A Holocaust memoir that turned out to be wrong

Bob Somerby's Daily Howler column of 01/06/09 alerted me to a story that hadn't registered on my consciousness before. But it's the kind of story that particularly interests me because it involves the effort to get the facts of a story right and the possible negative consequences of failing to do so.

I grumped in a number of posts back in 2007 about Ken Burns' PBS documentary The War, about Americans during the Second World War. The subjects of the interviews were elderly. Anyone old enough to vote in 1945 (at age 21) would have been at least 81 in 2005. And they were relating events from six decades before. The documentary provided little if any information on whether the stories had been individually verified in some way. One woman seemed downright dingie, even though she was presented in a very sympathetic light. Another guy told a story that had the feel of "too good to be true" about staving off his imminent execution in a POW camp by a bluff involving a claim about an evil spirit, a story that could have been checked at least to some degree.

I checked one account myself, of a guy talking about the motivations of kamikaze suicide pilots late in the war. From a view minutes researching in my home library and in the digital Encyclopedia Britannica, I concluded that what he said on that subject was very unlikely. And the motivation of the kamikazes was not a matter of which he had any direct wartime experience. He had seen a kamikaze plane crash into a ship, but he had not (so far as the film told us) been involved in interrogating would-be kamikaze pilots. It would have been helpful to know whether some of these stories had been vetted through normal historical research. (There was one story the film followed that did have contemporary documentation in the form of a diary kept by the girl they were describing.)

I've often said something to the effect that the only type of story I know of that's possibly less reliable than men bragging about their sexual accomplishments would be women bragging about theirs. People make up stuff. Even when we're not consciously confabulating something, we misremember things, mix up the details, embellish the story get the dates wrong, forget some of the participants, doctor the story to avoid relating something embarrassing that someone did or said at the time (usually ourselves), and so on. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously fallible. And as time goes on, it becomes more so.

The story that Somerby mentions is a case of an elderly Jewish man who was in the Buchenwald concentration camp outside Weimar, Germany, as a boy. His story was about a little girl that brought him an apple every day - during the winter - by tossing it over the fence of the camp. The girl was the daughter of (apparently) Polish slave laborers who had been brought there to work. They were Jewish but were passing for Christian.

Years later, after the war and after emigrating to America, he went on a blind date with another Jewish immigrant. After talking for a while, they discovered that they were the same boy and girl of the Buchenwald story! They married and lived happily ever after. Or at least stayed married for a long time.

The story got a lot of publicity, was featured on Oprah, and became an e-mail chain-letter favorite. The guy had a book of his story about to be published, a movie was set to be made.

But what I've related of the story already should have raised a few questions. Apples in the dead of winter? Did the concentration camp guards routinely let visitors stroll up the fence? Were prisoners allowed close enough to the fence to chat with outsiders and get food from them? Is it plausible that a Jewish family trying to pass for Christian in Nazi Germany during the middle of the war would let their nine-year-old daughter stroll down to the Buchenwald camp every day?

The story of what happened with the book is discussed in these two articles: The Greatest Love Story Ever Sold by Gabriel Sherman The New Republic 12/25/08; and, False Memoir of Holocaust Is Canceled by Motoko Rich and Joseph Berger 12/28/08,

Historian Deborah Lipstadt has posted about it several times on her blog, obscurely titled Deborah Lipstadt's Blog. This post of 12/31/08, for instance, reproduces an article of hers from The Forward that describes her issues with the story. The book has apparently found another publisher, even though the accuracy of the story has been effectively debunked. The title of the book, the first run of which the previous publisher had ready to release when it was cancelled, was Apples At The Fence by Herman Rosenblat.

Some basic research by an historian who knew what he was doing was what eventually killed the book's publication, though the publisher and prospective filmmaker were initially very defensive over any such criticism. As the Times reports:

The primary sleuth in unmasking his fabrication of the apple story was Kenneth Waltzer, director of Jewish studies at Michigan State University. He has been working on a book on how 904 boys — including the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel — were saved from death by an underground rescue operation inside Buchenwald, and has interviewed hundreds of survivors, including boys from the ghetto at Piotrkow in Poland who were taken with the young Herman Rosenblat to the camp.

When Dr. Waltzer asked other survivors who were with Mr. Rosenblat about the tossed apple story, they said the story couldn’t possibly be true.

In his research of maps drawn by ex-prisoners, Dr. Waltzer learned that the section of Schlieben [a sub-camp of the main Buchenwald camp] where Mr. Rosenblat was housed had fences facing other sections of the camp and only one fence — on the south — facing the outside world. That fence was adjacent to the camp’s SS barracks and the SS men there would have been able to spot a boy regularly speaking to a girl on the other side of the fence, Dr. Waltzer said. Moreover, the fence was electrified and civilians outside the camp were forbidden to walk along the road that bordered the fence.

Dr. Waltzer also learned from online documentation that Ms. Radzicki, her parents and two sisters were hidden as Christians at a farm not outside Schlieben but 210 miles away near Breslau.

Lipstadt's criticism focuses on how fabricated account can affect the general understanding of the events of the Holocaust and on how Holocaust deniers exploit erroneous, careless or falsified accounts of events. In her Forward article, she explains:

There are various lessons to be learned from this: Facts about the Holocaust must be checked. Historians should never build their understanding of events based on one story from one person. But Rosenblat had enablers. His publisher, agent and movie producer pounced on his story. Reporters never bothered to check it out. They all seemingly wanted a story that made the Holocaust heartwarming, even though, as Waltzer aptly put it, the "Holocaust experience is not heartwarming, it is heart rending."

[Harris] Salomon [who is still planning to do a film of the story though designating it as fiction] believed that this kind of "candy-coated message” would reach “Middle America” and “do more to teach people about the Jewish experience during the Holocaust in a way nothing before has done." Jewish sources also allowed themselves to be co-opted. Aish HaTorah featured the story on its Web site. A Chabad rabbi, whose relatives died in the Holocaust, was swept off his feet by this phony tale and arranged a belated bar mitzvah for Herman, garnering even more publicity for the Rosenblats and himself.

I have spent much of my academic career studying Holocaust denial. But the much greater danger to our collective memory of the event is posed by Holocaust trivialization and romanticization. What the Rosenblats and their enablers did was create yet another obstacle for the remaining survivors to convince others that their stories are true.

Rosenblat claims that all he wanted to do was make people love each other more. The Chabad rabbi probably thought the story would inspire faith. Salomon wanted to teach Middle America about the Holocaust.

These may be worthy goals. But the Holocaust should not be reduced to a means for trying to fulfill these or any other ends. The instrumentalization of the Holocaust, the use of it to fulfill something else, is the ultimate degradation of the event. If Holocaust deniers were smart, they would sit back and let the Rosenblats, Salomons, Berkley Books and the like peddle their wares. Within a short time, no one would know what was truth and what was fiction. [my emphasis in bold]

It's probably too much to expect that the Holocaust won't be instrumentalized. People have a huge need to draw meaning and lessons events. And when someone settles on what they take as "the lessons of the Holocaust" or "the lessons of Munich" or whatever, they are sorely tempted to use it to justify their own arguments.

But, as a specialist in the field, Lipstadt may be applying a more precise academic meaning of "instrumentalization" that I would. There are whole volume written on the nuances of the "representation" of the Holocaust and I can't pretend to be extensively acquainted with it.

In the New Republic article, Lipstadt explains how Holocaust deniers exploit false or mistaken claims:

Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, who was appointed by President Clinton in 1994 to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, says she first heard Herman's story while on a research trip to Auschwitz about the same time Waltzer started examining the narrative. Someone had read her an email chain that they had printed out that recounted Herman's amazing love story. "I said, 'I don't believe it,'" she told me, recalling the episode.

Lipstadt, who wrote the 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust, is troubled by the possibility that Herman's love story is fabricated, because she believes it could be co-opted by the Holocaust denial movement. "If you make up things about parts, you cast doubts on everything else," Lipstadt told me. "When you think of the survivors who meticulously tell their story and are so desperate for people to believe, then if they're making stories up about this, how do you know if Anne Frank is true? How do you know Elie Wiesel is true?"

In addition to the impossibility of being able to approach the fence, Lipstadt disputes other details of Herman's story. "Based on what I have seen thus far, I would say that this story is not exactly a shining example of verisimilitude [i.e, accuracy]," she wrote on her blog on December 15.

Tags: deborah lipstadt, holocaust, holocaust denial, shoah

A strange book review

German Einsatzgruppen massacre of Jews in the USSR, 1941

The headline on this book review is an eye-catcher: Timothy Snyder on the Forgotten Holocaust Truthdig.com 02/15/08.

But as soon as I saw the title of the book being reviewed, The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories (2007). I immediately wondered who had forgotten about this portion of the Holocaust, since it was a major part of it. Snyder writes:

Some 2.2 million Soviet Jews were killed by shooting; 350,000 more were asphyxiated in mobile gas vans. Compare this to the 1.1 million deaths at Auschwitz, or the approximately 800,000 deaths at Treblinka. Even had the death camps never existed, this eastern Holocaust would have to be regarded as the most horrible of atrocities. Yet we have all but forgotten it. (my emphasis)

"We" must not include any of the historians of the Holocaust of which I'm familiar. This is not some obscure part of the story.

The numbers as cited by Snyder appear to be on the high side of estimates specifically for Soviet Jews. The 1993 German edition of Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, cites figures by country for Jews murdered in the Holocaust. He cites 700,000 in the USSR, 3 million in Poland, and of course many more in other countries. Michael Shermer in Denying History (2000) cites a 2.1 million figure from Wolfgang Benz for Soviet Jews killed. It's not the point of this post to analyze the numbers. Although it's important to get the numbers right for more than one reason, not least of which is that the Holocaust-denier sleaze-bags seize on careless estimates and then debunk them to show the alleged deviousness of those writing about the Holocaust. On the face of it, Benz seems to be counting a higher percentage of the dead as Soviet and a smaller percentage as Polish compared to Hilberg's figures.

(Hilberg puts the clearly documentable number of Jews Holocaust deaths at 5.1 million, though he explains that the famous six million number is credible. He also explains that the six million figure originated from Adolf Eichmann, who was in a good position to make such an estimate. Benz places the total at 6.3 million.)

But it's clear that the deaths of Soviet Jews are very much a part of the story. Here are a few other examples that might it strange to me that someone would claim this part of the Shoah was somehow nearly forgotten.

Christopher Browning in The Path to Genocide (1992) has an essay called "Beyond 'Intentionalism' and 'Functionalism': The Decision for the Final Solution Reconsidered", which walks through some of the key points historians have used to determine when Hitler made the operative decision to start mass killing of Jews. It deals extensively with the systematic killing of Soviet Jews. Because, as Browning puts it:

In July 1941, with the stupendous early victories of the Russian campaign, [Hitler] accelerated the Einsatzgruppen [special death squads devoted to murdering Jews] campaign and solicited the Final Solution. In late Spetember and early October 1941, with the capture of Kiev and the great encirclement victory of Vyazma and Bryansk, he approved deportations [of Jews] from the Third Reich. At the same time death camp construction commenced. It would appear that the euphoria of victory emboldened and tempted an elated Hitler to dare ever more drastic policies.

Robert Wistrich in Hitler and the Holocaust (2001) uses a higher number than Hilberg does for Soviet Jewish deaths. But there's nothing hidden about the Soviet portion of the actions in his account, either:

The four Einsatzgruppen battalions that operated on the vast Russian front from the Baltic to the Black Sea would, with the help of the Wehrmacht and Nazi police units, murder more than one million Jewish men, women, and children in the first eighteen months of the Russian campaign. In the Ukraine, beginning in Lvov, they found willing collaborators among local nationalists.

The Web site of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum includes an article on the Einsatzgruppen, which says:

Einsatzgruppen (in this context, mobile killing units) were squads composed primarily of German SS and police personnel. Under the command of the German Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei; Sipo) and Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst; SD) officers, the Einsatzgruppen had among their tasks the murder of those perceived to be racial or political enemies found behind German combat lines in the occupied Soviet Union.

These victims included Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and officials of the Soviet state and the Soviet Communist party. The Einsatzgruppen also murdered thousands of residents of institutions for the mentally and physically disabled. Many scholars believe that the systematic killing of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union by Einsatzgruppen and Order Police (Ordnungspolizei) battalions was the first step of the "Final Solution," the Nazi program to murder all European Jews.

This map, Einsatzgruppen massacres in eastern Europe, shows places where such actions occurred.

The 1941 massacre of Jews in Babi Yar is a particularly notorious incident. Harrison Salisburg in his 1978 book The Unknown War (whose title might give some credence to Snyder's argument) includes a chapter titled "Babi Yar". He wrote:

As the German occupation went on other victims were shot and buried at Babi Yar, possibly 100,000 in all - more Jews, Soviet POWs, partisans, Communists. According to a postwar commission under [Nikita] Khrushchev's charmanship, about 195,000 persons were executed byt he Nazis in the Kiev area.

Before the German pullout the Sondercommando had another task - to try to conceal the extent of their crimes. Slave labor excavated the site and burned the remains of the bodies in a pyre over a period of six weeks.

Babi Yar in the post-Stalin years became a symbol of German atrocities in Russia, particularly against the Jews...

Yehuda Bauer in Rethinking the Holocaust (2001) writes in discussing a key meeting between Hitler and Heinrich Himmler in December 1941: "In the occupied Soviet areas extermination [of Jews] had been going on for months already, and Hitler had been receiving the detailed reports of the Einsatzgruppen (murder squads)."

The point of listing several examples is to say that to the extent that the Holocaust is remembered - and it's actually far better known to people today than it was in the 1950s or 1960s - the fate of Soviet Jews is a major part of the story. How Timothy Snyder thinks that "we have all but forgotten it" is hard to imagine.

Here's a weird example of Snyder's argument:

Hitler was planning some kind of Final Solution throughout the war, but until 1941 this meant exile rather than murder. It can be uncomfortable to be reminded that the German decision to kill all the Jews of Europe was taken quite late, in summer or autumn 1941, and that this decision was taken in a certain context.

So far, that description is fine. But then he continues directly:

That this context was the German invasion of the Soviet Union also introduces a certain awkwardness. Hitler connected the Jews to Soviet power, and therefore some students of modern Jewish history, particularly in the United States, treat the issue of Jewish communists as taboo. This would have made no sense to the survivors whose memories are recorded in this volume, many of whom saw themselves precisely as both communists and Jews.

What?! Whatever there may be to that comment - and I doubt there's much - it certainly hasn't stopped historians of the Holocaust to writing extensively on the deaths of Soviet Jews.

Tags: holocaust, shoah

The War: Episode 7

Artwork by Auschwitz survivor Halina Olomucka

It's finally over. America has saved the world again for the 1000th time. Earl Burke got to "cop a feel" on Market Street in San Francisco on V-J Day. Katherine Phillips down in Mobile got to celebrate the atomic bomb as "the greatest thing they ever came up with." And we got to hear Norah Jones sing that dreadful "America, I gave my best to you" song one last time. I ain't buying the soundtrack.

Episode 7 didn't change the pattern established in the first six. Despite a good moment here and there, the personal connection we were supposed to make with these people according to Ken Burns' pre-screening hype was pretty much blocked by the chopped-up nature of the interview presentations. We rarely got enough continuous time with any of them to get any sense of their personalities.

And the war narrative itself was weak. There was lots of combat footage for people who are too lazy to channel-flip to the History Channel. But there was pitifully little political context for any of it. And there were points where the historical narrative was so bad as to be really misleading.

In the end, Burns wound up with the worst of both worlds: individual testimonies that the audience finds it hard to connect with as individuals (unless you count knowing that Katherine P. would pronounce "war" as "wauh" every time) and an historical narrative that was often painfully weak.

Episode 7 opens with one interviewee offering his pop psychology view that "there'll always be wars". We get a very conventional treatment of the death of Franklin Roosevelt. The only thing that struck me as notably positive about the historical narrative was that they did manage to mention the Soviet declaration of war against Japan along with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It would have been too much to expect an explanation that during the Cold War, the US account tended to make the atomic bombs the magic weapons that ended the war, while the Soviet account make the A-bombs almost insignificant in comparison to the threat posed by the Red Army.

The discussion of the Holocaust was as painfully superficial as most of the historical commentary. Here the America-centric focus of the documentary was glaring. The sequence gives an impression that is hard to believe wasn't an intentional sleight-of-hand. It's certainly true that seeing the sad state of inmates in the various detention camps in Germany and Austria had a strong effect on the Americans that liberated them, including giving many a new sense of how important the war was.

But this segment is introduced by historian Paul Fussell, one of the regular interview subject, referring to the effects the "death camps" had on people. It's understandable that people thing of concentration camps where people were killed as "death camps". But it can easily be confusing. There were six camps designated by the Germans as "extermination camps" (Vernichtungslager), all in Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. See also the article Extermination Camps from the Yad Vashem Web site. (Sometimes Majdanek is not counted as a Vernichtungslager.)

There was enormous death and suffering in other camps. And a large part of the killings in the Holocaust took place outside of camps, including mass shootings in the east by the Einsatzgruppen and Ordnungspolizei units. But those six camps were the locations used specifically for the systmatic, industrially-organized killing of Jews and others targeted for mass murder. None of the six were liberated by the American troops. Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were part of "Operation Reinhart" in 1942-3 and had all ceased operation by the end of 1943. The Soviet Red Army liberated Majdanek in July, 1944, and Chelmno and Auschwitz in January, 1945.

This is another case where the information in The War was not wrong. But it surely left viewers not familiar already with more details the impression that Americans liberated the extermination camps, which is not the case. But it's clear that what the Americans did see, at Bergen-Belsen for instance, was dramatic and horrible (from a contemporary Czechoslovakian army newspaper, Ein tschechoslowakisches Armeeblatt berichtete im April 1945 aus dem KZ Shoa.de):

Angloamerikanische Armeen, die derzeit siegreich Deutschland durchqueren, haben auch eine ganze Reihe deutscher Konzentrationslager befreit. In diesen sahen die englischen und amerikanischen Soldaten erstmalig mit eigenen Augen, wie schrecklich Deutschen mit ihren Gefangenen umgingen. Im Lager Belsen waren 21.000 Männer, 18.000 Frauen und 500 Kinder. Es gab kein Trinkwasser, eine Ernährung war nicht möglich. Als die Amerikaner und Engländer ins Lager drangen, fanden sie dort Gefangene in einem so furchtbaren Zustand vor, dass diese sich kaum bewegen konnten. Von 40.000 Gefangenen waren 20.000 in so schlechtem gesundheitlichen Zustand, dass sie umgehend in Krankenhäuser verlegt werden mussten. Ein amerikanischer Korrespondent berichtet, dass in diesem Lager täglich viele Menschen an Hunger starben. Niemand begrub die Leichen. Amerikanische Soldaten sahen in einem Lagerbezirk aufeinandergehäufte tote Frauen, die alle völlig nackt waren. Der Haufen war 60 Meter lang und erreichte Tischhöhe. In Gruben und Gräben lagen viele weitere Leichen.

[Anglo-American armies which at the time were victoriously crossing Germany also liberated a number of German concentration camps. In these, the English and American soldiers saw for the first time with their own eyes how horrible German had treated their prisoners. In the Belsen camp there were 21,000 men, 18,000 women and 500 children. There was no drinking water, nourishment was not possible. When the Americans and English entered the camp, they found prisoners there in such a terrible condition that they could hardly move. Of 40,000 prisoners, 20,000 were in such a bad state of health that they had to be placed in hospitals immediately. An American correspondent reported that in this camp, many people died of hunger daily. No one buried the bodies. American soldiers saw in a section of the camp dead women tossed into a pile, all of them completely naked. The pile was 60 meters long and table-high. There were many more bodies in ditches and trenches.]

At least The War managed to give some sense of this event. But historical clarity was sacrificed to dramatic footage.

This series shows a big pitfall of "people's history". In trying to use the memories of "ordinary people" to tell the story of a world war, Burns winds up using their personal descriptions like experts of somce kind would be used in most documentaries. Now, I'm not one to promote the cult of Experts. A well-informed journalist or amateur historian may give as good or better an account of some events as a professional historian.

But it's one thing to hear Maurice Bell of Mobile describe seeing a kamikaze attack on his own shiop. But was the best guy to to give a background description of what the kamikazes were and what matoivated them? Bell tells us that the kamikaze pilots believed they would get a special place in Heaven for dying this way. Sound familiar?

But was religious martyrdom the sense of the kamikaze pilots of what they were doing? Leaving aside the questio of whether the concept of Heaven in the Abrahamic religions has a meaningful parallel in Buddhism or Shitoism, the religions of most Japanese at the time, here's what Robert Pape writes about the kamikazes in Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005) that the Japanese military adopted kamikaze attacks as a measure of desperation. They were initiated by Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi as a way to slow down the American land invasion. And he writes:

Kamikaze pilots were also motivated by the belief that their sacrifice would bnable Japan to avoid occupation by the United States. These individuals, who were generally graduates of special training programs for pilots of universities, often kept extensive diaries, many of which have been published. Special attack pilots volunteered for their missions. Although social pressure may have contributed to why individuals willingly stepped forward, the common explanation they give for why such missions were important was that suicide attack was the only way to stave off American occupation. Shortly before his death, one pilot wrote in his diary: "We must fight to the end so that the Japanese can create a new era by the Japanese ourselves. We cannot succumb to the 'red hair and blue eyes.'" (my emphasis)

He also quotes Lt. Gen. Torashiro Kawabe, in a postwar description given to the US Strategic Bombing Survey on "the motivation of individual kamikaze pilots" that Pape says is in agreement with "contemporaneous accounts":

We believed that our spiritual convictions and moral strength could balance your material and scientific advantages. We did not consider our attack to be "suicide." The pilot did not start out on his mission with the intention of committing suicide [i.e., of immolating himself in a spirit of despair]. He looked upon himself as a human bomb which would destroy a certain part of the enemy fleet ... [and] died happy in the conviction that his death was a step towards the final victory. (my emphasis)

In other words, from Pape's brief account it appears that the perceived military necessity of the attacks was the central motivation according to which the kamikaze pilots were willing to saccrifice themselves in that way, not some promise of a special place in Heaven. But the latter is the impression with which the viewers of The War will be left.

The bottom line for me on the series: Burns' series provided some interesting moments. But on the whole, it was a real disappointment, offering largely conventional war stories and sub-par commentary on the major events of the war itself. Worst of all, the series will be very easy for most viewers to place into a familiar, comfortable, nostalgic framework, adding little to our understanding or perspective on the actual historical events.

Tags: holocaust, ken burns, paul fussell, robert pape, second world war, shoah, the war documentary

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