Holocaust Tourism

Welcome to Theresienstadt.  150,000 people were imprisoned here, including tens of thousands of children.  Roughly 90,000 prisoners went on to their deaths by cattle car in the Treblinka and Auschwitz murder factories.  33,000 starved painfully to death, died of illness or were murdered in individual acts of brutality by the SS.  The Nazi concentration camp and ghetto are also known by their Czech name, Terezín.

Souvenirs

Could we interest you in a souvenir fridge magnet?  We have a number of designs.  The German "Bier Stein" magnet with the Star of David on it is a classy reminder of your visit.  It's actually the Star from the garden of remembrance: look you can see the stones under it that Jewish visitors have left as a sign of respect.  Or, the one with the cycle sign showing "this way to Terezín" might look nice in your kitchen back at home.  They're a bargain: £1.60!  You could buy one as gifts for your friends and family.

Theresienstadt Souvenirs

I wish it were all a bad, tasteless, unthinkable joke.  But it's not.  I'm just back from there and Auschwitz with a group of students on a holocaust education tour.  As you enter the car park at Theresienstadt you are greeted by a sign with SOUVENIRS in large letters and an advertisement for the crystal shops.  Only after that sign has greeted you, do you see the one directing visitors to the Jewish ghetto (left) or the small fortress with the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei sign on it (right).  The souvenir shop has a two metre sign announcing it sells Bohemia Glass, Souvenirs, Jewellery, Playing Cards and Militaria.  "Militaria" at a place where the SS killed thousands of civilians.

Playing cards at Theresienstadt

I've long been unsettled by the weight of tourists descending on the camps.  The backpackers' bible "Let's Go" apparently used to tell people that if they had time for only two things in Munich, they should make it out to Dachau, and the Hofbräuhaus.  There we have the Munich Experience in a nut-shell: a concentration camp and a tacky tourist beer hall.  It's become a tick-box item: a must for any visitor on a tour of Europe to visit the nearest convenient Nazi killing site. 

I wonder about the motivations of those who come: is it genuine remembrance, is it a spiritual pilgrimage, is it to learn, is just to say you've been, or is to satisfy a ghoulish curiosity.  I'm sure for many it's a combination of all those things, though I doubt many would own up honestly to the latter two.  I fear for most the visit is a bit like Disney in reverse: you're not going to be thrilled and made happy; you're going to be upset.  I guess it shows that you are a sensitive being, who cares.  Then in the evening, it's back to the beer. 

Learning

In terms of the didactic value, I'm well aware that people learn in different ways.  There's absolutely nothing in the museum at any of these sites that you couldn't learn by watching a TV documentary, looking on the internet, reading a book, or visiting one of the excellent exhibitions at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Holocaust Museum in DC, the Jüdisches Museum in Berlin, or our own superb Imperial War Museum in London.  I think it's fair to assume that if anyone is bothering to go out to a camp, they're familiar with the background.  It's not that likely they'll come away saying "Wow, the Germans murdered 6 million Jews.  I just didn't know that!"

"Fallen Leaves" at the Jüdisches Museum Berlin

For some actually being there, and seeing the place, might have an effect that the other methods of learning don't.  If we're really honest though, that has to concern a very few people.  Let's consider what there actually is to see.  In most of the camps (I've taken groups to 10 different ones myself, over the years, from Westerbork to Treblinka) there's a big empty space, sometimes huge memorials, and a visitor centre/museum.  The wooden buildings were long since pulled down, and the extermination camp gas chambers were almost all destroyed by the Germans at the end of the War.  In Dachau or Buchenwald the barbed wire has been nicely replaced with fresh supplies, and the watch towers are always kept newly painted.  At Birkenau everything is covered in grass, where before there was mud.  At Bergen-Belsen everything is gone: the place is turned over to nature and there are mounds where the dead lie.

Giant Menorah at Mauthausen

I'm not sure what the few iconic "sights" that remain at the camps actually teach anyone.  We're all so familiar from photographs with the train lines with the watch tower behind it at Birkenau, or the Arbeit Macht Frei signs at Auschwitz, that I wonder if it makes the slightest difference to anyone, in terms of actual learning, to see them in real life.

The same goes for the piles of shoes, spectacles or mounds of hair.  Yes, you're aware that these things each belonged to an individual, whose life was so brutally cut short.  But you already knew that.  I fail to see what viewing some of them in a room actually adds to understanding.  The picture below is powerful enough.  It is undeniably poignant and needs to be seen.  However, you are viewing it on the Internet, or can see it in any book.  You don't need to go to Auschwitz to get any better comprehension of the vastness, or of the personal nature, of the crime.

Shoes

We can't imagine what the camps looked like in 1942 or 1944: the piles of dead bodies, the selections, the crippling hunger, the illness, the human excrement, the desperation and the cruelty.   We wouldn't want to see them as they were, so what does visiting the santitised version actually add to our knowledge of the time, and the personal lessons we can learn from the period?

Dignity and Respect

These places are both killing places and cemeteries.  At Dachau this summer I watched a teenage boy standing in the centre of the Appelplatz where prisoners were forced to stand for hours in baking heat or freezing cold to break their spirits.  He was taking selfies.  It took him a long time to get the lighting and reflection right.  I do hope he got the right balance of "cute" and "upset" for his Instagram.  Perhaps a mournful tear was involved.

Auschwitz-Birkenau is the largest Jewish cemetery in the world, followed closely by Treblinka, where at least 800,000 were murdered.  I know two Auschwitz survivors personally, both of whom lost close family there.  Even disregarding the behaviour of idiots such as the guy above, I find it hard to see how the dignity of those who died can be preserved with the sheer weight of people coming out to some of the camps.  I stood at the exit of Auschwitz I last week, watching group after group of teenagers came out, plenty of them laughing and goofing around.  It didn't use to be like this: you had to really "want" to go to any of the camps in Poland.  Nowadays there are cheap flights, easy access and all the commercial operators described below.

Auschwitz as a whole is simply sinking under the weight of all the visitors.  This was a weekday, off-season, in October.  The guide told me that sixteen tour buses just from Norway were booked in the following day alone.  1.33 million visitors came last year, which was a 12% increase on 2012.  1.4 million are expected this year.  That's nearing 4000 on average (roughly 100 tour buses) per day, with more coming on a busy peak season day.  Auschwitz-Birkenau is apparently now Poland's single biggest "visitor attraction".  

March in, collect headphones, do tour, back on bus. Repeat.

There is very little opportunity to afford the victims any form of personal respect or dignity, or to have individual reflection, when you are being shoved around in groups at the site with a set of headphones on.  Groups stand close to each other, jostling shoulder to shoulder, as the guides provide their often robotic commentary (I understand why they don't hardly ever show human emotion: working in this environment a strong detachment is a necessary defence mechanism).

Unlike somewhere like Pearl Harbor, there's no attempt to limit tour numbers: everyone just piles on in to hear the stories of atrocities, individual cases of murder, or to file inside the one remaining gas chamber.  No one is sure whether the scratch marks in the walls are original or not.  I wonder whether a system of regulation, i.e. a limited number of places being available on any day at any camp, wouldn't be a very sensible solution.

Buses arrive every couple of minutes to the death camp

The only opportunity you have to breathe is at the vast terrain of Auschwitz II (Birkenau), but most of the commercial tours allow you only 15 minutes there.  That might explain why few bother to go all the way down to the location of the actual gas chambers and cemeteries.  Or, perhaps, it's simply they agree with the girl I overheard who wanted a golf cart because it's just a bit too far to walk.

Commercialisation

Visits to the camps can be lucrative businesses it seems.  In Cracow you can hardly go anywhere without seeing posters for operators offering "all inclusive" trips out to Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Given entry to the camp is free, that is a little puzzling.  The museum does charge a fee for its guides, but it's only £55 total for a group of 30, for the full 3.5 hour tour.  That works out at £1.80 a head.  The "excursions" from Cracow are charged out at £25 upwards, with transport provided on a 50 seater coach.  Trips to Auschwitz-Birkenau appear alongside fun tours of the Old Town and the Wieliczka Salt Mines.  It's a must for any stag or hen party in town - and again, would that were some tasteless joke.

In Germany the camps are, at least, apparently far more mindful of the acute criticism they would attract if items such as the Terezín fridge magnets were permitted to be sold in the concentration camp car parks.  For some unfathomable reason, the town of Oświęcim (present day Auschwitz) has  no such qualms about allowing a huge pizza, burger and other fast food complex to be built and exist directly opposite the main entrance to the camp car park.

The bus on the right is in Auschwitz I car park

Wait for it... why there's even a set of amusement machines inside.  After all, we all need to have a go on a pin-ball machine, having heard how painful and terrifying a death it was being crammed into a dark gas chamber, breathing rat poison into their lungs for 20 minutes, until they collapsed down dead upon the bodies of their elderly parents or children.  This is well under 100 metres from the entrance to Auschwitz I camp.  Just across from here there's a souvenir shop.  A set of 20 postcards of the camp is only £3.00 and you can buy lots of other stuff from around Poland too!

This commercialisation is grotesque.  It leaves me feeling sick writing about it.  Oświęcim and Terezín are towns where the inhabitants were expelled from their homes at gunpoint by the Germans, when the camps were built.  It is their right to come back and to bring their families up here, work here, and make their living here.  That could be done without the municipal authorities permitting fast food restaurants or tacky gift shops in such sensitive locations, so close to the sites.

Personal Irony

I'm aware of the enormous irony of this post, given the fact that I personally lead students on tours of the camps and have done so now for 20 years.  Every year, however, I become more and more uneasy with the fact that the camps are becoming tourist sites.

It is enormously and critically important that this chapter is never forgotten, which is ultimately I suppose why I keep on coming.  I can see the "positive" argument for so many people wanting to come here.  It's better I guess than the opposite, which would be no one caring and no one being interested in the subject at all.

Some visitors may get something profound out of their visit: if only one person in a hundred reflects on the nature of their own prejudices as a result of coming to a camp and does something about it, then that is a good thing.  I still can't get away from the feeling, though, that the vast bulk of visitors will learn little here that they didn't know before, or that I couldn't communicate without an actual visit.

More importantly, the sheer volume of them is utterly destroying the dignity of a place that means so much still to survivors, their descendants, and the family members of the victims.  I'm part of that and I'm very troubled by it.

Closing the Camps

One aspect of the ongoing crime that the 3rd Reich committed when it perpetrated the holocaust was the fact that it built many of the camps on foreign soil.  The Germans came to Poland, for example, created killing centres, murdered millions, and then left.  The Poles are now stuck with this in their country, and the obligation to keep up the buildings in all likelihood for eternity.  I don't envy them that at all.

For the first time in my life, for all the reasons above, I find myself having sympathy with the view others have expressed that when the last survivor dies, thought should be given to closing the camps and letting them go back to nature.  The chapter must clearly never be forgotten, but it can be kept open very effectively through museums, lessons, documentaries and books. 

May their souls rest in peace

All photos are my own.

The Bombing of Germany

Pforzheim in the Black Forest

Pforzheim was an extremely pretty little town in the Black Forest.  It dated back to Roman times and was known as the "Gold Town" because of its precision jewellery and watch making industries.  Cuckoo clocks, after all, hail from this part of Germany (not Switzerland as many think).  It was awarded market rights some time before 1080.  Its centre was made up of typically German "ginger bread" half-timbered houses.

 The town had about 50,000 inhabitants: that makes it the size of Havant in Hampshire (ever heard of it?) or less than half the size of Bath.  In 1938 the Pforzheimers had watched on as the Nazis burned down the handsome Moorish style synagogue that had been built in 1890. In 1940 a large proportion of the town's Jewish population was deported to a concentration camp in France.  55 of the 195 Jews deported survived the holocaust.

By the end of February 1945 Nazi Germany was on its knees.  The Soviets were advancing rapidly towards Berlin.  Millions of German civilians, my Mother and her family amongst them, were fleeing the troops.  Auschwitz had been liberated a month before.  The Germans' Ardennes offensive in the West had entirely failed.  France and Belgium had long since been freed.  US forces would shortly be crossing the Rhine.  Many German cities were entirely unprotected by this stage from aerial attack.  German historian Jörg Friedrich, who made his reputation by reporting on the Majdanek trial, described the situation in  Germany simply as follows: "By March 1945 there was no longer any morale, oil or transportation".  The bombing raids which the Allies were conducting with ever greater ferocity were "almost totally devoid of military purpose and free from all tactical risk."

Pforzheim was small.  It was regarded as irrelevant by the Allies as regards armament production.  It was also highly flammable because of its historic buildings and narrow, winding streets. On the evening of 23 February 1945 the Royal Air Force flew over.  They dropped 330 high explosive and thousands of phosphorus incendiary bombs.  1551 tonnes of them.  The incendiaries were designed to rain through the old tiled roofs of people's homes, destroying everything you owned.  Your bed, your clothes, your furniture would catch ablaze.  Flying wood, splinters, debris and glass would be hurled through the air.  The noise would be deafening.

Hundreds of small fires would merge into a major blaze.  The superheated air would shoot upward like a giant chimney.  The heat would climb to 800C and suck in wind like a typhoon at speeds of up to 170mph.  It would suck everything into its centre, uprooting people and trees and drawing away the oxygen.  There would be precious little chance of escape for you, your children, or your dog or cat.  If you sought refuge from the inferno in a fountain you would be boiled to death.  If you were in a cellar seeking protection with your family you would either be suffocated, or it would quite literally serve as a crematorium.  Metal with a melting point of 1700C would become molten as the fire storm progressed. 

Survivor Hermine Lautenschlager:

"On the floor of the cellar, there were piles of ashes here and there.  Part of a human torso that looked like a charred tree stump was in the middle.  Near a pile of ashes in the corner lay a key chain.  They were the keys of my sister.  That's where she always sat during the air-raids, that's what my brother-in-law told me.  Later they even found a small piece of fabric from her dress."

The smoke rose over Pforzheim to a height of 3 kilometres.  The glare of the fire could be seen 160 kilometres away.   The carpet bombing of the town lasted from 7.50pm to 8.12pm: precisely 22 minutes.  There were 20,277 deaths in the hellish inferno.  More than one in three people in the town died.  In Nagasaki, one in seven died.  Over 85% of the city was destroyed.  Not even the pattern of the streets was visible the following morning.  Lead bomber Major Edwin Swales, whose plane crashed in Belgium on the way home, was posthumously awarded a VC for this work that night.

Pforzheim after the Firestorm

Not The Only One
 
You quite possibly hadn't heard of Pforzheim.  That's one of the points of this blog post.  Dresden is remembered every 14 February, the night that the RAF delivered its Valentine's Day gift to the city.  Between 25,000 and 35,000 died.  We are nearing the 70th anniversary of "Operation Gomorrah" in July 1943 when 1 million people were made homeless in Hamburg and 42,600 were killed.  I'm sure that will be the subject of a couple of articles and then it will be soon forgotten. 

Every time I visit Germany I'm aware of the effect on the Allied aerial bombing on the country.  Literally a handful of towns survived untouched: centuries of culture, architecture, beauty and history was wiped out with the repeated destruction of 160 towns, most of them with medieval hearts.  That's not even to mention the human cost: a staggering five hundred and fifty thousand Germans were killed by the British and Americans.  550,000.  76,000 were children or babies.

Whenever Dresden is mentioned, Coventry is thrown in, as if the scale of destruction and loss of life were equivalent.  Goebbels fully exploited the horror of the bombing of Dresden and totally overstated the losses.  Here are some simple comparisons of actual statistics:

• Deaths in Coventry: 568
• Deaths in Dresden: 25,000-35,000
• Total deaths in German raids on the UK: 60,000
• Total deaths in Allied raids on Germany: 550,000
• German bombs dropped on the UK: 75,000 tonnes
• Allied bombs dropped on Germany: 2,800,000 tonnes

Charred bodies in the ruins of Dresden, one of Europe's finest cities

Whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of Allied area (carpet) bombing (which I shall come on to), please do not take the simplistic position that there was equal killing and destruction on both sides.  The British and Americans dropped almost 40 times the amount of bombs on Germany than the Luftwaffe did here, and killed almost 10 times more civilians.

From a human perspective, to me, every death is a tragedy.  In that respect this is far from a "competition".  It doesn't matter to the individual who was killed (or to their family) how many others died at the same time, but it does matter when assessing the historical record and behaviour of a country.  Germany was responsible for the deaths of many, many more people in the war than Britain, but I am concerned in this piece with Britain's behaviour, not Germany's.  I'm at pains to stress that below.

For the avoidance of doubt the above figures say little about intention.  I've seen nothing to suggest that Germany would not have wreaked the same level of destruction on British cities had they had the ability to do so.  The fact is that they did not, thank god.  Intent is one important aspect of moral (and legal) culpability; execution is the second.  The Allies had both.

"We shall.... kill 900,000"

A widespread bombing of civilian targets in carpet bombing raids (as opposed to tactical bombing of strategic targets) was feared when war broke out.  The Germans had demonstrated their lack of concern for civilian human life in Guernica (400 dead), Warsaw, and Rotterdam (900 dead, rather than 30,000 as claimed in the Western press).  The first bomb of the London Blitz fell on the City on 24 August 1940 - and is now believed to have been a mistake.  The RAF retaliated with an attack on Berlin and the tit for tat began.

For the first part of the war, the aim was still predominantly to destroy German means of production, despite the revenge attacks.  The accuracy of these raids was sketchy at best.  The RAF even managed to hit the wrong country when it bombed Geneva, Basel and Zurich in neutral Switzerland in 1940.  Later in the war, the USAF killed 40 in Schaffhausen in Switzerland.  Their target was Ludwigshafen, 235km north in Germany.  The US ambassador held a reception in Zurich to apologise and was forced to take cover when yet another USAF bomb raid hit the city, killing five.  The target this time was Aschaffenburg, 280km north.

By October 1942 the policy of aiming mainly for strategic targets changed.  Air Marshall Sir Charles Portal framed Bomber Command's new policy: "I suppose it is clear that the new aiming points are to be the built-up areas, not for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories."  Air Vice Marshall Harris explained his superior's policy:

"We shall destroy Germany's will to fight.  Now that we have the planes and crews, in 1943 and 1944 we shall drop one and a quarter million tons of bombs, render 25 million Germans homeless, kill 900,000 and seriously injure one million."

Think about these words.  This was a deliberately framed, express British policy to render tens of million homeless, to kill almost a million civilians, and to maim a million more.  The strong belief of Bomber Command was that the war could be shortened in this way and British lives saved.  Targets of cultural value were deliberately included, as their destruction would allegedly damage German morale and break the will to fight, as were "flammable" cities, which would burn better.  Centuries of human heritage, art and achievement (what today would be called "World Heritage" assets) were irrelevant in this fight against the then German government.

Britain issued a warning to German citizens.  They dropped leaflets to say that all German cities were now considered valid military targets.  Quite how 30 million people were supposed to leave their work and homes as a result of this, during wartime, is a good question.  The USA was at first quite reticent to join in the British plans to carpet bomb German cities.  By 1944 attitudes had hardened and the US too joined in the revenge attacks - which were labelled "terror raids" by the Germans. 

Two Points to Remember: a Just War and Morale

A couple of things need to be remembered here.  This was a just, brave war.  The Nazi machine was one of the murderous the world has ever known.  We hardly need reminding of the grisly images of the most barbaric treatment of human beings that is possible in the form of the German death camps.  Seen in retrospect, there is an argument that anything that would harm Nazi Germany was a good thing.  Britain held out alone with dogged determination through the years of 1940 and 1941.  Our country has an enormous amount to be proud of in this respect, and more generally for seeing the fight against the Nazis through until the bitter end.

However, caution also needs to be exercised.  It is too easy to simplify matters and to see things with the benefit (or hindrance!) of hindsight.  Britain did not go to war in 1939 to save the Jews.  The world was not aware of what would happen to the Jews in 1939, or even in 1942 when Bomber Command decided to fire-bomb German cities.  The "Final Solution" to murder Europe's Jewry was decided upon in January 1942.  90% of the holocaust's eventual victims were still alive at this point and the policy of mass-murdering them was to be kept a closely guarded secret.  The reality of the death camps only became fully clear in 1945 with their eventual liberation.  Britain went to war because of alarming, threatening German territorial expansion.  When the enemy was finally crushed, Britain and the USA handed Poland on a plate to Stalin's Soviet Union.  A war started for the protection of a country ended with over 40 years of communist rule being inflicted on it. 

Morale: a key part of WW2. But at what cost?

The second is that the area bombing of German cities was considered important to British morale.  After the defeat and flight from Dunkirk, followed by the significant victory of the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, there was for years very little opportunity to actually fight the war.  Other than the fight in North Africa, and a failed attempt to invade France in 1943, Britain had little chance to engage properly until June 1944 and D-Day.  By highlighting the fact German cities were being destroyed, morale could be kept up.  Revenge is a powerful motivator in war time.  Whether that justified deliberately killing hundreds of thousands of people and wiping out centuries of culture for every future generation is another matter.

The Cost to British Lives

An aspect in this ghastly story that absolutely must not be forgotten is the cost to British life that the policy of bombing Germany involved.  Bomber Command crews suffered horrendously high casualty rates.  55,573 mainly young men were killed out of a total of 125,000 aircrew.  That is a death rate of 44.4% and is a testament to the extraordinary courage of these men.  Only one in six was expected to survive their first tour of duty (30 sorties) and they knew this.  The death rate was far higher than infantry officer rates in the trenches of WW1.  Bomber Command losses represent a staggering one in five of all British losses in the six years of world war.  Considerably more Britons died flying raids over Germany than the Luftwaffe managed to kill here during the long months of the Blitz (40,000).

Bravery doesn't even do it justice: the stats are terrifying

Those who survived (I knew one) were sometimes scarred for life with their experiences and conflicted about what they had done and the effect it had had.  I too am deeply conflicted when I see the memorials to Bomber Crews which dot my part of the country, Suffolk.  It is, I believe, possible to honour and respect the bravery and sacrifice of individuals, whilst disagreeing with the policy that was initiated by those far higher up the chain of command.

Opposition in Britain

Not all Britons of the time welcomed the reports of German cities turned in giant infernos and "1000 bomber raids".  George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, was perhaps the most outspoken.  He was an active supporter of the German resistance, and a great humanitarian.

He wrote to the Times in 1941 and described the bombing of unarmed women and children as "barbarian".  He said it would destroy the just cause of the war, thereby openly criticising Churchill's support of a bombing strategy.  Two years (to the day) ahead of the destruction of Dresden he urged the House of Lords to resist the War Cabinet's decision to engage in area bombing.  He said it called into question all the humane and democratic values for which Britain had gone to war.  In 1944 he called the bombing of cities such as Hamburg and Berlin an illegal "policy of annihilation" and a "crime against humanity".  Other senior Church figures did not support him.

A (very) few spoke out

Major Sir Richard Stokes, MP for Ipswich (Labour) also openly and repeatedly criticised the policy of area bombing in Parliament and helped force a partial change of policy following Dresden.  He was joined by Alfred Salter, MP for Bermondsey West (Labour) whose own constituency had been heavily bombed, but who held heavily pacifist, Quaker inspired beliefs.  Theirs views were not supported (at least in public) by other Labour MPs.

The existence of these three men, all strong opponents of the Nazis, who in war time could rise above the general clamour for undirected revenge gives me tremendous comfort.  I believe it is to their eternal credit that they did so.

The Rights and Wrongs of the Bombing

It is beyond my abilities to weigh up in a shortish article like this all aspects of the bombing and their rights and wrongs.  I do have a few points though, before passing over to someone (Professor Grayling) who has assessed this far better than I could.

The first is the lack of natural justice that is involved in area bombing.  Germany was the perpetrator nation in WW2.  It doesn't however follow that all Germans should be punished, by death, for the actions of their government.  If an individual commits a crime, s/he should be held responsible.  "Justice from the skies" does not fulfill this.  50 of the surviving 150 surviving Jews of Dresden were killed in the firestorm.  Socialists, opponents of the Nazis, resistance members, babies and children (remember, 76,000 were killed by the British and US) were as likely to be killed in the infernos as committed Nazis or perpetrators of war crimes.  The very top of the pile were entirely safe in their bunkers: the evil judge Freisler is the only prominent Nazi I can think of who was killed in this way.

The next is the question of destroying morale.  Time and again it has been shown that by bombing, people are united in terror and hatred of the people doing the bombing.  That is exactly what happened when the Luftwaffe bombed London during the Blitz.  The Allied destruction of German cities in no way led to a shortening of the war because the people turned against the government.  This simply did not happen as a matter of fact.

We also have the issue of reciprocity.  The basic idea here is that they did it, so it was okay for us to do it back.  Leaving aside the fact that the Allied bombing of Germany was SO much more extreme than the German bombing of Britain, let's just think about this for a moment.  There is zero question that the Nazi regime was evil.  It was so evil, it still almost makes me physically vomit when I discover new aspects of it.  We are not concerned with Nazi actions, however.  What we are concerned with is a democratic nation that takes a premeditated decision "to kill 900,000", which is then accepted in the Mother of Parliaments with the smallest of opposition.

It is perfectly possible to have fought a just war, but in this (actually quite important) aspect to have fallen far short of how we should have behaved.  Area bombing was not, in my view, justified on a tit-for-tat basis: it lowered us to a level where we aimed to murder civilians.  It is a tragic stain on the brave conduct of a nation at war.

The question of whether area bombing was a war crime is one which will never be tested in the courts.  Perhaps surprisingly, a raft of academics from across the political spectrum seem to be  agreed on this point.  They usually focus on Dresden, but the logic presumably applies to other cities.  Dr Stanton, the president of Genocide Watch said: "The Nazi Holocaust was among the most evil genocides in history.  But the Allies’ firebombing of Dresden and nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also war crimes... We are all capable of evil and must be restrained by law from committing it."  Historian Professor Bloxham, editor of the Journal of Holocaust Education is unequivocal that Dresden was "a war crime".  Frederick Taylor in his outstanding work Dresden is however less clear: he finds the city was in many ways a typical wartime target and bounces back any moral judgement to the reader.

Finally we have the issue of whether area bombing shortened the war by damaging German war production.  Historians take different stances on this, but the consensus seems to be "somewhat".   The major problem was that German production was spread out across the country, not centered in a single place.  Despite the 2.8 million tonnes of bombs dropped, production continued to rise right through until 1945.  Questions include: whether simply targeting specific factory targets or purely industrial towns would have been yet more effective; and whether the massive cost of 550,000 civilian lives justified the benefit received. 

Professor Grayling's Conclusion

Professor AC Grayling wrote a 350 page book in 2006 that considered in great depth the moral, international law and strategic (did it help end the war sooner, were these valid military targets etc) aspects of Allied area bombing.  Here is his conclusion:

On the basis of the foregoing chapters the answer I give to the following questions are these:  Was area bombing necessary? No.  Was it proportionate? No.  Was it against the humanitarian principles that people have been striving to enunciate as a way of controlling and limiting war? Yes. Was it against the general moral standards of the kind recognised and agreed in Western civilisation in the last five centuries, or even 2,000 years? Yes.  Was it against what mature national laws provide in the way of outlawing murder, bodily harm, and destruction of property?  Yes.

In short and in sum: was area bombing wrong?  Yes.  Very wrong?  Yes.

What can I add to that?  It is as clear as it could possibly be, and having read the whole of his work very carefully I cannot fault his logic or analysis.  I really recommend the book if you are interested in finding out more on the subject.

Some Final Thoughts

This subject evokes very strong emotions.  In some ways this is good.  Killing 550,000 civilians and wiping out the historic fabric of 160 towns and cities should be discussed.  These were acts implemented and carried out by the British government.  Consider the shock and contemplation in peacetime when there is an accident or an act of terrorism and 20 or 50 people die.  How little is actually spoken about this subject in this country?

Each and every loss of life was horrendous and tragic.  The aim of this piece is not belittle British deaths or claim German ones are more important: far, far from it.  It is to remember from a simple human perspective the astonishing suffering that happened on all sides.  How wrong it would be to claim that the life of a German child who died in Pforzheim, a British child killed in the Blitz, and a Jewish child murdered in Auschwitz are somehow of different values.  To see them as members of groups to be accorded different rights to life is to go down the path of the philosophy of evil.  My aim is also not to somehow claim that by remembering and critically assessing the sufferings of Germans under area bombing, the culpability of Nazism is diminished.  That is what neo-Nazis try to do and it is illegitimate, offensive and wrong.

My father was bombed out of his childhood home in Portsmouth by the Luftwaffe.  He remembered the raids and hiding in the shelter in the garden.  We, as one of the nations on the winning side, are able to remember this type of suffering.  Most Germans do not feel able to highlight what happened to their suffering for obvious reasons.  A member of a perpetrator nation cannot ever be a victim, so the narrative goes.  I disagree, but understand why a different perspective should ideally come from our side of the fence, rather than theirs.

My favourite writer, WG Sebald wrote an incredibly elegant essay on this - On The Natural History of Destruction - in which he considered why there is an almost absolute absence of post-War German literature on this massive series of events.  Almost every German city is scarred by ugly 50s and 60s centres, yet no one speaks or writes about it.

Almost 70 years after the end of the war, I would hope this topic can be spoken about with some objective distance and without people taking simplistic, entrenched views as if we are supporting soccer teams.  It is not, I believe, an insult to the people who lived through or fought during the war in Britain, for me to come to the conclusion that in the course of a just and courageous struggle, our government made mistakes.  Area bombing was a huge and deadly one. 

Reflections on War

I'm just back from leading a "European War Tour" that took me and my group of high school students from California from the beaches of Normandy via Paris, Belleau Wood, the Ardennes (Battle of the Bulge), Nuremberg, and Buchenwald Concentration Camp, to Berlin. It was a fascinating, packed trip. It had me, someone who has visited many World War related sites, thinking deeply and reflecting.

Loss of Life - On All Sides

The most obvious reflection is of course the loss of life and the suffering and sacrifice of the people involved. I reeled off numbers like 6,600 US losses on D-Day, 6.2 million Jewish deaths, 50 million overall casualties, without ever being able to think of what this actually represents. We simply cannot picture numbers like this. It was only by reducing the statistics to statements such as "80 men died at the Somme for each yard of land captured. That's two of these buses filled full of young men for every single yard, before we reach the 1 million total who died in taking the 4.5 mile gain in territory." Even then the scale is just so hard to grasp.



We visited a number of war cemeteries which helped in some way with the issue. The US cemeteries looked like a sea of white crosses (peppered with occasional Stars of David). They are always immaculately kept: pristine, peaceful, proud and perfect. I encouraged everyone to realise that each person here had a story; they should look at the name and the state and reflect on the fact that each one had a childhood, a family, friends, a personal history. Many were not much older than the students in the group at the time of their death. The US memorials included maps about the campaigns and inscriptions with at times somewhat dramatic language. It was hard not to think there was some kind of political purpose behind parts of the design, even if the major purpose was clearly the remembrance of the individual.

It was not just US cemeteries that we saw. We also went to a German and a Soviet war graveyard, where we reflected on the entirely different feel of the places. The German cemetery in Normandy was sombre and sorrowful. It too was beautifully kept, but this was clearly no victor's creation. Where visitors to the US cemetery could be drawn into the proud inscriptions about sacrifice for the greater good, the German dead offered no such comfort for the visitor or family member. The graves were doubled up and marked by simple grey stones on the ground.

The Soviet war cemetery in Berlin was different again: it was a highly overt piece of political propaganda. At the entrance was a sculpture from stone taken from Hitler's bunker and at the end of the site was a colossal statue of a Red Army sergeant with a little German girl he had saved in his arms (a true story). This was all about collective sacrifice, there was no element at all of individual remembrance as at the German or the US cemeteries. The dead here had no separate stones: they were buried in big trenches that were then covered over.

At Buchenwald Concentration Camp, in the deep snow

Viewing History Through Our Own Prism

I reflected too on the way we still see history very much through our own prism. British war movies concentrate on how clever we were in outwitting the oafish Germans. We broke their secret codes, we invented the bouncing bomb, we broke out of Colditz Castle. Our "Keep Calm and Carry On" attitude is shown in photographs of milkmen carrying out their deliveries through bomb torn streets in London. The American WW2 War Memorial in Washington carries the dates "1941-45." Movies tend to focus on D-Day, the Normandy landings and the Battle of the Bulge. The Soviet War Cemetery too carried the dates "1941-45," which conveniently forgets that Soviet troops actually entered the war on the Nazi side on 17 September 1939. This was the day they invaded Poland, followed later by their invasion of Finland and the Baltic States. The way the Russians look back on the War is entirely different to how we do: for them it was a struggle to the death between the socialist Motherland and the fascist Nazi beast, fought and paid for almost entirely with their blood alone.

This "prism focus" is of course very common. There is apparently an African saying along the lines of "Tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter, until the lion gets his own story-teller." It depends who is telling the story as to which angle it will take. I remember for example learning about the "American War of Independence" at school and was quite surprised when someone in one of my groups called it the "American Revolution." I'd never seen it in that way. In a similar vein, British history has labelled Catholic Queen Mary as "Bloody Mary" for eternity, whilst her Protestant sister, Queen Elizabeth I has gone down as "Good Queen Bess." An almost identical number of religious deaths occurred during both reigns, and even though Elizabeth ruled longer, this is hardly ever focused upon in British schools.

It is also very natural (and indeed right) for us to remember our own fallen. The US Marines' engagement at Belleau Wood during WW1 was the bloodiest battle they had been involved in. The battle has entered US military lore, despite the fact that the number of deaths was actually very small. 1811 men died here, compared to 1 million British, French and Germans who died at the Battle of the Somme. Americans visit here and the place has a very special status for the country.  Despite the comparatively low number of deaths, Belleau Wood matters to them because they have a connection of nationality (and perhaps even are relatives of those who fought) - which is lacking from a visit to a Somme battlefield.

An Objective Historian's View

However, if we wish to gain a more objective, overall view of historical events, our own "prism" view can be a hindrance. My group was surprised when I told them the Normandy landings did not even feature in the top 8 battles of WW2. Seven of the top eight were actually fought in the East, between the Soviets and the Germans. Both British and US total military losses were less than 1% of the total of WW2 casualties. The Germans lost over 80% of their casualties on the Eastern Front, yet our "European War Tour" didn't even feature more than a passing mention of the Battles of Kiev, Leningrad, Stalingrad and the Barbarossa campaign. If anyone can be excused for having a narrow view on the importance of their contribution, it would in fact be the Soviets, with 14 million military war dead.

From a civilian perspective, the British painfully remember the 45,000 civilians killed in the London Blitz (0.1% our population), yet remarkably few of us consider that Poland lost 6 million civilians from 1939-45 (20% of its population) or that Belorussia suffered even worse. A staggering 1 in 4 of its people were killed during WW2.

A related, further perspective, however, is that history is not a competition. This is particularly the case when we are talking about deaths and suffering. Each death, and each family loss is a tragedy and it would offensive to suggest any matters more of less than any other. The Soviets did pay far more heavily than anyone else in terms of casualties, but to the elderly Dane who still mourns the loss of his brother, amongst the 16 Danish soliders who died fighting the surprise German invasion, this is little personal consolation. The contributions from all Allied countries all played a linked and important part in victory. It was not just deaths, but also industrial, financial and strategic contributions that helped win both World Wars in Europe.

Visiting US Fox Holes from the Battle of the Bulge: as featured in Band of Brothers

The study of the World Wars, their causes, and their results, is one of the most important things I can think of in history. It fascinates me, it upsets me, it makes me reflect, and I hope it teaches me. It is a wonderful thing that so many decades after the events, schools are signing up for student travel and coming on these trips to learn more about them. I am still processing much of this: I hope that the students have gained a new perspective and that the places they have visited will bring their lessons back at school or college to life.


[The original of this blog post appeared on the ACIS travel website on 1 March 2013]

Property

Another weird wonder we found just around the corner from our house, this gutted building at Frakkastígur 16, just below Kaffismiðja Íslands and the corner shop Drekinn and where the music and instruments store Rín* lived for forty years before moving to Brautarholt in 2004, has become a canvas for street artists while its future is being decided. You can play around with this interactive map of Reykjavik to find the streets mentioned in this post...

I found some interesting info on this location: the property just below it takes an L-shaped turn up to Njálsgata, and is where the Ölgerðin Egill Skallagrímson brewery used to be. I remember very well being able to smell the almost too-rich aroma of a new batch of Malt Extrakt being brewed there before they moved out to Grjótháls. In the corner crook created by the fairly new apartment complex built on the site of the old brewery (btw, the 1100 square meter site was bought by the City for a sweet 37 million krónur back in 2000...good god how times have changed! That amount might buy you an average three bedroom apartment a tenth that size today) sits the Drekinn house built in 1905, a blue cement building from 1943, and this now-rundown structure. It seems its owners have requested permission to tear down at least six times since 2006, though it looks like the local building preservation society has had a hand in making sure that didn't happen, and there seems to have been a co-owner of the lot that also refused to agree on demolition. Ultimately, I'm sure it was the bank crash that set any grand real estate intentions on ear, seeing as the last specific mention I could find was an August 2008 photo report of abandoned houses in the midtown area by the Prevention Department of the Capital District Fire and Rescue Service, when there was still enough money floating around to bitch and squabble over who would get what share of the prosperity pie. Sigh.

The picture below is one I took last fall of some nice visitors who stopped to snap a classic shot of the Drekinn shop.

And here below? Just some nuns, and just for fun : )

*Some of the links in this post are in Icelandic...sorry I wasn't able to find anything in English with the same info, but now you've got more material to practice your language learning with!