Political blogger Matthew Yglesias links to this article on how Germans view their suffering in WWII 60 years later. Yglesias then expresses what is probably a common American point of view concerning this issue:
I suppose this makes me a bad person, but I have a hard time getting too seriously concerned about German suffering
during the waning days of World War II and the related issue of the
postwar expulsions of the German-speaking populations of various
Eastern European countries. On the one hand, this all kind of falls
under the "had it coming" file. On the other hand, rather than leading
— as a liberal-minded person might well have feared ex ante —
to just another cycle of conflict, things seem to have worked out
pretty much fine. Now Germany is united and once again Europe’s
strongest country, but they don’t go around conquering people anymore
and, indeed, the German population seems to have internalized a
semi-pacifist worldview that probably goes too far in some ways but
that’s strongly preferable to the previous habit of erring too far in
the other direction.
The comments from readers are worth reading as well. I can’t agree with this way of thinking. "They had it coming" is simply misstates the facts, since only a small percentage of the victims were Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. Also, would the postwar outcome have been any different if these cities had not been destroyed? Not sure, but the massive influx of resources into post-war West Germany as part of the Cold War dynamic contributed more to the success of democracy than any other factor.
This debate has been going on for some time in Germany, but is only just now reaching the mainstream US media. The discussion here really got going two months ago with commemoration of the bombing of Dresden. An interesting book to pick up on the topic is Ein Volk von Opfern? edited by Lothar Kettenacker. The book contains a number of essays on the subject by both German and British commentators, representing all points of view. One the best essays is by Wolfgang Sofsky, a sociologist of violence, entitled: Die halbierte Erinnerung. (Memory Cut in Half) . I cannot find this essay online, but here is my translation of his conclusion:
Calculations with exactly the opposite premise are
behind the idea that the German civilian population has only itself to blame for
the mass death in the bomb shelters. For after all, it was the Nazi regime that
started it with the total air war in Warsaw, Rotterdam and Coventry. Whoever
commits the first unjust act deserves what he gets – at least that’s the crude
logic of the childish morality. But injustice cannot be avenged with
injustice. The prinicple of retaliation had nothing to do with the
devastation of the cities. Those were not Poles, or Jews or Russians sitting in
the cockpits of the bombers – who would have had every reason to exact revenge.
The aerial bombardments reached their climax after the outcome of the war had
been decided by the allied ground forces.Enlightened thinking does not require a
half-memory. The postwar thought-barriers have long since been
overcome. Culpability is now anchored in the historical consciousness of
Germans. For this reason our memory can now turn back to mourn our own victims.
