Germans
call Churchill a war
criminal
Winston
Churchill was effectively a
war criminal who sanctioned
the extermination of
Germany's civilian
population through
indiscriminate bombing of
towns and cities, an article
in the country's
biggest-circulation
newspaper claimed yesterday. In an
unprecedented attack on
Allied conduct during the
Second World War, the
tabloid Bild has called for
recognition to be given to
the suffering inflicted on
the German population during
the strategic air campaign
of 1940-45. The
newspaper's campaign,
provoked by a new German
history of the bomber
offensive, breaks six
decades of virtual silence
on the subject, and is being
seen as the latest
manifestation of a belief
among Germans that they too
were victims of the war -
albeit a war started by
their country. The
newspaper is serialising Der
Brand (The Fire: Germany
Under Bombardment 1940-45)
by the historian Jorg
Friedrich, which claims to
be the most authoritative
account of the bombing
campaign so far. Mr
Friedrich claims the British
government set out at the
start of the Second World
War to destroy as many
German cities and kill as
many of their inhabitants as
possible. Civilian deaths
were not collateral damage,
he says, but rather the
object of the exercise. He
argues that Churchill had
favoured a strategy of
attacking the civilian
population centres from the
air some 20 years before
Hitler ordered such raids. Britain's
war leader is quoted during
the First World War as
saying: "Perhaps the
next time round the way to
do it will be to kill women,
children and the civilian
population." Friedrich
goes on to quote Churchill
defending the morality of
bombing: "Now
everyone's at it. It's
simply a question of fashion
- similar to that of whether
short or long dresses are
in." Der Brand
is far removed from the dry
style of most German
histories, and is filled
with emotive accounts of the
horrors of bombing, but
carries few references to
the man who brought
retribution on Germany,
Adolf Hitler. Friedrich
argues that the Allied
policy of seeking to break
German morale through
bombing proved mistaken, the
attacks merely serving to
weld together the German
population. The debate
is certain to anger those in
Britain who see the
strategic air campaign as a
necessary evil. The
British, led by
Sir Arthur Harris, C-in-C
Bomber Command, were the
leading proponents of
"night area
bombing", involving the
systematic destruction of
German industrial capacity
and housing. The policy
resulted in the laying to
waste of city after city,
including Hamburg, Cologne
and Dresden, and the deaths
of some 635,000 Germans. The policy
was to some extent forced on
the RAF by the failure of
daylight operations against
pinpoint targets early in
the war. It also reflected
the fact that, for much of
the conflict, bombing was
the only method by which
Britain could attack
Germany. German
raids on Britain in the
Blitz of 1940-41 were seen
to have freed the British
from the obligation not to
attack civilian centres. The
serialisation of the book
will furnish the far-Right
in Germany with arguments to
back its revisionist claims.
It is also likely to
overshadow recent
reconciliation attempts
between Britain and Germany
over the bombing of Dresden
in February 1945 in which
tens of thousands died. In a
symbolic sign of friendship,
British
businesses have paid into a
fund to reconstruct the
Frauenkirche or Church
of Our Lady which was
destroyed in the raid and is
set to be reopened in 2006. Yesterday
Antony Beevor, the British
historian and author of the
bestselling Berlin: The
Downfall, 1945, criticised
the German claim that
Britain's war of attrition
was unnecessarily brutal.
"The trouble is this
argument is removed from the
context that they were the
ones who invented terror
bombing," he said,
referring to German attacks
on Coventry, Rotterdam and
Warsaw. "They
literally obliterated whole
cities and that certainly
preceded what the British
did," he said.
"What we did was more
terrifying and appalling,
but it was a natural
progression in this war. "One
can certainly debate the
whole morality of bombing,
but for Germans to say
Churchill was a war criminal
is pushing it a bit,"
he said. Friedrich,
58, said his two years of
research prompted him to
change his views radically
on the Allied bombing. "Previously
it appeared to me to be a
just answer to the crimes of
the Third Reich, but I've
since changed my mind,"
he said. "Until the
Second World War there was a
common consensus that the
massacre of civilian
populations was
illegal." For the
past year Germans on both
the Left and Right have been
locked in a new and intense
debate about the war and
their role as its victims as
well as perpetrators. The
debate was sparked by
Gunther Grass, the Nobel
prize winner, in a novel
fictionalising the wartime
account of a passenger ship
torpedoed by the Soviet navy
killing thousands of Germans
on board.
By Kate
Connolly in Berlin
(Filed: 19/11/2002)