The bombing of Dresden

Der Spiegel's English site recently carried a story that gives a good glimpse at one way the politics of remembering the Second World War plays out in Germany, in this case in connection with the bombing of Dresden on February 13, 1945: A War of Words 02/02/05.

The firebombing of Dresden presents some unusual twists. Many American readers know it from Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, which tends to present it as unnecessary excesss. After the war, the Soviets and their client regime in East Germany condemned the bombing of Dresden as an example of British and American savagery, even though the USSR was fully in support of the strategic bombing campaign during the wartime alliance against Nazi Germany.

Those who want to rehabilitate Germany's role in the Second World War, in the sense of minimizing Germany's blame for causing the war, also tend to focus on the bombing in general and the firebombing of Dresden in particular as a way of depreciating the Allies.

And Holocaust deniers use the bombing, especially of Dresden, as some kind of balance against Hitler's campaign of murder against Jews. Their argument suggests or outright claims that the killing of Jews was in retaliation for the bombing of Germany civilians. Also, in a contradiction of a kind not uncommon among extremists groups, they minimize the number of Jewish victims and exaggerate the numbers of deaths in Dresden.

"The Bombing of Dresden" section (click on "The Judgment" and then Part XI) of the judge's report in the failed lawsuit of Holocaust denier David Irving against author Deborah Lipstadt, and how Irving uses it, gives a lot of historical material about the bombing of Dresden, and also about what an ideological football it's become, particularly in the dark corner of thought known as Holocaust denial:

The Spiegel article gives this background:

The spectacular firestorm caused by the carpet bombing left Dresden, long known as "Florence on the Elbe" because of its splendid Baroque architecture, in ruins, officially killing at least 30,000 people. The exact number will always be the subject of great debate and some estimates count tens of thousands more deaths. There is no doubt that the horror was a tragedy of terrible dimensions, but wasit an act of vengeance on the part of the British and Americans for the Nazi bombings of Britain or was the decision to attack born out of the perception of military necessity?

One prominent argument is that it was a needless act on the part of the British at a point when the Germans were retreating on many fronts and the Russians had already crossed the Oder River into Germany. The other, most recently proffered by British historian Frederick Taylor is that the Allies saw in Dresden an important communications and transportation hub from which supplies and troops were being sent to the eastern front, where the Soviet Army was suffering heavy troop losses. The latter, one could argue, would make Dresden a legitimate military target. Residents of Dresden, indeed, across Germany, remain divided between these theses as the 60th anniversary of the Dresden firebombing approaches.

My own view is that within the context of the "strategic bombing" campaign, Dresden was a legitimate military target. It's also worth noting, especially since it has become a common criticism of the Allies that not enough was done to interfere with the Nazi killing of Jews, that Dresden at the time was a key transit point for Hungarian Jews being shipped to Auschwitz. But, as destructive as the bombing was, the shipment of Jews from Dresden to Auschwitz resumed very quickly.

I have larger concerns about the whole strategic bombing campaign in the Second World War. The Army's own survey after the war found that the bombing had actually achieved little in terms of its military aim to interfere with critical war production. John Kenneth Galbraith, who was part of that survey himself, explained in his famous book The Affluent Society, first published in 1958, that the bombing may have been actually counter-productive in that sense. The bombing destroyed so many businesses not directly related to military production that it freed up a huge number of people to work in the armaments industry.

Der Spiegel also provides this article from Salon on Dresden: "Dresden: Tuesday, Feb. 13, 1945" by Frederick Taylor by Laura Miller 02/02/05. The Salon original appeared there 03/01/04.

And speaking of Salon, they just published a review of Deborah Lipstadt's book on the David Irving lawsuit: Shilling for Hitler by Charles Taylor 02/07/05. In that article, Taylor notes:

Gray [the judge in the Irving lawsuit] handed down a decision that, to anyone sentient and breathing, ended the myth of David Irving as a historian. In his
judgment, Gray not only said that Irving was an "antisemite" and a "racist" but
that his "falsification of the record was deliberate and ... motivated by a
desire to present events in a manner consistent with his own ideological beliefs
even if that involved distortion and manipulation of historical evidence."

Tags: david irving, deborah lipstadt, dresden, dresden bombing, holocaust, holocaust denial, second world war, shoah, slaughterhouse-five