Was Allied bombing of Germany Jan - April 1945 a war crime?

"During World War II Bell repeatedly condemned the Allied practice of area bombing. He informed Anthony Eden of the German resistance movement and tried in vain to gain the British government's support for them.

As a member of the House of Lords, he was a consistent parliamentary critic of area bombing along with Richard Stokes and Alfred Salter, Labour Party MPs in the House of Commons. In November 1939 he had published an article stating that the Church in wartime should not hesitate

"...to condemn the infliction of reprisals, or the bombing of civilian populations, by the military forces of its own nation. It should set itself against the propaganda of lies and hatred. It should be ready to encourage the resumption of friendly relations with the enemy nation. It should set its face against any war of extermination or enslavement, and any measures directly aimed to destroy the morale of a population." (quoted in Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, Macmillan Press, 1976, p. 493).

In 1941 in a letter to The Times he called the bombing of unarmed women and children "barbarian" which would destroy the just cause for the war. On February 14, 1943 - two years ahead of the Dresden raids - he urged the House of Lords to resist the War Cabinet's decision for area bombing. As a close friend of the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer Bell knew precise details of German plans to assassinate Adolf Hitler. So in 1942 he asked Anthony Eden to declare publicly the British would make a distinction between the Nazi regime and German people. After July 20, 1944, he harshly criticised the British government, as having doomed German resisters against Hitler to fail. That year, during debate, he again demanded the House of Lords to stop British area bombing as a crime against humanity and asked:

"How can the War Cabinet fail to see that this progressive devastation of cities is threatening the roots of civilization?" "

My understanding is that even at Dresden the American bombers were trying to confine the bombing to legitimate targets (namely the railyards outside town), and it was only the UK bombers that caused the firestorm.

This page breaks down what was targeted by the various raids on Dresden:

Oralloy's link condensed in appearance

TV shatters the Dresden taboo

Roger Boyes, Berlin
March 07, 2006

A DASHING British hero survives a plane crash in wartime Germany, flees through a crowded city, speaks German without a hint of an accent, makes love to the beautiful nurse who saves his life, then exposes a corruption scandal.

This is no fictional blockbuster but German television's attempt to tell the story of the bombing of Dresden by the British during World War II, when up to 50,000 people are believed to have died.

At pound stg. 7million ($16.5million), Dresden: An Inferno is the costliest drama made by German television.

Yet critics have been harsh in their condemnation of the plot and historians have expressed concern over the made-for-TV treatment given to what many Germans still see as a war crime.

"Why does one wish that Dresden was never filmed?" asked Kerstin Decker, chief critic of Berlin's influential Tagesspiegel. "Because it makes a mockery out of suffering."

Treating the bombing as fiction shatters one of Germany's last historical taboos.

The British raid on February 13, 1945, is still regarded with horror. So far it has been dealt with only in very cautious black-and-white documentaries.

Millions of German viewers watched on Sunday the first part of the miniseries, which has at its heart an implausible love affair between an RAF pilot and a German nurse.

Made by German state broadcaster ZDF, Dresden features British and German actors. The lead role is played by John Light, who starred in Band of Brothers.

"We thought the story of Dresden could only be told from a German-English perspective," said Nico Hofmann from Teamworx, which produced the film for ZDF. "Otherwise it ends up in the wrong political corner.

"Neo-Nazis have been stoking up 60-year-old resentments about the bombing in order to win political support in Dresden."

Hofmann said he wanted to show a British pilot confront the devastation wrought by his bombs, and disputes claims the romance trivialises it.

"We have made an anti-war film that tries to make the right connections," he said.

Light's RAF pilot is shot down after a raid on the city of Magdeburg. For the critics, that is the moment when the film starts to lose credibility.

"He runs through Dresden, finds a hospital, and when the nurses are not looking, he eats their breakfast. With a stomach wound? Isn't that fatal?" wrote critic Decker.

He makes love to the nurse, who has not realised he is English, on the ward.

"We haven't seen that even in hospital soap operas," Decker wrote.

The Times

yeah only hollywood could do that...

History is usually recorded from the point of view of the victor.

Are we capable of standing back from this, and recognising objectively a war crime as a war crime, even if it was 'our' side that committed it?

Was the deliberate targeting of German civilians a crime, or just another horrific act of war?

I don't know.... I'm just asking the question, and reaching for my tin hat before the answers come in!

I'll stick my neck out--i do know. Yes, it was criminal. All explanations and excuses for the Allied policy of intentionally targeting German civilians aside, it was reprehensible and inexcusable

ok off to listen tolast of Wigan v Man U (1:1) at present

Well, when you get back you might think about this. Your point about apologies and legal liabilities is well taken. Yet people in "the West" continue to decry the Japanese unwillingness to apologize and to acknowledge the commission of crimes. How much less willing should they be to do so, when they lost the war, and war crimes trials established a basis for the criminality of all of their acts?

...I'm coming to the conclusion that we are simply deluded if we think we have aright to the moral high ground.

I don't even believe the much despised George Bush supposes he occupies (or occupied) this ground. (Moral high ground)

The new debate was started with last years's publication of a book called "The Fire - Germany and the Bombardment 1940-1945" by historian Jörg Friedrich.

Fanning the flames


The 1945 destruction of Dresden has been criticised before, but a controversial German bestseller, newly translated, accuses Churchill and Harris of war crimes. By Stuart Jeffries

Saturday December 23, 2006
The Guardian


Beneath Dresden lay the catacombs. Towards the end of the second world war, the authorities decided that these cellars under the beautiful baroque Old Town could provide cover from British air raids. On February 13 1945, the bombers arrived and many civilians fled below to avoid being killed by shrapnel or crumbling buildings, or being burned alive.
But, writes Jorg Friedrich in his book The Fire: the Bombing of Germany 1940-45, "this tightly meshed underground construction was a landscape of insanity". Such was the incendiary impact of the bombing that heat, gases, flames and smoke whipped through the labyrinth. People panicked. In one underground corridor, 50 people got so wedged that their bodies were found fused together from the heat. Underneath the junction of Margarthenstrasse and Marienstrasse there was a steel door connecting two passageways at a right angle. Two groups of people ran towards the door from opposite sides, desperately seeking a way out of a huge subterranean oven. Each blocked the other group from going through the door and so they all died. Under Moritzstrasse, a man ran for an exit shaft, but the following crowd pulled him back and he was killed in the crush. Two hundred people pressed on this crowd from behind, so that the body could not be budged. Again, everyone died.

This was where most of the 35,000 victims of the RAF on February 13 and USAAF attacks the following day died.
Friedrich's book, a bestseller in his homeland four years ago and which now appears in English, is thick with such horror stories. They were hard for him to avoid in meticulously detailing, over nearly 600 harrowing pages, how 635,000 Germans, mostly civilian, died and 7.5 million were made homeless when British and US bombs were dropped on 131 cities and towns. "For more than 50 years after the second world war," wrote the war historian and journalist Max Hastings, "German writers remained remarkably muted about the issue of Allied bombing of their country."

The Fire is part of a growing German literature, including WG Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction, that breaks this near silence about their wartime suffering. This is no neo-Nazi apologia (Friedrich is a former Trotskyist who hitherto spent his career indicting the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe for what it did to Coventry), rather an investigation of memory repressed for more than half a century. Friedrich tells me his 93-year-old mother, who experienced the bombing of Essen, cannot talk to him about what she saw: she embodies what Sebald called a "pre-conscious self-censorship, a way of obscuring a world that could no longer be presented in comprehensible terms". Surely, I ask as we sit in the gathering gloom of Friedrich's Berlin apartment, your mother must dream about the past? "I don't know. She can't talk to me about it."

For many, to mourn was not justified because of Nazi war crimes. Sebald wrote: "Some of those affected by the air raids, despite their grim but impotent fury in the face of such obvious madness, regarded the great firestorms as a just punishment."

Friedrich wants not only to put the suffering on record, but to question the moral justification for the air raids. This makes English publication fraught, at least for Friedrich, who considers some of what the British did to be war crimes. He is dreading his publicity tour: "The British have simply put a defence around this bombing campaign. It is unquestionable and yet I am questioning it."

Indeed, The Fire is being published in English by an American academic publisher, Columbia University Press. "I don't think there is any conspiracy about this," says Simon Winder, head of Penguin's history division. "I think the reason is much more lazy than that - it's just the idea of translating it may have proved too much." Winder did see a manuscript, but with another book on the subject by the historian Richard Overy commissioned, declined to take it on.

The tenor of Friedrich's book has irritated even British historians who regard the bombing as a mistake. "Everything he says in the book is true in terms of the details of the effects of the bombing," says Hastings. "It is when Friedrich speaks of 'war crimes' that I become suspicious. What worries me about Germany, and indeed Japan, today is that there is an increasing move towards the doctrine of moral equivalence, but I think it's important to reject that. It's one thing to say, as I do, that the bombing of Germany was a great mistake, and another to compare it to the killings of Jews or the appalling things the Japanese did."

Keith Lowe's book, Inferno, on the bombing of Hamburg in which 45,000 people died, is due next year. He says: "Something we tend to forget is the suffering we put the Germans through and Friedrich highlights that in no uncertain terms. That's a good thing.

However, the way he goes about it is not something I can agree with. When he writes about libraries being set ablaze by our bombs, he describes it as book burning; and when he writes about people killed in cellars where they were sheltered, he used the word crematoria. He thus uses the language of the Holocaust in describing our bombing of Germany. But to equate what we did with what the Nazis did is nonsense really.

"The intentions of Bomber Command were completely different from those of the SS. Arthur Harris [Air Marshall Sir Arthur 'Bomber' Harris, the commander in chief of Bomber Command] wanted to end the war as quickly as possible."

Friedrich does more than indict the British for killing German civilians. He contends that the Luftwaffe and the RAF changed the nature of war. "The idea is that the cities and their production and their morale contributed to warfare," he says. "So warfare is not simply the business of an army, it's the business of a nation. Therefore everyone is a target. That is how Churchill and Hitler changed the nature of warfare. That is what Bin Laden says. The idea is we all deserve it. You and me and those German, British, and Japanese civilians in the mass graves: they all deserve it."

I point out that the first protocol to the fourth Geneva Convention of 1977 forbids military attacks upon civilians. Civilian targets are defined as "all objects which are not military objectives". Article 52 defines military objectives as "those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralisation, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage". One might, see how Article 52 might justify bombing civilians, so long as they fell under the description of military objectives.

"This is all true," replies Friedrich, "but civilians were targets irrespective of military necessity. We saw it in Dresden and we have seen it in many places since. We see it still today. Such is modern war. And from the first there was no international court to indict those such as Harris and Sir Charles Portal, the British air force chief who, in 1942, ordered the annihilation of 900,000 enemy noncombatants. Nor is there any charge of a war crime against Winston Churchill, who was in charge of the British war effort and knew what was happening."

Should these men be charged with war crimes? "The question should at least be asked," he says guardedly.

Even in Britain, the reputation of Harris has been controversial. In 1948, disappointed at postwar criticism and that he alone of wartime commanders-in-chief was not offered a peerage, Harris left Britain for South Africa, returning in 1953 when Churchill, re-elected prime minister, offered him a baronetcy. Even after his death in 1984, Harris was dogged by opprobrium: in 1992 the Queen Mother was jeered as she unveiled a statue outside the RAF church, St Clement Danes, in London. The statue was repeatedly sprayed with graffiti. "It is very unfair," says Lowe. "If you're going to blame Harris, you've got to blame Churchill as well."

But, I ask Friedrich, wasn't the loss of life in Dresden the tragic consequence of a raid premised on military necessity? The British military historian Corelli Barnett argues that Harris took a "purely operational decision to attack Dresden, a key road and rail centre behind the German divisions fighting the Red Army", and it was "fitting that the most notorious Bomber Command attack of them all" took place a fortnight after the full horror of the Nazi extermination camps became known to the world.

Frederick Taylor, in his acclaimed Dresden: Tuesday 13 February 1945, argued that behind the seeming peace lay armaments factories and marshaling yards; Dresden was channelling men and armaments east to fight the Red Army.

Friedrich thinks such justifications are absurd. At that stage in the war the optical precision instruments manufactured in Dresden for submarines and fighter planes could never have been used. He cites a memo from Albert Speer to Hitler at the end of January 1945 that said: "We have eight weeks and we're finished." He goes on: "It is 150% evident that all those parts in Dresden would have never become weapons because of a lack of coal, a lack of locomotives and a lack of railway lines."

He doubts Dresden was as important for the transport of troops and armaments as Taylor alleges. "Like George Bush in Iraq they had bad intelligence and made a terrible mistake. But British historians do not believe it was a mistake. They bought this argument."

Not all Britons who reflect on the bombing of Dresden take this view. The philosopher AC Grayling, in his recent book Among the Dead Cities, argues that many of the raids were unnecessary and disproportionate. He focuses on Operation Gomorrah, the raid on Hamburg. He writes: "It clearly and unequivocally targeted the civilian population of a large city, which was carpet bombed at night to fulfil the aim, graphically described in Sir Arthur Harris's own words ... of 'crushing Boche, killing Boche, terrorising Boche'. If Operation Gomorrah was an immoral act, then how much more so were Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

Grayling's argument is that area or carpet bombing was immoral. "Bombing attacks that were genuine attempts at precision bombing - targeting oil, V-weapon launch sites, railways lines, U-boat pens - killed people too; but here the defence applies that there was a war on and that these things happen in war. It cannot be said deliberately targeting civilians and dropping thousands of tons of bombs on them remorselessly is a side effect of war."