Atrociticies and collective memory

It is always them. The victors are the ones who write history, and they tend to blame the losers for the horrors of war. However, there is hardly a better example of the hypocritical fashion in which we have built our moral self-image than the historical obliviousness surrounding the Allies behaviour in the final year of the Second World War. Whereas crimes committed by the German, the Japanese, and the rest of the Axis members during the War have been extensively documented, it is striking how scarcely the deliberate murder of civilians (particularly Germans) in huge proportions by the British and American forces in 1944 appears in Western history books -even in German ones-, as if this exercise on collective awareness and memory was not necessary, as if we in the West were naturally immune to brutality, as if it was the remotest possibility it could happen again, with us as perpetrators. After all, it is well known no one else is to blame but them, whoever they are…

Here is an account of the Allied bombardments of Dresden and other German cities during the last years of the War: (1)

“In May 1942, Cologne became the first target of the Tausenbombernacht, as the victims called them. But Berlin was the favoured objective, it was ‘the evil capital’ and the lair of ‘the Huns’ […] on the night of 18 November, 1943, the city was bombarded by an airbone fleet of almost 450 bombers. The operation was repeated a few weeks later, but now with 750 planes. Entire neighbourhoods were in flames. 2,000 people were killed. […] On 26 February, 1944, old Alexanderplatz went up in a sea of flames and exploding ‘blockbusters’. By that point more than 1.5 million citizens of Berlin had been ausgebombt. In the end, seventy per cent of the city would be reduced to rubble. […] In Hamburg, on 28 July, 1943, the first firtestorm was created. People ran down the street like living torches; almost 40,000 suffocated in the burning cyclone or were roasted alive in bomb shelters that quickly became as hot as ovens. […] During the German bombardments of England. 60,000 civilians were killed, 90,000 were badly wounded and another 150,000 were injured. The Allied raids of Germany claimed five times that number, around 300,000 victims, including 75,000 children. Almost 800,000 people were badly wounded. Seven million Germans were left homeless, and a fifth of all the country´s houses were destroyed.  The effect of the bombings on the German war industry, however, was far less severe. […] This disproportion between industrial damage and civilian casualties was no accident. It was a concious policy. […] For every ton of bombs that landed on London, Coventry and a few other places, the British and the Americans dropped more than 300 tons back on Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, Nuremberg and other German cities. […] The bombardment of civilians became a special science. […] A pronounced preference arose for residential neighbourhoods, as being more susceptible to ‘demoralisation’. Specialists calculated which bomb could best be used to destroy which building, how a firestorm could be created by first using a blockbuster to blow out all doors and windows, how a house could quickly be set alight by adjusting a bomb to explode only after it had first crashed through three floors. To kill firemen and other helpers, time bombs were dropped that went off only 36, 72 or 144 hours after deployment. […] On the night of 13 February, 1945, Dresden was full of refugees from the East. The city had no war industry to speak of, but that was not the point. Precisely according to plan, a firestorm raced through the streets within half an hour of the first bombs falling. To maximise the number of victims, the British and American strategists had devised a triple-whammy. They knew that, in a burning city, bomb shelters provided protection only for about three hours. After that the ground and the walls became so hot that everyone had to go back outside. It was at precisely that moment that the second attack came. The citizens of Dresden had to choose between the sea of fire outside and the oven-like bomb shelters within. Then, while everyone was busy saving themselves and others, a third attack followed. […] Today, local historians […] estimate the number of people killed in the bombardment of Dresden at 25-30,000. In the old market square in the centre of town, a funeral pyre was built that burned for five whole weeks. The cremation was supervised by SS Sturmbahnführer Karl Streibel, who had gained his experience burning bodies at the Treblinka death camp.”

Can we say we in the West have left behind and for good this kind of brutality? What on earth makes us think we are vaccinated against its resurgence, specially when we have decided to remain intentionally and shamefully ignorant about our recent past?

(1) Geert Mak, 2008, In Europe. Travels Through the Twentieth Century, New York, Vintage, pp. 560-561, 563-567.

Read on:

W. G. Sebald, 2003, On the Natural History of Destruction, New York, Random House [originally published in German in 1999 as Luftkrieg und Literatur, Munich, Hanser Verlarg].

Victor Klemperer, 1997, Das Tagebuch 1933-1945, Berlin, Aufbau-Taschenbuch Verlarg.

Michael Ignatieff, 2000, Virtual War. Kosovo and Beyond, New York, Metropolitan Books.

Photo: Dresden after World War II © Emory U.