Category Archives: literature

From The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe, by Marek Kohn (Yale U. Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 126-128, 130-131:

[“Bomber”] Harris believed that the bombing campaign against German cities, together with the Soviet struggle against Hitler’s forces in the east, would bring the war to an end in 1944, sparing the Western Allies from having to mount an invasion. The Ministry of Economic Warfare provided him with a table of a hundred German towns, compiled from Bomber’s Baedeker data, rating them according to their economic importance. He crossed them out one by one as his planes worked through the list. Although the campaigns did not have the effect that he had predicted, they continued after the D-Day invasion in June 1944, and were sustained almost up to the moment at which Germany finally surrendered.

During those last terrible months before the clock stopped at Stunde Null, Allied bombers made sure that they had left few German cities unvisited. The major targets had all been struck over and over again; minor potential targets now attracted increasing attention from the mission planners. With hindsight, speculative remarks in the Bomber’s Baedeker entry for Pforzheim read like a death sentence upon the Black Forest town and its inhabitants, who specialised in making jewellery and watches. ‘These industries were formerly carried out largely in the homes of the individual workers,’ the report observed, ‘and it may be said that almost every house in this city is a small workshop . . . As was the case in the 1914–1918 war, most of the factories and workshops of Pforzheim will have now been turned over to the manufacture of precision parts for instruments, small-arms components, fuzes, clockwork movements and similar products . . .’

In his post-war report on Bomber Command’s operations, Harris rewrote the Baedeker’s presumption into a statement of fact. As if the RAF’s reconnaissance aircraft could see through roofs and ceilings, the chief of Bomber Command asserted that ‘almost every house was a small workshop engaged in the production of instruments, small arms and fuzes’. Every house was therefore confirmed as a legitimate target, and so was everybody in it. The RAF bombed the town towards the end of February 1945, raising a firestorm. ‘Hardly a building remained intact,’ Harris claimed: the accepted figure for the extent of the destruction is 83 per cent. He noted that Pforzheim had a population of 80,000, but not that the raid killed 17,600 of those inhabitants. It was the third highest toll from an Allied raid in Europe, after the firestorms that left 18,500 dead in Hamburg and 25,000 in Dresden. The scale of the whole campaign is indicated by the estimate of 350,000 for the total death toll.

In hindsight, looking back along a timeline in which the war against the Third Reich ended in May, the attacks carried out against modest German towns in February and March seem to defy any strategic justification. Pforzheim and Würzburg were the most horrific instances of bombing that was, in Richard Overy’s measured judgement, ‘evidently punitive in nature and excessive in scale’. At the time it may have looked different to many on the Allied side, after the Western Allies’ slow progress towards German territory and the Reich’s deployment of new weapons, including the V-2 ballistic missiles that represented a new technology for bombing cities. The first American troops did not manage to get across the Rhine until early March, little more than a week before the climax of the British raids on Würzburg. In January, Britain’s Bombing Directorate had advocated inducing ‘a state of terror by air attack’. Hitherto, the RAF had euphemistically talked of attacking ‘morale’. Now the word ‘terror’ was slipping into the Allies’ usage, as they cast about for ways to win the war.

Even with hindsight, and even with decades in which to reflect upon how to locate right and wrong in the history of the air war against Germany, the campaign poses questions that are intractable even when they are answered. The period of reflection seemed to last until almost the end of the century, and then the books began to appear. Peter Johnson wrote his memoirs, subtitled Reflections and Doubts of a Bomber, which were published in 1995. The writer W.G. Sebald produced a series of essays that came out in 1999 under the title Luftkrieg und Literatur (Air War and Literature). Lighting his argument with firestorm scenes, he criticised his fellow German authors for having failed to write about the bombing war in a satisfactory fashion, or at all. Then, in 2002, came Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand (The Fire), the best-seller that thrust the Bombenkrieg, and German suffering, to the forefront of national public debate about the Second World War. Written by a freelance scholar-journalist, Der Brand was not an argument about morality or a detached academic summation of events in their broader context. It was a literary enactment of agony, its testimony unbearably eloquent, and a lament for loss. To describe it as repetitious is not to deprecate its narrative structure, but to recognise the depiction of similar horrors in city after city as an assertive act of remembrance. Professional historians criticised its standards of scholarship, while acknowledging its literary power. Pushing its readers onward through inferno after inferno, Der Brand insisted that their gaze should be fixed upon the lives consumed in the fires, and the agonies in which those lives ended.

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Across the eastern border, by contrast, Germany’s actions had created a moral framework of invulnerable simplicity for the Poles. In Warsaw the narrative was grand, tragic and unequivocal. It was easy to put together a story of urbicide planned from the start of the occupation, or even earlier (on the basis of a rumour that Friedrich Pabst had been appointed as the future Chief Architect of Warsaw more than a month before the German invasion). The so-called Pabst plan made a compelling narrative element, although in reality it may have been little more than a vanity project for a peripheral regime functionary from Würzburg. Poles embraced the story that emerged from the capital’s ruins, a sublime arc of victimhood and valour, as the story of the nation. Warsaw’s tragedy was Poland’s tragedy in its most concentrated form, reaching a peak of intensity in the Old Town’s passion of resistance, devastation and martyrdom. As it rebuilt its capital city, the whole nation created an example to be followed throughout the country, in spirit if not necessarily in form. The reconstruction of each individual Polish town or city was understood to be part of the greater national project.

No such understanding was available to Germans, for whom the very idea of a national story was fundamentally compromised. Jörg Arnold notes that Der Brand rarely even speaks of ‘Germans’ at all: ‘the locality, not the nation, is the focal point of reference’. That was the position in which the people of German cities found themselves after Stunde Null. Each town had to work out a story of its own upon which to rebuild itself.