Ramble or rant
Walter Hinteler wrote:Paaskynen wrote: I am very allergic to Germans complaining about the allied terror bombing of German cities
Sorry, I've never intended to complain.
I am sorry too, Walter. I did not mean to attack you personally, I just wanted to point out how the war still colours our perceptions even in the second and third generation. In fact, I believe we understand each other better through the experiences of our respective families. My father's side of the family lived through the Finnish war experience, but my father was too young to be enlisted and my grandfather was too old and since they lived away from the front, on Åland for part of the time, the did not see much action and my father was not evacuated to Sweden like some 70 000 other Finnish children, and when they moved to the Oulu area the Russian bombardement of that town had long since ceased, because a squadron of Swedish (bi-plane!) fighters protected the area.
But my mother's family lived in Rotterdam throughout the war and although they all survived the war, I grew up with the stories, walking through the now modern heart of the city with my uncles pointing out that one day there was church here and three girls were burned alive inside the rubble, and that over there a shelter suffered a direct hit killing everybody inside, etc. Americans do not have that experience walking through their home towns (not until 9/11 at least). My eldest uncle was a medic at the time of the German invasion and assisted in evacuating wounded from a Rotterdam hospital before it was engulfed in the flames. Two of his comrades were shot to death by the Germans when they tried to help a wounded German (!) paratrooper. The Jewish ladies living in the same appartment block as my mother were taken away never to return. The whole family balanced on the brink of starvation during the last war winter when the Germans cut off all food transports to the West of the country, except for an aunt who walked hundred of kilometres in the freezing cold and was taken in by farmers in the East who had food and one uncle who was sent to the town of Vlissingen in the south and was liberated by the British, while floating in a flooded cellar (because the allies had bombed the dikes and flooded the countryside in preparation for their invasion). And my two eldest uncles had been taken away to Germany as slave labourers, one was simply picked off the street in a so-called razzia, while the other, the medic, did not want to let his younger brother go into captivity alone and volunteered to come along. Together they suffered every imaginable hardship, but were quick to point out that the Russian prisoners were treated even worse. They survived months of allied bombings of the town of Düsseldorf and the gas works where they had been put to work. Once the allies had bombed away the gates that kept them prisoners, and the guards had fled, they escaped and wandered through the south of Germany towards the American lines, helped by some Germans and chased by others, captured once again and forced to dig tank traps and escaped again at night, helped by a German family living nearby with food and clothes and they reached the Americans near Mullhouse on the Rhine. After which they had to hitch rides with allied convoys back to the Netherlands, questioning sessions, the first train riding in the liberated part of the country to the river that formed the border between the librated sounth and the still occupied north, where my eldest uncle took the risk of crossing at night the river and the minefields, because he longed to see his wife and his child that had been born in his absence. A couple of days later, on the fifth of May in fact, the German surrender in Holland was signed.
So in one sense, through the stories told by my uncles and aunts, I can begin to understand what German civilians suffered during the allied bombings and the following grond war, and when I walked through Berlin just after the fall of the wall, I was aghast at seeing how literally every single old building in the centre was still riddled with (patched up) bullet holes! But at the same time I have an instinctive reaction of indignation whenever a German brings it up. Like some time ago when I visited Leipzig for a conference and was offered a tour of the old town and the guide kept mentioning what a crime it was of the allies to have bombed such a beautiful and historical city (town of Bach, etc.) and all the time I had to struggle to hold in the cynical remarks about his countrymen doing exactly the same thing to the city of Erasmus, thank you very much!
Still, after this long ramble, what I meant to point out initially is that bombing of civilians is a crime at any time and that one crime does not excuse another. But of course the victors of the second world war don't want to hear that since they have been doing it again in Afghanistan and Chechnya, in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, etc. and many have followed their example. However, somehow my point got lost along the way in the terrors of war in general and in the history of my family in specific.
War is pure hell for everyone and in a way it is good that these days of commemorations help to keep that realisation alive!
