Crime and Punishment (Page 2)

Shortly after the heated public debate over Sebald's argument subsided, a historian named Jörg Friedrich published a 600-page study titled The Fire: Germany in the Air War, 1940-1945, which vividly and emotionally described the air war from a German perspective. Like a man with a movie camera, Friedrich takes his readers into the burning cellars and rivers, into the collapsing buildings and howling firestorms--into what he calls the "Leideform," or specific "form of suffering," experienced by the German population on the ground. His subsequent edited volume of photographs gives a condensed and almost unbearably explicit version of The Fire: devastated urban landscapes as far as the eye can see; neatly stacked piles of charred, rigid bodies; an incinerated, grotesquely shrunken corpse sitting in a bucket.

Intentionally or not, these photographs uncannily reprise the now familiar images of Holocaust death, and like those images they serve as both documentation and denunciation of their subject matter, in this case the Anglo-American decision to target the highly flammable medieval city centers and their largely civilian populations, not just the railways, oil refineries or munitions factories located on the periphery. What is the morality, Friedrich asks, of the so-called "morale bombing" in late February 1945 that destroyed Pforzheim, a small medieval town of no military or strategic importance, killing more than 20,000 inhabitants (a third of its population) in a few hours? What is the morality of the "science" that English strategists perfected during the course of the war to turn urban centers into raging infernos that burned or suffocated German civilians, many of them children who had no role in supporting the Nazi regime?

To raise such questions doesn't diminish the barbarism and inhumanity of the Holocaust. Nor does it cast doubt on the need to defeat Hitler. Much of the bombing--even including, perhaps, the late destruction of Dresden in February 1945--had an explicit military rationale. (The English historian Frederick Taylor has recently argued that the city housed many small munitions factories and that its railway hub was being used to funnel German soldiers to stop the Red Army's advance from the East.) What is more, not all of Friedrich's methods can be defended: He deliberately appropriates Holocaust terminology to describe the Allies' "extermination" techniques or the "crematoria" of burning buildings, and he makes copious use of traumatized contemporary witnesses, whose accounts are notoriously unreliable. But Friedrich is a provocateur, not a Holocaust denier. A former Trotskyist who has written books on Wehrmacht crimes in Russia and the scandal of Nazi judges in the Federal Republic, he knows that National Socialist ideology aspired to create an empire "cleansed" of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and the infirm, and based on a racial hierarchy in which Russians and Poles were reduced to slavery. But in exploring these questions he does indict the means by which the Allies forced Germany to surrender. The strategy of "total war," he argues, engendered evil on both sides, and though Hitler initiated the practice, the Allies followed him down an ultimately criminal, unjustifiable path. In this sense The Fire represents the continuation of his generation's indictment of National Socialism--except now the finger is pointed at the Allies, and sympathy is extended to the civilian Germans who were their victims.

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