Victims and villains: the Holocaust, Churchill and Dresden
This is a year of anniversaries. They mark a succession of momentous events 75 years ago which only those of advanced age will remember. January 27 marked three quarters of a century since the Russians liberated Auschwitz. The Nazis had already sent most of those reserved for slave labour, and for this reason not gassed, by train or by foot westwards. Many thousands ended up in Bergen-Belsen, where emaciated survivors were liberated by British troops in mid-April, an anniversary which had been due to be marked last week at the camp, before coronavirus intervened.
This week, it is Yom Hashoah, Israel’s annual ceremony of remembrance. In May, it will be 75 years since VE Day, the German surrender in Europe, and then in September the Japanese surrender, following the atomic bombs dropped by the US Air Force on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
For me, liberation from the Budapest ghetto happened around the same time as that of Auschwitz. Thankfully I was too young to have personal memories. But at exactly this time 75 years ago, on 20 April 1944, my grandmother was being taken from the salt mine at Beendorf, a sub-camp of Neuengamme, where she had been forced to make armaments deep in the ground and thus away from Allied bombers. She had come there from Auschwitz and Ravensbruck.
As the fighting neared its inevitable end, the head of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Bernadotte, negotiated with the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler — evidently seeking to save his own neck — to release a few thousand, mainly female, concentration camp inmates and allow them to reach Sweden. About a third of the women in the Beendorf camp died on the ten-day train journey northwards. My grandmother was one of the lucky ones, if lucky is the word. Recuperation in Sweden did not save her. Like many others who had been released as a result of the deal between Himmler and Count Bernadotte, she was to die within two years.
There is no single lesson to be drawn from this week’s Yom Hashoah, when many Jews around the world remember the Holocaust. For the ever smaller number of survivors of the death camps and concentration camps, there will be intense personal memories. Their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren will be affected in different ways. For others, there will be a variety of political and moral lessons.
This year, I have found myself particularly disturbed by the continuing debate over the bombing by British and US aircraft of the city of Dresden in February 1945, another 75th anniversary attended by the Duke of Kent. Dresden has become a powerful symbol of the suffering of ordinary Germans. Many consider it a war crime committed by the Allies, in particular by Winston Churchill.
Though they deny that there is any intended parallel between wrongdoing on both sides in the Second World War, though the dignified annual events held around the reconstructed Frauenkirche are acts of reconciliation, though the German President Frank-Walter Steinmaier’s speech stressed that Dresden’s suffering followed Hitler’s deplorable policies and acts, some of the assumptions of the Dresden campaigners risk misunderstanding and distorting the history of the Second World War. This is especially the case in light of a succession of books by German and British historians, blaming the Allies.
There appear to be political as well as moral and religious agendas. One of them is that 1939-1945 shows the need for a federal Europe. Moreover, it is now said to be Britain which, in the words of a book blurb advertising a work by a leading Dresden activist, “acts according to the principles of its military heritage, while Germany has swung to pacifism”. Through an “unreserved assumption of guilt”, Germans have regained the moral high ground and are “set to become the natural leader in Europe”.
This focus on British moral shortcomings has become widespread. It is seen in a major educational site of our National Archives. This gives just six international examples of documents relating to “Heroes and Villains”. The first example of someone schoolchildren are clearly invited to view as a “villain” is Churchill, for his role in the bombing of Dresden. Alongside him is Stalin, but not Hitler.
Admittedly, there is reason to impress on those at school that “we” are not inevitably the goodies and “they” are not always the baddies. History is complex. The trouble is that the bombing of Dresden became a staple of Nazi propaganda, when Goebbels claimed a vastly exaggerated death toll. This was later followed by David Irving’s greatly inflated statistics (later modified) in a bestselling book on the bombing.
On the merits of the decision to bomb Dresden in 1945, and more broadly on the British policy of “area” bombing at a time when targeting technologies were still poor, I have not considered this narrow question closely enough to reach a conclusion. Certainly, specialist historians such as Richard Overy have raised serious doubts.
I have resisted becoming drawn into the historical details for several reasons. The attempt to blame Churchill, if indeed there is cause for blame, rests on disputed details concerning the actual decision to bomb Dresden. It was reportedly taken while he was out of Britain on his way to Yalta. Then there is the issue of whether a request from the Russians was key to the decision. A third issue, argued by Anthony Beevor, concerns the strategic as distinct from the tactical forces at play.
Though Germany was under extreme pressure by early 1945, it had mounted a serious offensive against US forces in the Ardennes, was still bombing the UK with rockets and was developing weapons and equipment, such as jet engines, possibly capable of turning the tide. Even after the defeat of Germany, the Allies faced the potentially daunting task of invading Japan. Even if the continuing sufferings of slave labourers and POWs in Germany are to be discounted, there were pressing reasons to force a German surrender at the earliest possible moment.
Yet all these arguments, in my view, pale into relative insignificance. The amount of coverage of the destruction of Dresden lacks proportion and is diversionary.
By any normal standards, the deaths of about 25,000 people in Dresden, most of them civilians, constitutes a tremendous, wholly unacceptable toll. German civilian deaths from all Allied bombing amounted to hundreds of thousands. A danger is that Dresden is being used by some to justify pacifism, an approach which for all its nobility may partly have been responsible for the weakness which led to the outbreak of the Second World War. Further, despite the care taken by organisers of the annual commemorations at the Frauenkirche to avoid any moral equivalence between the Nazis and the Allies, the subtext of much, though not all, of the Dresden debate is to divert attention from the deeds of the Nazi state, especially but not exclusively towards Jews. The implication that Churchill was as bad as Hitler is grotesque, as has been the tendency among parts of the German population to focus excessively on their status as victims. The further result is to “ contextualise ” — that is, minimise — the Holocaust.
We canot allow ourselves to be desensitised to the point of shrugging off the deaths of the 25,000 victims of the bombing of Dresden. But nor should we be tempted to weigh them as heavily as the millions of Soviet prisoners starved to death in Nazi captivity, the millions of non-Jewish civilians and the six million Jews murdered.
Concerning the citizens of Germany, there can be no suggestion of collective guilt. This would amount to an immoral, quasi-racist approach. At the same time, we should have no illusions about certain German responses to the past, which have been far less satisfactory than generally realised.
In the course of acting as honorary academic advisor to a group of London-based Auschwitz survivors, I experienced bruising encounters with several German ambassadors in London, alongside generous help from several German scholars and one notable serving German diplomat.
The outcome of our negotiations was highly unsatisfactory. One of our aims — to several of us it was the principal one — was to receive from the German authorities the acknowledgement that slave labour in Auschwitz had been illegal. I have recently been informed by someone then serving in the German Foreign Ministry that they had considered the point, but rejected it. It would prove too costly. In lieu, survivors were offered a very small cash sum and an informal acknowledgement of their suffering, but on the condition that receipt of the money would be conditional on abandonment of any future claims.
Germany’s extraordinary refusal to acknowledge that slave labour imposed by the Nazis had been illegal followed the effective early abandonment of war crimes trials, and the employment after 1945 of former Nazis by Allied and then also by West German intelligence agencies. (The Soviet record seems to have been dubious too.)
Now that 75 years have passed, does any of this matter? Ceremonies to commemorate the Holocaust have become widely established. There are ever more museums and monuments. Outright Holocaust denial is restricted in Europe and North America to the fringes. But I cannot help feeling that, with many honourable exceptions, the response in Germany to its deplorable history under Hitler has been considerably less complete than many suppose.
