Freelance historian Jörg Friedrich’s sensational book Der Brand will be released in English later this summer and is sure to ignite a debate about the allied firebombing of Germany. Friedrich presents compelling evidence that the bombings were relatively ineffective in curtailing military production in Germany but were in fact designed to inflict massive civilian casualties. The folks at Sign and Sight have translated a recent article by Friedrich where he elaborates on a provocative thesis that the destructive firebombing of Dresden (as well as others) towards the end of the war were conducted primarily to impress the advancing Soviet army:
From
autumn to the following spring, the Western Allies came to see that
their "war comrade", who had won the liberation campaign, had his own
way of reading the events. Making him see things differently was
impossible. In late March and early April, the other Allies were just
warming up their military muscles with the encirclement of the Ruhr
region. No wonder; they outweighed the German forces 12 to 1. The
German Western Army stopped fighting. Their tanks stopped moving.
Petrol and the will to fight ran out at the same time. But in the
military twilight of February – March, the West took a nervous look at
the Soviet military steamroller, rolling forward with no regard for
casualties, and loaded the bombs. The occidental Mongol devastations
could begin.Stalin had nothing comparable to this airborne
might. While his men could walk 30 kilometres a day, Churchill’s
bombers could fly at 300 kilometres per hour. The Russian army took 18
days to get from the Vistula to the Oder. But the British planes
reached Dresden from the British Midlands in just five hours! After a
40 minute operation, the city is a heap of rubble, strewn with 35,000
dead. At a distance of 110 kilometres from the first lines of Marshall
Konyev’s troops which were in the process of liberating Upper Silesia,
this is, to put it mildly, the demonstration of a capacity. If not a
military capacity, then at least the capacity of a military. Konyev,
the conqueror on the ground, did not profit militarily from the attack
and took no notice. Zhukov would later castigate the barbarianism of
his allies in Dresden; from that point on, they were his arch enemies.
But what were they in February 1945? And what was Zhukov for them in
September 1939? An ally of Hitler’s in the subjugation of Poland. In
one and the same war, enemies became partners, partners rivals and then
partial enemies once more. The Cold War fronts replaced those of the
World War as if by an invisible hand. The interfaces are Dresden in
Europe and Hiroshima in Asia. In these theatres of slaughter, it is no
longer possible to distinguish between partnership and enmity.
I am not a scholar of WWII military strategy, but Friedrich’s argument is not convincing. The bombing of Dresden was a great human tragedy, but there is not sufficient evidence that its destruction was meant as a lesson to Stalin. There is much evidence that it was a routine operation targeting one of the few large cities in Germany that still had an intact communications center and rail system. Also, his statement that "The
German Western Army stopped fighting" is simply false as evidenced by the German breakout success at the Battle of Bulge. Friedrich’s valuable historical work poses a dilemma for us: how do we discuss the efficacy and morality of bombing civilian populations without succumbing to the rhetoric of the extreme right, who use terms such as "bombing holocaust" ?
