The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe 1940-1945

by Richard Overy

Official propaganda had always described Allied bombing as “terror bombing” and the aircrew as gangsters or air pirates. The word “vengeance” had become part of the public vocabulary of the air war. On May 27, 1944, Goebbels published a widely read article in the party newspaper calling for “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” in subjecting Allied fliers to German “self-justice,” echoing views expressed by Hitler as early as the autumn of 1942.275 Many of the cases of lynching were associated with party members or SA men, or policemen, who expected not to be punished. Spontaneous popular violence was rarer, though again explicable because of the level of destruction and casualties imposed in the last years of war. What is surprising is that the violence was not more widespread given the increasingly lawless character of German justice. Reports after Goebbels’s article indicated public concern that killing captured Allied aircrew would result in the killing of captured German airmen too in retaliation. The uniformed services would not endorse the killing, and Allied survivors attested to the intervention of soldiers or policemen in saving them from angry crowds. In the aftermath of heavy bombing, violent reaction against its perpetrators seems often to have taken second place to the relief at having survived and concern for others. Hans Nossack observed in Hamburg in the days after Operation Gomorrah that “no-one comforted himself with thoughts of revenge”; the enemy wa...