Independent review

	THE GUARDIAN
	LEADER

Casualties of total war

Saturday February 12, 2005

Sixty years on, the bombing of Dresden still evokes horror and regret: horror at the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians; regret that the British and American planes which attacked it on February 13 1945 destroyed so much of the lovely city known as the "Florence of the Elbe". But such emotions have to be seen in the context of the times: the final, cruel months of a world war launched by an aggressive, racist, totalitarian state.

The vast majority of today's Germans recognise that truth, even if they are now more able than before to say openly that they too were victims of "die Hitlerzeit". Thus the recent success of books such as Gunther Grass's novel Crabwalk, which features the sinking of a ship with thousands of refugees fleeing the Red Army.

But acknowledgment that Germans were victims as well as perpetrators is not the goal of the neo-Nazis planning to demonstrate in Dresden against what they provocatively call "the bombing holocaust". That creates a false parallel between the genocide of Europe's Jews by the Nazi state, and the allied military effort to destroy that regime. To say that war is cruel is not to duck the debate about whether the city was a "legitimate" target - the latest scholarship says it probably was, and that Hitler's propagandists exaggerated the number of casualties - or a gratuitous and vindictive act that made no difference to the predictable outcome of the war. What is indisputable is that there was, and is, no moral equivalence between the sides. The neo-Nazis of the National Democratic party are an odious bunch. Their rise, with 9% of the vote in the last Saxon regional elections, reflects a depressed economy, unemployment twice the national average and the weakening of civic and democratic traditions by decades of communism. But unified, democratic Germany is robust enough to deal with, and perhaps even to outlaw, demagogues who nod and wink about Iraq and claim that thousands of utterly blameless Dresdeners were burned to death in the name of "Anglo-American gangster politics".

Six decades, in the span of an average human life, is the moment when memory becomes history, as it did with D-Day last summer and this month's Auschwitz anniversary. Time and distance should cool this terrible firestorm. So it will be a sad irony if protests overshadow events that are intended to share Dresden's grim experience with Hiroshima, Guernica, Coventry, Sarajevo, Grozny and New York. History should neither be nationally exclusive nor fenced off into areas that are taboo. Nor should it be abused for extremist political purposes.