Dresden and After. Has the Holocaust Eclipsed all Other Horrors?

On the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden (an account of which can be found here, and I beg you to read to the end

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/dresden-bombing-70-years-on-a-survivor-recalls-the-horror-he-witnessed-in-the-german-city-10042770.html )

 

 I thought it worth asking :

 

Are all other horrors of war so eclipsed by the Holocaust that we no longer have any usable scale by which we can condemn them? Can we condemn them as much as they ought (in my view) to be condemned without being falsely accused of equating them with the Holocaust?

 

Here is one answer.  In his fine and necessary book ‘Orderly and Humane’ (about the disorderly and inhumane, but forgotten and ignored expulsions of ethnic Germans from eastern Europe after 1945) Professor R.M. Douglas wrote (referring to these expulsions) : ‘…the threshold for acknowledging mass human rights abuses for what they are cannot be the unprecedented barbarities of the Hitler regime. With the exception of the war years themselves, Europe West of the USSR had never seen, nor would it again see, so vast a complex of arbitrary detention - one in which tens of thousands, including many children, would lose their lives. That it largely escaped the attention of contemporaries elsewhere in Europe, and the notice of historians today, is a chilling commentary on the ease with which great evils in plain sight may go overlooked when they present a spectacle that international public opinion prefers not to see.’

 

Does the fact that Hitler’s Germany was responsible for the Holocaust mean that any measures taken against Germany during the 1939-45 war, or afterwards,  are beyond effective condemnation? Does this fact mean that anyone who does condemn such measures is in effect excusing or minimising the Holocaust? Some have, repellently, tried to do so, attempting to equate them.

 

Does that mean that those (such as I)  who emphatically do not equate them but who still regard the bombing of civilians as terrible and wrong, must fall silent for fear of being falsely lumped with such grisly propagandists?

 

My answer is ‘no’. It is perfectly possible to make a consistent and sincere condemnation of both the Holocaust and the British bombing of German civilians.  It is perfectly possible to say that the bombing was wrong, while continuing to believe that the Holocaust was even more wrong, and rejecting any equivalence of the two.

 

The problem really lies in the ear of the hearer of such condemnations. A lot of British people do not want to know what we did in our bombing of Germany, and as a result  remain in a deep and self-imposed ignorance. That ignorance allows them to remain ignorant of the he extent of the bombing (thinking that Dresden was the only serious incident for instance) .they are also uninformed about its true character, continuing to think that our main targets were military and industrial, rather than domestic. Knowing so little of its true character, they can then pretend to themselves that nothing truly bad was done, and even it was, that the mass murder of the Jews somehow excused it. If these barriers fail, they can claim that critics of the bombing are German propagandists trying to excuse the Holocaust. Or they can say that people such as I are attacking the RAF bomber crews, which I specifically refuse to do.  

 

As I know to my cost, from various futile exchanges I have had with people who refuse to listen to facts and logic about the British bombing, many even to this day simply do not want to know what happened in the Dead Cities of Germany, many have a deluded belief that the civilian casualties were an unintended side effect of striking at military targets, many believe (wrongly) that the bombing of German cities in some way ‘saved’ Britain from invasion ( a danger which, if it ever existed, was in no way reduced by bombing) or contributed importantly to winning the war (which they did not, in reality do, as Hitler had already lost the war in the USSR before the major bombing started) .

 

It is arguable that they may have shortened the war by diverting aircraft and artillery from the Russian front, but it is equally arguable that they may have lengthened it, by depriving our anti-submarine forces of aircraft, and by diverting men and manpower to the destruction of cities and people, who could have been better used in attacking military and industrial targets.  

Had they done so, of course, they would have achieved a similar diversion of artillery and aircraft from the eastern front. This rapidly becomes counterfactual and speculative, as it involves such things as the earlier development of long-range fighter escorts, consideration. But in truth it is a diversion from the moral argument – could it ever possibly be right to deliberately bomb civilians from the air?

 

One solution to this is to apply a presumption of mass guilt to the German people. They must have known, we are told, what was being done by Hitler. I cannot tell if this is so. The industrial mass-murder of Jews took place outside Germany, and it was never publicly stated as an aim. Yet rumours must have reached civilians from the combat zones and the districts in conquered territory where the murders were taking place. I think many knew, and many did not, and many suspected. The outrage of Kristallnacht in 1938 must have warned anyone in any doubt that the National Socialists were ready and willing to murder Jews for being Jews. Whether you could deduce the existence of Auschwitz from that , I am not so sure.  The human mind would be inclined to think it impossible, unless presented with actual evidence.

 

As we know, certain people, either pitiable or disgusting, refuse to this day to believe the extermination camps existed, in spite of incontrovertible evidence and eyewitness testimony.

 

But I think we must exclude babies and children from this calculation.  Yet they were not excluded from the bombing.

 

Then there is the question of whether they could have done anything about it. Once again, they could have done so. But how many of those who say ‘They should have protested’ would have done so themselves in that society? The threat of losing a job is usually enough to silence most forms of dissent in modern Britain. How much more effective would be the threat of torture, imprisonment and death, made against you and your family?

 

As I repeatedly point out, many Germans continued to resist, and to vote against Hitler long after most of us would have gone quiet, when the Brownshirt terror was already unleashed.. The English channel , which saved us form these dilemmas, is not a moral quality allowing us to claim superiority. It is just a physical fact, which saved us from being tested.

 

Maybe you think that failing to protest, even in such danger, is a sin of omission so serious that those who committed it, and their children, deserved to die in firestorms.

 

Well, that is a point of view, But those who believe it must be careful to apply the same stringency to themselves, and to their own acts of cowardice, probably known only to themselves.

 

We know for certain from the dispassionate official post-war bombing surveys that the effects on the German economy were far smaller than those imagined and claimed by the advocates of ‘dehousing’.

 

AS for ‘giving them some of their own medicine’, we also know that the British raids on Germany were far larger than those by Germany on Britain (Germany never had any equivalent of the Lancaster bomber) , and that wartime surveys showed that people who had experienced German bombing were *less* keen on bombing Germany in return than those who had not experienced it. The question of ‘who started it’ is also a good deal more complicated than we like to think.  AS for the argument that ‘you weren’t there, you couldn’t know’, Bishop George Bell of Chichester (an unimpeachable patriot, by no means a pacifist and an early and principled opponent of the Nazis well-informed about events inside Germany)  was ‘there’, experienced bombing himself and still opposed it. Indeed, he and those like him were in a minority, but the fact that he did and said what he did and said, shows that it was possible be ‘there’ and oppose it.

 

I often think that the expression ‘War Crime’ gets in the way of our understanding. If you don’t want to lose a war you must fight with ruthless violence. Almost every effective act of war ( I say ‘almost’, in case there are exceptions I can’t think of)  would be a crime in civilian life. The only excuse is self-defence or justice, and – if we knew how terrible war was going to be – most of us would set the bar of justice a good deal higher than we do. I’m still not a pacifist – I tried that in my teens and found it impossible to sustain. But I am harder and harder to persuade of the need for war except in direct self-defence . Well-prepared and thoughtful deterrence, on the other hand, is a moral act of great value.