GERMAN REVISIONIST HISTORIAN BRINGS ALLIED
TERROR BOMBING TO LIGHT
By Christopher Bollyn
American Free Press
How the German civilian population suffered under the Anglo-American wartime policy of "devastation and annihilation" of some 1,000 cities and towns by fire-bombing is the subject of two unprecedented books by a German revisionist historian.
BERLIN, Germany – The bombed and burned ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church in central Berlin serve today as a war memorial known as the Remembrance Church. Such a conspicuous memorial in the nation’s capital gives the impression that Germany is a country mindful of the immense suffering experienced by its population during the Second World War. However, as the controversy surrounding the recent works by German historian and author Jörg Friedrich reveals, this is not the case.
Friedrich, a revisionist historian born in Essen in 1944, has produced two ground-breaking books that bring to the public for the first time the experiences and images – felt by the civilian urban population – of the U.S. and British fire-bombing of German cities and towns between 1942 and 1945.
The first book, The Fire – Germany and the Bombardment 1940-1945, published in 2002, describes the development of the Anglo-American terror weapon of fire-bombing as a weapon of mass destruction – and how the urban German civilian population suffered from it.
"This has never been described in any book," Friedrich said about his first book. The English translation of Friedrich’s book is expected to be published by Colombia University Press in 2005.
"The bombardment of German towns and cities that went on for five years during World War II has no parallel in history," Friedrich wrote.
Friedrich’s second book on the subject, Brandstätten or Places of Fire, is a collection of "the most grisly images from the war ever to be published," according to The Guardian (UK). "None of them have been seen before. The victims are not Jewish, but German.
"The charred, mutilated bodies of women, children and babies are all civilians who perished during the Allies’ bombing campaign against Germany’s cities."
"We’ve all seen the pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki," Friedrich said. "But these images are not part of the iconography of the war."
The previously unpublished photos were taken from the archives of 70 German cities visited by Friedrich. The photos offer "a grim insight into what happened on the ground, revealing that many of the civilians who died in Allied raids were asphyxiated in their cellars," The Guardian wrote.
"The bombing left an entire generation traumatized. But it was never discussed. There are Germans whose first recollections are of being hidden by their mothers. They remember cellars and burning human remains," Friedrich said. "It is only now that they are coming to terms with what happened."
"The Allies dropped 1.5 million tons of bombs on Germany during the war," Friedrich says, "My books start 30 seconds later. It is only the German population who knows what happened when those bombs hit the ground."
Fire-bombing, the technique of using incendiary bombs to create a holocaust in a city, was first employed by the German Luftwaffe in an attack on Coventry in October 1940, according to Friedrich. The tactic was adopted and first used by the British air force against the medieval city of Lübeck in March 1942. "Lübeck is the exact copy of Coventry," according to Friedrich. Some 1,200 British civilians died in the bombing of Coventry.
The use of incendiary bombs against German cities was adopted as a strategy because Allied bombing of military targets was generally unsuccessful and very dangerous. Only one-in-five Allied bombs reached within 5 miles of its intended target and nearly 50 per cent of Britain’s bombers were shot down. As a result, British Air Marshall Sir Arthur Harris studied and put to use the "area bombing" tactic Germany has first employed on Coventry.
From the 1942 attack on Lübeck until the end of the war in 1945, British and U.S. forces continually developed fire-bombing as a terror weapon to devastate 160 German cities. Only three medieval German cities: Bamberg, Heidelberg, and Göttingen, survived the war unscathed by fire-bombing, according to Friedrich.
While many Americans know something about the horrific fire-bombing of Dresden of February 13-14, 1945, thanks to the novel Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut, who experienced the bombing as a prisoner of war, the fate of some 1,000 other German cities and towns that suffered similar attacks is less well known. Eighty-five per cent of Dresden was completely obliterated in the Anglo-American raid.
The "area bombing" of German cities gutted Hamburg, Dresden, Cologne, Essen, Freiburg, and Dortmund, and left large parts of Berlin and Munich in ruins. Friedrich estimates that at least 635,000 German civilians, including some 80,000 children, perished in the massive Anglo-American arson attacks.
"I kill thousands of people every night," Harris said during the war.
The fact that 45,000 civilians were killed in one night in Hamburg, or that the medieval German cities of Pforzheim and Würzburg were unnecessarily obliterated at the end of the war, however, are facts that are generally not included in the western historiography of the second world war.
In the February 1945 bombing of Pforzheim one-third of the population of 65,000 was killed. "It was the most horrific weapon ever directed at human beings," Friedrich said.
"The city in flames is the weapon," Friedrich says, "The idea was to make your house your gallows."
Friedrich explains how the Allied fire-bombing was conducted. First the city area was "framed" by red and green lights on the ground. The target area was then bombed by a massive shock bomb that destroyed the roofs and windows from the buildings. Finally, the area was carpet bombed with incendiary sticks that set the timber-built houses of the old cities on fire.
Eighty million incendiary sticks were dropped on German cities by the Allies, according to Friedrich, some 600,000 on Dresden alone.
The roof-less buildings then acted as chimneys and burned completely leaving nothing but blackened facades. The Allied fire-bombing destroyed 3.5 million homes and left 7.5 million Germans homeless.
German cities were virtually "defenseless" from the second half of 1944 until the end of the war according to Friedrich, because the Allies had virtually uncontested air superiority over Germany. The most intense period of fire-bombing occurred between January and May 1945 when the Allies bombed German cities "round the clock," according to Friedrich.
The relentless bombing campaign against German cities during the final months of the war served no military purpose, Friedrich says. British prime minister Winston Churchill’s decision to bomb residential areas of German cities was a war crime, according to Friedrich. "Churchill was the greatest child-slaughterer of all time," Friedrich says, " he slaughtered 76,000 children.
"The question of whether Churchill was a war criminal can never be answered because one never puts the victor on trial," Friedrich said.
Friedrich suggests that the Churchill had decided to target German civilians even before the German Luftwaffe attacked Warsaw in 1939. Churchill was quoted during the First World War as having said: "Perhaps the next time round the way to do it will be to kill women, children and the civilian population."
While German communists and some members of the German media have been extremely critical of Friedrich’s work, his first book on the Allied fire-bombing has sold some 200,000 copies in Germany and been translated into 6 languages.
"The Second World War is traditionally portrayed as a struggle between good and evil," Friedrich said. "Bombers were the weapons of the winners, but what happened on the ground wasn’t very heroic."
Friedrich says that his work will be even more controversial and "complicated" for American and British readers because it reveals that the Allied bombing campaign during the war was something less than "heroic."