On
October 22, 2003, the British ambassador to Germany, Sir Peter Torry,
visited the city of Kassel.
The purpose of his arrival in the German community was to attend the
sixtieth anniversary of the bombing of Kassel by British warplanes on
22 October 1943, where 10,000 people were killed by a firestorm that
was created from the bombings.
In his address at the ceremony, Sir Peter’s speech spoke before a
public who have had a different experience from that of the British.
Where Britain remembers the Second World War as a time of hiding in
shelters from air raids by the German Luftwaffe,
Winston Churchill’s war speeches, and posters calling on their
people to keep calm and carry on; Germany recalls a time of
oppression under Adolf Hitler and chaos from the bombings by the
Allies. Germany’s conception of its time in the Second World War
has also been shaped from its time in the Cold War as the Federal
Republic of Germany in the west and the German Democratic Republic in
the east. In studying the German recollection of the bombings of
German cities by Britain and the United States, it can be seen that
Germany has a complex memory of the Second World War.
Thunderclap
The
bombing of German cities such as Dresden and Hamburg have a part in
the memory of the war for Germany. The British had considered
launching air raids on the German capital of Berlin in July 1944
under the codename “Thunderclap” with the intention of using
large scale casualties to break morale among the German public,
particularly in the city of Berlin.
According to historian Bill Niven, the choice to bomb other German
cities were “a prelude to the development of plans for Operation
‘Thunderclap’,”
meaning that the air raids conducted by British planes over Germany
served as a practice that could also help in affecting the
determination of the German people and cause them to put pressure
upon their leaders. Niven also points out that the plan of attack
was not solely a British plan, citing that discussions on targeting
German cities had been conducted by Britain, the United States and
Russia during the Yalta Conference in early February 1945.
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| Hamburg after a bombing |
The
city of Hamburg had seen several air attacks before the Allies had
begun plans for “Thunderclap”. Between 1940 and 1941, the city
was the site of one hundred twelve attacks with seven hundred fifty
one casualties as a result.
A second series of sixty-five raids between 1944 and 1945 killed
five thousand six hundred ninety residents.
Though these two periods of air raids were horrific to the people of
Hamburg, the summer bombings of 1943 are considered to be the most
devastating with forty thousand deaths in July of 1943 alone.
In most cases, citizens died not in the streets but from hiding in
shelters and cellars as a way to protect themselves from the bombs.
As the attacks would go on, cellars would start “absorbing the
external heat… or they [would] imperceptibly filled with combustion
gases,” making gas poisoning contribute seventy to eighty percent
of all causes of death in the air raids during the summer of 1943.
The air raids also caused firestorms that first ravaged Hamburg’s
working-class districts of Hammerbrook, Hamm, and Borgfeld.
The city center of Hamburg survived the raids for the most part
until July 18, 1944, where eight hundred Americans heading to the
Blohm and Voss shipyards miscalculated their targets and resulted in
their bombs landing in areas such as Gänsemarkt Square.
In
February 1945, Dresden boasted approximately eight hundred thousand
to a million people; of this number roughly six hundred forty
thousand were permanent residents while the remainder were refugees.
In the air raids that occurred on February 13 and 14, 1945, forty
thousand people were killed.
The raids also created firestorms within half an hour after ally
planes had departed from the city, killing an estimated seventy
thousand people.
As mentioned before, the point of these attacks
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| Dresden after a bombing |
was to weaken the
morale of the German people in order to force Germany into
surrendering. The bombings by the allies resulted in around six
hundred thousand deaths and 3.37 million homes destroyed.
The Nazi Party even expected this result from the attacks.
In a meeting with Adolf Hitler on August 1, 1944, Field Marshal
Erhard Milch, inspector general of the Luftwaffe,
stated: “We have lost the war! Finally lost the war!”
It is clear from this that even before the attack on Dresden, the
German military was beginning to see their demise.
Remembering the war - F.R.G.
The
memory of the Second World War for German was shaped during its time
of separation as West and East Germany. The memory of the war by
both sides was influenced by the Cold War, which pushed both states
into a “bitter competition over which state had learned the
appropriate lessons from history.”
First, the Federal Republic of Germany (F.R.G.) had a certain
framework in remembering the events of the war. On the whole, West
Germany viewed the Nazi regime that dominated the formally united
Germany during the Second World War as strictly totalitarian and
believed that its eastern counterpart was trapped in a totalitarian
government under the Soviet Union.
In this anti-totalitarian framework, the F.R.G. “played down the
specifically German nature of Nazism” and instead emphasised the
fact that Germans had suffered under Hitler’s Nazi regime and drew
parallels to that of the Jews in the Holocaust.
The anti-communist sentiment in the west led the F.R.G. to focus on
the suffering of Germans by Communist soldiers near the end of the
war.
The images of the “killings, rape and pilfering carried out by
soldiers of the Red Army” served as a warning of the dangers of
Communism in East Germany and the rest of Eastern Europe.
With
regards to the bombings, West Germans took on an image of being
“double victims.”
As they were under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi
Party, Germans were forced into the war. The air raids by the
British and United States over German cities made Germans victims in
another dimension by showing them as innocents in a war against their
dictator. This image of double victimhood was enhanced through works
of memory literature by historians like Malte Thieβen, which went on
to shape the memorial culture of the bombings in German cities such
as Hamburg.
The
German Democratic Republic (G.D.R.) created a different post-war
legacy. In this situation, the east took a stanch anti-fascist view
to Nazism.
The Communist Party (S.E.D.) followed their western counterparts and
removed the German context from its understanding Nazism but they
also placed it as a “class-based phenomenon, minimalizing its
nationalist and racial dimensions.”
The S.E.D. also concentrated their vision of the Second World War to
be about the “glorious struggle of the Soviet Union and German
Communists” against Hitler and Nazism.
This meant that the treatment of Germans by Red Army soldiers went
without criticism or question.
Remembering the War - GDR
The
G.D.R. government aimed to play on the image of the bombing of German
cities to strengthen their view of the war and the anti-Western
rhetoric of the Soviet Union, which can be seen in their approach to
the memory of the bombing of Dresden. In this image, the Germans of
Dresden were cast as the sufferers of “British-American
aggression.”
Since the fifth anniversary of the bombings in 1950, the S.E.D. used
the event to twist it into an incident caused by “Anglo-American
warmongers,”
while the Soviets were seen as liberators rather than rapists and
plunderers like in the west.
This imagery of the Dresden was reinforced through yearly ceremonies
to mark the anniversary of the bombings and through “corresponding
interpretations in official school text books.”
Speeches presented at these ceremonies were used to strengthen the
anti-western sentiment in East Germany with updated statements to
match what was seen as the latest “Western – particularly
American and West German – threat to world peace.”
In 1952, the G.R.D.’s German Peace Committee (Deutsches
Friedenskomitee)
designed a tribute to the city by making it appear as the symbol of
the “will to rebuild” and served as an example during the
rebuilding of East Berlin.
The German Peace Committee argued that the resolve to revitalize
Germany was under threat by the west and Germans, especially those in
the east, were “in danger of becoming victims again.”
The overall
view of the bombings in Dresden was clear: Germany were victims both
fascism and western imperialism during the war. The Soviets came to
save Germany from this violent behaviour and have allowed East
Germany the chance to rebuild itself despite the threat of the west.
Throughout the fifties, the S.E.D. tried to spread this concept to
West Germany, hoping that the latter would support the “idea of
peaceful German unification under socialist auspices.”
Revising Memories - Post-unification
Since
reunification, Germany has had to come to terms with several parts of
its past, this ranging from understanding not only the victims of
Nazism but also those involved in supporting the Nazi regime in
Germany.
It has made both the Eastern and Western halves of Germany come to
realize that both communism and Nazism were “but variants of
totalitarian barbarity.”
This development discredited G.D.R.’s anti-fascist understanding
of the war and strengthened the F.R.G.’s anti-totalitarian
framework.
An example of this change in perception can be seen in the G.D.R.’s
memorial dedication against fascism – “To the victims of fascism
and militarism” – was replaced to read: “To the victims of war
and the rule of violence.”
In this example, the original phrase only sees Germans being only
being the victims of fascism but the change in phrasing changes this
frame of mind by broadening what the Germans were victims of , in the
west’s view, totalitarianism and not fascism.
Echos of the Past
 |
People walking through the ruins of the city of Peja, Kosovo.
Pictures like this bought back memories of Allied bombings
in Germany. |
Since
the reunification, the memory of the bombings became less a part of
German memory of the Second World War.
However, participation in N.A.T.O. (North Atlantic Treaty
Organization) conflicts such as the Kosovo conflict in 1999 have
caused the public to reopen the debate on civilian bombings.
The Kosovo crisis spoke volumes for Germans as televisions showed
images of “dishevelled refugees and victims of ethnic cleansing
arriving en
masse
[to] Albania” brought back memories of the Holocaust and the Second
World War.
The 2003 Iraq conflict also reminded Germans of civilian bombings
with images of the massive damage to cities and towns in Afghanistan
and Iraq ushering back the memory of the attacks that occurred in
cities like Dresden and Hamburg.
German youth, some even in elementary school, united together under
the phrase “We know what it’s like to be bombed.”
To the German public, the bombing of Iraqi cities like Baghdad was
the same as the bombings of German cities. This attitude toward
Baghdad could be traced back to the eastern view of Germans being
victims of western aggression. To Germany, the 2003 conflict could
have easily have been viewed as another example of this aggression by
the United States just as the bombings on German cities was a form of
western hostility.
Conclusions
In
closing, the memory of the allied bombings of German cities during
the Second World War has changed in the second half of the twentieth
century. During the Cold War period, the F.R.G. and the G.D.R.’s
understanding of German victimhood during Second World War, and
particularly the bombings, were shaped by their situations. The
F.R.G.’s experience as a democratic state made it view the war as a
product of totalitarianism and that Germans were both victims of the
allies and of Hitler’s regime; while the G.D.R. saw the bombings as
further evidence of the dangers of Western imperialism and that
Germans were victims of this aggression during the war. Though the
F.R.G.’s anti-totalitarian approach won out after reunification,
the G.D.R.’s elements of the west as a threat still shine through
in German society as seen in the German reaction to the Iraq conflict
in 2003. Therefore, as Germany continues to come to terms with its
past, its view of the victimhood of its people will continuously
change and will be shaped by the current events that occur in world
affairs.
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