Текст книги "Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943"

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

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Perhaps the worst aspect of this policy is that it removed all the traditional distinctions between combatants and civilians. There has to be some line over which military men will not cross, even if it is an arbitrary one. The problem with the Allied air strategy during the Second World War was that it removed the line without even attempting to draw a new one. The failure to do so opens the door to the nightmare of unlimited warfare, where anything is allowed provided it gets the job done – war without rules, without principles, without conscience. I hesitate to make the comparison with the amorality that led to the Holocaust, as several historians before me have done, because that would be going too far. But, ethically speaking at least, we are only a few steps away.

* * *

It would be reassuring to report that the British people of the time at least considered these issues before they lent their support to the bomber war, but this was by no means the case. Few people ever spoke out against the bombing of German cities like Hamburg. George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, was one, as was the Labour politician Richard Stokes – but their speeches in Parliament were largely dismissed by the British press as unpatriotic. Basil Liddell Hart was another who objected: after writing enthusiastically about the theory of bombing he was much less enamoured with bombing in practice. As early as 1942 he claimed that it would be ironic if the so-called defenders of civilization could only defeat Hitler by depending on ‘the most barbaric, and unskilled, way of winning a war that the modern world has seen’. ⁸

Beyond those lone voices, however, the atmosphere was less one of regretful determination than of pure triumph, with ever-increasing superlatives emblazoned across the front pages of all the newspapers. The men who flew the bombers were regarded as heroes: several British and American airmen have told me that they would often spend a night in a pub without ever having to buy a drink for themselves. Those who were recruited for morale-raising tours round British factories were treated like celebrities, and their descriptions of the huge fires created by Allied bombs were always greeted with enthusiastic cheers. ⁹

By the end of the war, however, things had begun to change. Britain was already turning its back on the deeds of Bomber Command. After six long years of conflict the appetite for German blood was no longer what it had been in 1943, and nobody wanted to be associated with a policy that had killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. One by one, politicians, planners and even the Prime Minister distanced themselves from the decisions that had led to the ‘blanket bombing’ of German cities. The only senior figure who openly accepted responsibility for the policy was Sir Arthur Harris, who had always been its outspoken champion. At the end of the war he became something of a pariah, and there are numerous examples of how the political establishment tried to distance themselves from him. ¹⁰Rightly or wrongly, his reputation remains severely tarnished to this day – as the defacing of his statue makes clear.

In the USA the tide was also turning. The American people had always opposed the wholesale bombing of cities, so their reaction to the supposedly indiscriminate bombing of Dresden in February 1945 was of outrage. Across the country front-page reports appeared claiming that American airmen were engaged in the ‘deliberate terror bombing of great German population centres as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom’. ¹¹The people, and the media, were not pacified until General Arnold stepped forward to insist that the USAAF had not departed from its strict policy of bombing only military targets. Unlike in Britain, this assertion was generally accepted, and the idea that American involvement in bombing Germany had been anything less than exemplary did not really resurface until the 1960s. ¹²Even today, Americans tend to reserve their distaste either for the way the British conducted the air war, or for how they themselves acted in the subjugation of Japan.

As popular revulsion for bombing has grown, the men who flew the planes and dropped the bombs have gradually become the scapegoats for our communal sense of shame. And since it was the British whose bombing was apparently more indiscriminate, it is the RAF who have received most of the blame. Almost every British veteran I interviewed for this book expressed indignation over the way the world has come to judge their actions since 1945. Indeed, I have often found it difficult to secure interviews with them in the first place, because many were worried by my intentions. They assumed that my wish to show the German side of the story meant that I was likely to do what countless people have done: that is, to blame them personallyfor the suffering that British bombs caused ordinary Germans. In short, they were worried that I would treat them in the same way as the protesters treated them at the unveiling of Harris’s statue.

This is one of the saddest legacies of the bomber war. While I admit that I have a small measure of sympathy for someof the beliefs held by those protesters, I deplore their abuse of Bomber Command veterans. If it is wrong to punish German civilians for the sins of their political leaders, then it is equally wrong to attack British airmen for the planning decisions of their superiors. British bomber crews were almost always told at briefing that they were attacking military or industrial targets. They were motivated by a sincere desire to help their country, and to rid the world of a profoundly evil regime. Whatever we think of the way the bomber war was conducted, those men, who faced death daily, and witnessed the deaths of countless friends and comrades, deserve our utmost respect.

It seems fitting here to record what the veterans themselves have to say about the part they played in the Hamburg bombings. Most of the men I have interviewed seem to have demonstrated an understandable lack of imagination while they were actually flying over Germany: they were young, some still in their teens, and they pursued war with all the enthusiasm of youth. As they flew over the fires at Hamburg the typical reaction was not ‘Oh, those poor devils down there!’ but ‘Cor, this is a damn good show tonight!’ ¹³They rarely spared a thought for the people beneath the bombs, and even if they did it was usually only to register the notion that Germany had asked for it. For those who had lived through the Blitz on Britain, the Germans thoroughly deserved what they were getting.

Some of the veterans I have spoken to are unrepentant to this day. One who sees no reason to regret the part he played in the bombing says: ‘I don’t care about their cities. I was glad to see them burning… My only regret was that we got shot down when we did, because I would much rather have done a lot more.’ ¹⁴

Others seem to have softened over the years, if only to acknowledge the suffering of those who were, nevertheless, still legitimate targets. A few have taken the process further, and seem genuinely troubled by the thought of those who had to fight their way through the firestorm. In the years since the war they have had time to reflect on the terrible consequences of the fires, and even to question the part they played in events.

Colin Harrison of 467 Squadron is one such man. Some time after the war he came across a photograph of an old man and his wife, dead, on the street in Hamburg, and the image haunts him to this day. ‘I often thought about those two old people,’ he says. ‘The street was clear – all the rubbish had been pushed to one side. There was no rubble on the road. And I often wondered whether they had anything to do with me… I wondered if I’d done it.’ ¹⁵

If we are ever to lay this painful subject to rest, we could do worse than take a leaf out of Colin Harrison’s book. I do not wish to imply that he is right to feel any guilt for his part in the Hamburg bombings – far from it – only that his capacity for empathy is to be praised. The legacy of the last war will never be left behind until both sides learn to acknowledge the consequences of their actions, as he has done, regardless of whether or not we believe that those actions were justified.

* * *

And what of the people of Hamburg themselves? How do they view the ordeal they went through? Do they blame the British and Americans for the devastation that was wreaked upon their city? Are they angry? Whenever I have asked this question of anyone from Hamburg, I have invariably received the same answer, which exactly mirrors the sentiments of their enemies: ‘We started it.’ Or, even more tellingly, ‘We deserved it.’ Anger, resentment, indignation – even sadness – seem for most people to be irrelevant, because what reallymatters is that Germans are sorry.

Even during the war, many people in Hamburg realized that they were not blameless, and that, to a degree at least, they had brought the disaster upon themselves. Many saw the catastrophe as the logical consequence of the Luftwaffe’s attacks on Britain; some even believed it to be just retribution for the way Hamburg had treated its Jews. ¹⁶In any case, an unspoken sense of shame was already embedded in the German psyche long before the end of the war. As Hans Erich Nossack recorded shortly after the firestorm, it was difficult to view the Allies as anything other than the agents of some kind of divine justice:

I have not heard a single person curse the enemies or blame them for the destruction. When the newspapers published expressions like ‘pirates of the air’ and ‘arsonists’, we had no ears for that. A much deeper insight forbade us to think of an enemy who was supposed to have caused all this; for us, he too was at most an instrument of unknowable forces that wished to annihilate us. ¹⁷

After the war, the sense that Germany had deserved this retribution grew, fuelled by the news of what had happened at Belsen, and Auschwitz, and Hamburg’s own concentration camp at Neuengamme. The cold-bloodedness of the atrocities seemed to dwarf anything the Allied air forces might have done. As the Nuremberg trials came and went, Hamburg’s capacity for anger was smothered beneath a huge burden of communal guilt.

In such an atmosphere it was the Nazis, not the Allies, who were blamed for the catastrophe that had consumed the city in 1943. For example, when the famous memorial to the dead was unveiled at Ohlsdorf cemetery in 1952, the city’s first post-war mayor, Max Brauer, gave a speech in which he denounced the ‘inhuman dictatorship’ that had led the people like lambs to the slaughter. ‘This mass grave is a warning to us,’ he said. ‘We must recognize the danger [of extremism]. We must know that, in the end, as soon as mankind gives up its rights and freedoms it is stepping on to the road to self-destruction.’ ¹⁸

Those sentiments have been repeated in one form or another in every memorial since. On the fiftieth anniversary of the firestorm, Elisabeth Kiausch, the president of the city council, implored her audience never to forget the horrors of war, and the ‘sorrow that Nazism brought to innumerable people’. ¹⁹That same day, even as the student demonstrators were clamouring outside her church, the Bishop of Hamburg was praying for forgiveness for the wrongs that Germany had committed in the past – particularly against eastern Europe, against the Jews and against Gypsies. Her sermon was primarily an appeal for world peace, but also a plea that we should never forget the time of the Third Reich, when the ‘political blindness’ of the German people had led to war and atrocity. ²⁰

However, there is a feeling in Germany that such attitudes might slowly be changing. While newspapers, politicians and community leaders maintain the official line that Germany herself was responsible for the firestorm and its aftermath, many privately hold different opinions. It is not only those who lived through the bombings – German society has always made concessions for personalanger against the former Western Allies, so long as it is not voiced too loudly – there is now much more widespread resentment. A younger generation, which is not quite so intimately acquainted with German war guilt, has begun to question the readiness with which the Allies bombed civilians. Since 1989 there has also been an influx of ideas from the former East Germany. Understandably, the East Germans have never been quite so well disposed towards the way Britain and America bombed their country – an attitude that was encouraged by the country’s Communist leaders for more than forty years.

Those feelings came to something of a head in 2002, when Jörg Friedrich published an extremely controversial history of the bombing war. ²¹He claimed that the British insistence on area bombing made both Harris and Churchill no better than war criminals. Even more controversially, he deliberately described the bombings in terms usually reserved for Nazism and the Holocaust: so, for example, cellars are described as Krematoria(‘crematoria’), cities as Hinrichtungsstätten(‘places of execution’) and the destruction of libraries as Bücherverbrennung(‘book burning’). Needless to say, the book’s publication created a media storm, both in Germany and abroad. It also created enormous concern because it appeared to strike such a chord with the German people: there were immediate worries that Germans were beginning to see themselves as the victims rather than the perpetrators of war crimes, and that such books might even become a clarion call for neo-Fascists.

While this last point seems unlikely, it is important to note that Germans seem to live in constant fear of a resurgence of right-wing extremism. Nowhere is this fear more prevalent than in Hamburg. In 1992 neo-Nazi violence provoked an anti-Fascist demonstration on the streets of Hamburg 400,000 strong. There were more demonstrations when the American neo-Nazi publisher Gary Lauck was tried and sentenced there in 1996. I myself experienced a hint of the city’s anxieties when I first visited Hamburg in 2001, during a book tour. A complete stranger approached me and asked me to wear a badge bearing an anti-Fascist slogan: he had heard that I would be appearing on local television, and wanted his badge to appear with me. As I was unaware of Hamburg’s political landscape at the time, I declined – but not without a measure of surprise at the strength of his feelings. It struck me then, as it has struck me many times since, how politically active Hamburgers seem to be when compared with my own countrymen. Sometimes it seems as though the city is vigilant to the point of paranoia when it comes to avoiding the political mistakes of the past.

* * *

It is against this background that the demonstration in the Michaeliskirche took place. The anti-nationalist students claimed to be protesting against the fact that churchgoers were mourning allof the deaths that took place during the catastrophe, rather than making a distinction between the guilty and the innocent. However, as they blew their whistles and sounded their horns, their objections seemed to go much further. Their banner claimed that there was no reason to mourn whatsoever, thus implying that every Hamburger who died in 1943 got what he or she deserved. Since all of Germany had stood by and allowed the Nazis to march to power, all of Germany was to blame. ²²

As an outsider, this strikes me as a bizarre form of self-flagellation. I find it shocking that a group of Germans will go so far as to deny their countrymen the right to mourn the deaths of thousands of undisputed civilians, simply in the name of expiating their guilt. Even the most hard-hearted proponents of British bombing expressed regret at what they felt forced to do. Even those theorists who claimed that women and children were a legitimate target recognized that bombing them was a horrific idea – indeed, they believed that the very horror of it would prevent civilized nations going to war in the first place. None of those groups would ever consider denying Hamburgers the right to mourn their dead. I doubt that such a denial would get much support in Germany either, but that a group like this can suggest it seems significant. If German war guilt has grown so great that it takes precedence over the city’s capacity to mourn, it is unsurprising that there has been a right-wing backlash against it.

The more rational reasons behind the demonstration – that there should be a distinction between the civilian victims of the firestorm and those people who were legitimate targets for the bombs – are also much more interesting. Shouldsuch a distinction be made, or should we avoid distinctions, in the same way that the bombs did? Since it is Christian doctrine to pray for allsinners, are churchgoers right to mourn the soldiers, arms manufacturers and Nazi Party members along with the housewives and children who were killed? And, further, is it possible to go so far as forgiveness, even for those who went enthusiastically to war in 1939? Or would this merely lend legitimacy to the atrocities the Nazis committed?

To consider these questions, the first thing we must do is to draw a distinction between public and private mourning. This is important because they are two very different acts. A private act of mourning is exactly that – something personal, unique to the individual who suffers through loss. A public act of mourning is a statement to the world, declaring openly the values that collectively we hold dear. The same person, commemorating the same event, can profess very different sentiments, perhaps even conflicting ones, depending on whether he is acting in a private or a public capacity.

Privately, of course, any individual has a right to mourn whomsoever they choose. A mother will naturally mourn her son even if he turned out to be a murderer. A husband might forgive his wife things in death that he could never forgive her while she was alive. Love, as Nietzsche wrote, is beyond good and evil; mourning for a loved one, therefore, takes no account of whether they were worthy of that mourning or not.

The same is true of Christian love for one’s neighbour, whoever that neighbour might be – a civilian, a soldier, or even a Nazi. A storm trooper in the firestorm was no less human than a Hamburg housewife, and also deserves some empathy – if not for the factof his death then at least for the mannerof it. A Nazi prison guard might have committed countless crimes during his lifetime, and might even have intended to commit more, but at the point of death he was merely a human being undergoing a form of hell, and for this he, too, can be pitied. From a Christian point of view it is every individual’s dutyto try to forgive others, even those who have committed the most heinous crimes.

In a public ceremony, however, this duty dissolves into the background. The whole point of a public commemoration is, first, to remember what happened, second, to explain why it happened, and third, to show the world what you have lost. When commemorating an event as huge as the Hamburg firestorm, the ceremony is as much about the loss of ideals as it is about the loss of human life. In the years since the war, the firestorm has come to be symbolic of an even greater tragedy: the fact that civilians, not only in Hamburg but all over Europe, should involuntarily have found themselves caught up in the fury of aerial bombardment. The loss that is being commemorated, therefore, is not simply human life, but innocenthuman life.

During a ceremony like the one that took place at the Michaeliskirche in 1993, the Church authorities have to walk a fine line: on the one hand they need to provide a venue in which people feel able to express their private grief at what happened; but on the other they have an obligation to present the tragedy of the firestorm in terms of the public symbol it has become. If the firestorm is to be seen as a tragedy for the innocent, they cannot also include the guilty in their prayers. In short, a distinction must be made.

Furthermore, it is the duty of the Church to direct the moral values of the community it leads. In an atmosphere where there is already a widespread fear of a resurgence of neo-Nazi activity, any public forgiveness of the sins committed by the Nazis during the Second World War is unthinkable. Indeed, anything that goes even a tiny way towards an implied acceptance of Nazi crimes must be vigorously shunned. These things are important not only for those Hamburgers who happened to be present at the commemoration, but for the whole city, and indeed the whole of German society. Such ceremonies are a template for the way the German people think about themselves, and for the way they remember both what they did during the war and what they suffered.

For these reasons, I believe the protesters at the Michaeliskirche were right to demand a distinction between those who should be publicly mourned and those who should not (although I am less sympathetic to the methods they used to get their point across). One would never consider having a ceremony devoted onlyto those militant Nazis who died in the firestorm – so why include them in a ceremony that should have been devoted to the innocents? I have argued that the Allies should have drawn a line between combatants and non-combatants, even if it was an arbitrary one; likewise it is fitting for the Germans to draw a line between those who should be mourned, and those who should not.

However, wherethat line should be drawn is extremely problematic. Some people believe that all the genuinely innocent victims of the firestorm should be painstakingly named, in the same way that Berlin’s Jews were listed for the Holocaust Museum, so that any future commemoration will be for them and them only. They argue very passionately that this is the only way to avoid the cloudy thinking that mixes the guilty with the innocent, and thereby devalues any commemoration of Hamburg’s tragedy. ²³

I do not believe this is the answer. If such a register were ever created, it would necessarily have to include many people who do not fit with the spirit of the idea. For example, there were countless men and women in Hamburg who supported Hitler, who believed in ‘final victory’ and who hated Jews, but who were never required to do anything active for the Nazi Party. It would make me very uncomfortable if such people were included among the innocent victims of the firestorm, but how could they possibly be excluded? Freedom of speech and freedom of political association are two of the cornerstones of democratic society – by this token even the most ardent supporter of Nazism must be deemed innocent if they have not committed any actual crime.

Equally, some people for whom such a register seems designed might easily find themselves left off. Many soldiers privately hated the war, and despised Nazi policies yet still took up arms for their country. Hans Scholl is a perfect example. As the founder of the White Rose movement, he was executed for printing anti-Nazi leaflets – yet he had also served as a soldier in the German Army. Most Germans would say that Scholl was a victim of the Nazi regime rather than one of its perpetrators. But if he had been killed by a bomb before he had had the chance to print his leaflets, or while he was still in the army, would he have ended up on the other side of the dividing line?

The problem with listing the innocent is that everyone not listed then becomes guilty by default. The distress that this would cause countless families in Hamburg is surely too high a price to pay. In any case, I doubt that a register of the innocent would remove all ambiguity: disputes would inevitably arise, causing yet more distress, and in the absence of absolute proof it would be impossible to make a decision one way or the other. Guilt and innocence are rarely clear-cut concepts, no matter how much we would like them to be, and we must be prepared to allow for a rather broad grey area between the two.

If a line must be drawn, it should therefore be a broad conceptual one. Those people who both supported the Nazi Party and actively involved themselves in furthering its goals cannot, mustnot, be mourned publicly. Those who resisted the Nazis both in thought and deed should be remembered in our prayers. Everyone else should be left to God, in the faith that He will know His own.

* * *

I have written here about blame, about guilt, about morality, but in the end this book is not about any of those things. My main intention has never been to judge the events of the past, only to offer a reminder that they happened. One can always argue about who should be commemorated, and how, but in the end the most important thing is that a commemoration takes place at all: otherwise these terrible events will be forgotten. The world is already beginning to forget. Once the generation that lived through them has gone, there will be nobody left to tell the story first hand. That is perhaps the most dangerous thing of all. When the power of their direct experience is lost there will be little to prevent us stumbling into exactly the same mistakes all over again.

The purpose of this book, therefore, has been to try to give an impression of what bombing means to those unlucky enough to be caught up in it. There was nothing particularly special about any of the people whose experiences are recorded here. Those who flew the Allied bombers or the German night fighters were perfectly ordinary young men – a fairly typical cross-section of the societies from which they came. The people of Hamburg were also ordinary people, trying to go about their daily business in the same way they always had. And yet they were forced to live through some of the most terrible events the world has ever seen, simply because they happened to be born in the wrong time and place. In another time it could have been any of us.

Despite this, there are many who continue to harbour grudges – on the one side towards the Allied airmen who unleashed their bombs on Germany, and on the other side towards the German system, the German war generation, even Germany itself.

To those who continue to blame the Allies, and particularly the RAF veterans, for the way they conducted the war, I would say this: do not be too quick to judge history with the benefit of hindsight. What might seem obviously wrong to us today was not nearly so clear-cut in 1943. Their commanders might have made errors of judgement, but on the whole the men themselves acted honourably, and selflessly, at a time when civilization itself stood on the brink of the abyss. For this, if nothing else, subsequent generations owe them a debt of gratitude.

Likewise, for those who still harbour prejudices towards Germany, I have just one thing left to say. The bombs left their mark not only on Germany’s cities, but also on its population. In the aftermath of the firestorm the German appetite for war quickly began to crumble, not only in Hamburg but across the country, and by the summer of 1945 it had disappeared. It has never really returned since. A nation that was once proud of its martial tradition is now one of the most pacifist countries in Europe, and one that is quick to admonish others for rushing into war. ²⁴

It is this innate pacifism that is perhaps the most lasting single effect of the bombing war. Since 1945, Germany has deployed its troops only in peace-keeping operations. This is in marked contrast to the USA, Britain, France and the USSR, who between them have waged wars in almost every corner of the planet. Hamburg has returned to its traditional role as a city of commerce, and its many newspapers and television companies remain fervently anti-war. The old U-boat yards at Blohm & Voss now work only in the repair and conversion of trade ships and passenger liners. Whatever else can be said about Germany – and much is still said – it cannot be denied that her people have learned their lesson.