15
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

For five years during the Second World War, the Allies launched a trial and error bombing campaign against Germany's historical city landscape. Peaking in the war's final three months, it was the first air attack of its kind. Civilian dwellings were struck by-in today's terms-"weapons of mass destruction," with a total of 600,000 casualties, including 70,000 children.In The Fire, historian J& ouml;rg Friedrich explores this crucial chapter in military and world history. Combining meticulous research with striking illustrations, Friedrich presents a vivid account of the saturation bombing, rendering in acute detail the annihilation of cities such as Dresden, the jewel of Germany's rich art and architectural heritage. He incorporates the personal stories and firsthand testimony of German civilians into his narrative, creating a macabre portrait of unimaginable suffering, horror, and grief, and he draws on official military documents to unravel the reasoning behind the strikes.Evolving military technologies made the extermination of whole cities possible, but owing, perhaps, to the Allied victory and what W. G. Sebald noted as "a pre-conscious self-censorship, a way of obscuring a world that could no longer be presented in comprehensible terms," the wisdom of this strategy has never been questioned. The Fireis a rare account of the air raids as they were experienced by the civilians who were their targets.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface Chronology Map Genealogy

Mother of the Renaissance

Education of a Lady (1492--1515)

Queen in All but Name (1515--1520)

The Bishop of Meaux (1521--1524)

Envoy Extraordinary (1524--1526)

Queen of Navarre (1526--1533)

Politics and Religion (1534--1539)

Courtly Love -- and Marriage (1539--1543)

And Then There Was One (1543--1547)

Pearls from the Pearl of Princesses (1547--1549)

Notes

References

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

AFTERWORD

For American and British Readers

The story of Der Brand ( The Fire) is a 500,000-fold journey. That is how many readers have made their way through the seven chapters. They have by no means all arrived at the same picture of the events because every imagination reconstructs them in a different way and every heart gives rise to its own feelings. Since Der Brand deals with the manner of mass dying of German civilians in a world war, the echo of emotions cannot remain neutral. The reader is biased and so is the author.

The book aroused the passions of Germans in early 2003, at the same time as the public eye here was on the war in Iraq, which I supported. My readers, however, asked me if the Americans had still not learned anything. But had Dresden been bombed with the same result as Baghdad, there would have been no story for me to tell of the intentional mass killing of urban residents. No air force chief of staff today would command the annihilation of 900,000 enemy noncombatants, as Sir Charles Portal did in 1942. One of my most highly esteemed British colleagues reminded me on television about how many Germans had voted and cheered for Hitler. Did every one of them therefore deserve the death penalty? If so, there would still be many in the world to punish for their "sympathies for political monsters." The judges at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, especially the Soviets, would in any case have gone pale in view of such justice by bombing. And how could the bomb distinguish between Nazis, anti-Nazis, and the 70,000 children who were killed, who did not even know what a Nazi was?

No interviewer with the English-language press failed to ask if it was not Hitler who started both the war and the bombing of cities. "They that sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind." If only that were true! A characteristic of air wars is that those who sow the wind do not reap the whirlwind and those who reap the whirlwind did not sow the wind. One of the sowers was certainly Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle, who as commander in chief of German Air Fleet 3 led the bombing of London and Coventry. Tens of thousands of British citizens died by his hand. In 1948 he stood before the U.S. military tribunal in Nuremberg. His prosecutor was the great American international law scholar and historian Brigadier General Telford Taylor. But Taylor did not even charge him with that bloody act -- though 40,000 victims were a lot even by Nuremberg standards. That act did not appear in the proceedings; the charges included only the Russian prisoners of war allegedly assigned under Sperrle's command to build military facilities. That is prohibited by the Geneva Convention. The judges acquitted Sperrle due to insufficient evidence. Why was his documented annihilation of London schoolchildren, hospital patients, and churchgoers not consider a wrong? And why were the firestorms that consumed the schoolchildren of Hamburg, Dresden, and Cologne their proper punishment for Sperrle's unpunished attacks? Why was every soldier in the Nazi Wehrmacht -- even the Waffen SS -- who was captured in the invaded countries of Poland, Russia, or Belgium taken into custody and treated and protected according to the Geneva Convention while his wife and child at home were outlaws? The enemies could do what they wanted with them, albeit only if the attack came from the air. If Charles Portal or Hugo Sperrle had run amok through Berlin or London with a machine gun, then Taylor would of course have charged him for the action. At least that is what he later wrote. According to the legal position in Nuremberg, it was not the willful killing of noncombatants that determined the crime, but the direction of fire. The horizontal fire of a machine gun is illegal; the vertical direction of the bomb munitions, on the other hand, is legal.

A major Egyptian newspaper did not support this legal perspective but instead commented on Der Brand by demanding that Churchill's mortal remains be exhumed and chopped up as punishment for his air war. With their moderate disposition, many Dutch people told me they felt the Anglo-American bombardment of German and Japanese cities was barbarous -- and that of Dutch cities too. Citizens of Rotterdam, the Hague, and Nijmegen burned and bled to death from aerial bombs. These were dropped from the planes of their German attackers and tormentors, as well as from those of their Allied liberators. Five times as many Dutch people were killed by the bombs of the liberators than by those of the subjugators. It could be that both kinds of death were equally tragic and cruel. But if a patient bleeds to death on an operating table, it still makes a difference whether the surgeon wanted to operate on him or strike him dead. Thus many readers viewed the operations described in Der Brand as a cure for the world and the victims as its "military necessity."

In an interview with a major Israeli newspaper, I described Churchill's situation in the years 1940 through 1943, when there was only one way left for him to hurt the Third Reich. Invisible and protected by the cover of night, bombs had to be dropped with lightning speed in the most inflammable residential areas of the cities. This had nothing to do with punishing Nazis; there is no evidence of that in the archives. Churchill had no opportunity to carry out "surgical strikes" on military objectives, so he destroyed what he could: civilians. "That," the Israeli interviewer said, "is what our suicide bombers also say."

I am familiar with the interpretation of mass annihilation as a "military necessity" from my earlier research on the Nuremberg trials. All of the Wehrmacht generals who were charged there defended themselves by saying that the enemy's killing of German civilians was a legitimate means by which to wage total war. In total war, the battle is waged not against the enemy armed forces, as was previously the case, but against the enemy population as a whole, they stressed, and in any case they had not done anything different.

There are records documenting German people's support for the killing of British civilians. I told my readers in Dresden that a V2 raid on London in February 1945 with 30,000 deaths would have had people in their city dancing in the streets. Civilians do not show mercy to civilians; pain causes the destruction of my body, my loved ones, my city. Total war consumes the people totally, and their sense of humanity is the first thing to go. Everyone wishes the worst on everyone else, and it is not my profession's to judge who deserved or did not deserve what. Whoever opts for the "mili¥tary necessities" can read what these looked like "on the ground." The story of this book is an international chain of passionate judgments. In Spain, a country in which the passions of the civil war that raged seventy years ago are cooling down, in which families are tired of asking if the fascist uncle or the Bolshevist cousin was rightly and necessarily massacred, I heard a six-word commentary of Der Brand: "It is an encyclopedia of pain."

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