Dialog International

Herta Müller enrages the Serbs by speaking the truth

\

Last month Nobel Prize-winning novelist Herta Müller participated in a public forum in Belgrade.  When asked about NATO and her support back in the 1990s for the bombing of Serbia Müller  responded:

“I still think the same. A lot has happened. A lot of evil was inflicted on Kosovo and Bosnia, all because of this horrendous nationalism. I was scared. I did not expect that from a country like Yugoslavia which, back in the day, was a haven. I did not expect for nationalism to explode in it. This country caused its own pain and suffering. Serbs inflicted evil upon themselves”.

The response to her words in Serbia was angry and swift:

Beschimpfungen prasseln auf Herta Müller nieder. «Skandal: Die Tochter eines SS-Offiziers spuckt auf Kirche und Serben», titelte die Zeitung «Kurir». «Müller missbraucht unsere Gastfreundschaft», empörte sich das Boulevardblatt «Informer», und die grösste Zeitung «Blic» sprach von einem «Schock». Die Literatin sei eine Vertreterin «des Angst machenden, tiefen und primitiven Hasses gegen die Serben, wie ihn die Deutschen sonst einzig gegen die Juden gezeigt haben», war in der Regierungszeitung «Novosti» zu lesen.

Serbia is so closely aligned with Russia that any criticism of the country is perceived as an attack on Putin and the Kremlin.  Predictably, the pro-Putin (and pro-Milosevic) media in Germany was also quick to condemn Herta Müller.  In the pro-Putin propaganda portal NachDenkSeiten Albrecht Müller contrasted Herta Müller's "warmongering" with the pacifism of another German Nobel Prize laureate Heinrich Böll:

Beide haben den Literatur-Nobelpreis bekommen, Heinrich Böll 1972, Herta Müller 2009. Böll demonstrierte in Mutlangen gegen die Aufstellung von Atomraketen, Herta Müller wirbt für Kriegseinsätze der NATO. Und sie unterscheidet messerscharf in Gut und Böse. So auch bei einem Auftritt in der serbischen Hauptstadt Belgrad in der vor-vergangenen Woche. Wir sind von einem deutschen Studenten, von Lucas Maximilian Schubert, auf dieses Ereignis aufmerksam gemacht worden. „Diese Woche ist Herta Mueller der Hauptgast an der Belgrader Buchmesse und hat einige sehr interessante Statements geäußert. Vor allem sprach sie für militärischen Interventionismus seitens der NATO zum „Schutz der Menschenrechte“, von der Alleinschuld des serbischen Volkes für die Kriege im ehemaligen Jugoslawien und der „Arroganten Haltung der Serben gegenüber dem Militärbündnis“

It is true that Heinrich Böll's Catholic faith informed his pacifist positions, but Böll was also a champion of dissident writers and scientists in Soviet Russia.  In any case, I can't see him supporting the authoritarian kleptocracy of Putin's Russia, much less actively promoting pro-Kremlin propaganda like NachDenkSeiten. 

But the outrage at Herta Müller's comments in Belgrade reflects a larger issue: the total lack of Vergangenheitsbewältigung with respect to the war crimes in the Milosevic era: 

Serbia, political analysts say, is creeping steadily backward politically to the ominous days of the 1990s amid a groundswell of nationalist sentiment. The government in Belgrade is even welcoming convicted war criminals and associates of Slobodan Milosevic, the former dictator and indicted architect of Serbia’s genocidal program who died in 2006, back into the fold. And as Russia pushes to expand its influence in the Balkans — Europe’s “soft underbelly,” in the words of the political scientist Ivan Krastev — it is finding a receptive ally in Serbia. This comes even as the country is likely to become the next member state of the European Union.

Conspiracy theories about Western plots against Serbs are rife in the country, spread by the pro-government news media, which also orchestrates smear campaigns against government critics.

Now we are seeing similar conspiracy theories being propagated in Germany on the far left and radical right (the so-called Querfront).

Jakob Augstein Tells Readers to "Look Away" ("wegsehen") from Russian Atrocities in Syria

Just imagine what the scene would be in Germany if the United States incessantly bombed hospitals in a Syrian city and images of injured and dead children were broadcast on German TV.  Sahra Wagenknecht would hold forth with angry tirades against NATO in the Bundestag. Her husband Oskar Lafontaine would appear on the talk shows and lash out against "American Imperialism" (oh, wait, he does that anyway).  And Jakob Augstein, the "left-wing" Spiegel columnist would call for massive street demonstrations and for a boycott of Israel. But the images we are seeing now are the result of RUSSIAN bombs - not American.  So Jakob Augstein tells his readers to "look away" ("wegsehen") :

Intervenieren? Es ist kein Zufall, dass man diese Vokabel für die kriegerischen Einsätze des Westens nutzt, die in der großen Mehrzahl der Fälle die Dinge nicht besser, sondern schlechter gemacht haben. In Afghanistan, im Irak, in Libyen da wäre man froh gewesen, wenn der Westen nicht "interveniert" hätte. Und auch Syrien wäre heute besser dran, wenn weder der Westen noch Russland noch Iran noch Saudi-Arabien "interveniert" hätten.

Wenn man mir Bilder von toten Kinder zeigt, mache ich von meinem Recht auf Wegsehen Gebrauch.

("Intervention? It is no accident that this word is invoked for acts of war by the West, which in most cases have made things worse rather than better. In Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya we would have been much better off it the west had not "intervened. And also Syria would be much better off today if neither the West, nor Russi nor Iran nor Saudi Arabia had not "intervened").  If you show me images of dead children i exercise my right to look away.")

Funny how the same people who get outraged at anything the US does just shrug their shoulder when Russia commits atrocities.

Did Augstein - or for that matter, Wagenknecht or Lafontaine - make any statements when a detailed international report presented irrefutable evidence that Russia was involved in shooting down MH17, killing 298 passengers?  No, they exercised their "Right to Look Away.

See also: Augstein: Appeasement of Putin a "Necessity"

Kremlin Troll Wolfgang Bittner Blames US for Aleppo Bombing

The world was horrified by the image of 5-year-old Omran Daqneesh whose family was the destroyed by bombing in Aleppo. The 24/7 bombing by Assad/Russian warplanes has resulted in the deaths of thousands of citizens - including hundreds of children.

For Wolgang Bittner - a card-carrying member of Putin's Fifth Column in Germany - the annihilation of Aleppo is further evidence of America's treachery. Bittner is a frequent contributor to Kremlin-backed media outlets such as RT Deutsch, Sputnik and the magazine Hintergrund. Bittner is a self-proclaimed "expert" on the United States and published a book about how the US has taken over Europe ("Die Eroberung Europa durch die USA").

Here the Truther site NachDenkSeiten has published a poem by Bittner using the image of Omran Dagneesh to slam America and the West.  "Bomben-Stimmung" is a cynical play on the German word "Bombenstimmung" - loosely translated as "fantastic atmosphere".  In the second stanza he writes that "humanitarian missions" and "democracy" are just a pretense for capitalist exploitation.

 

Below is a photo of a Russian SU-34 fighter bomber delivering "humanitarian aid" to the Syrian city of Aleppo.

 

Review: Nikolaus Wachsmann's KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

(Photo: Selection at Auschwitz- Birkenau / May 1944)

Nikolaus Wachsmann, Professor of History at the University of London, takes the reader on a 12-year journey into innermost circle of Hell in his monumental work KL (abbreviation for Konzentrationslager - concentration camp). This 800-page work includes over 150 pages of footnotes: Wachsmann spent years researching original sources, including 45 camp archives that were preserved.  How he could read and systematically sort through the statistics and the stories of torture, slave labor,selections,  death marches, horrific "medical" experiments on children, mass murder, etc. without going mad is beyond me. There is a danger that the reader grows numb from the sheer numbers of prisoners murdered in the camps - beginning with hundreds in the days following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, to thousands following the 1938 November Pogrom, to tens of thousands Hitler launches his war, to, finally, hundreds of thousands as the Nazis carry out the Final Solution against Europe's Jews.  Of an estimated 2.3 million prisoners who entered the hell of the Nazi concentration camps, over 1.7 million were killed, whether gassed or perished through the Nazi program of Vernichtung durch Arbeit ("annihilation through labor"). Wachsmann does manage to bring the nightmare down to a human scale by recounting the stories of individual prisoners that he obtained from personal memoirs, letters or eyewitness testimony.  But nearly a million men, women and children entered the death camp at Auschwitz and were gassed within two hours of the their arrival without registration. They are what the writer and camp survivor Primo Levi called "the Drowned" - we will never know their identities.

Still, as Wachsmann points out, it is mistake to just associate the Nazi concentration camps with Auschwitz.  For there were 27 main camps and over 1000 satellite camps. Professor Wachsmann goes into great detail about the camp network, its function and administration.  True, we know more about Auschwitz because it was the largest camp which doubled as mass killing center and a vast slave labor facility for IG Farben and other German companies.  But we cannot lose sight of the "lesser" camps: Sobibor, for example, murdered about a quarter of a million people, a quarter as many as Auschwitz-Birkenau in one three-hundredth of the space and half the time. Precisely because of this efficiency, we know virtually nothing about the dead. 

The camps served different purposes throughout the 12-year Reich.  Here is Wachsmann writing about the liberation of Dachau on April 29, 1945.  Dachau -  the only camp I've personally visited -  was the first camp established by the Nazis in 1933 and one of the last to be liberated:

"It was more than twelve years since the SS had set up its first makeshift camp on the site.  Since then, Dachau had changed its appearance many times over and gained multiple functions: bulwark of the Nazi revolution, model camp, SS training ground, slave labor reservoir, human experimentation site, mass extermination ground, and center of a satellite camp network. Dachau was nto the most deadly KL, but it was the most notorious at the time, inside Germany and abroad."

I learned many things from this book, including extensive information about the hierarchy of prisoners in the camp - as denoted by the colored triangles. At the bottom were the black (criminal), yellow (Jews) and green ("Asozial" - social outsiders).  Beginning in 1937 the Nazis began rounding up these "social outsiders" - pimps, prostitutes, beggars, homeless people - often just poor people down on their luck.   They were subjected to the worst abuse as "human scum" - very few survived for long in the camps and little is known about this group,

One question has always intrigued me:  how much did the German population at large know about the concentration camps?  The early camps were often in residential areas of German cities and the prisoners were often paraded down the street in broad daylight. Later, slave laborers - often Poles or Russian POW's would work along side German workers int he munition plants.  And in the end, the emaciated inmates from the camps in the east were brought "home" to the Reich in Death Marches that passed though towns and villages throughout Germany.   Wachsmann writes that a small portion of the population tried to help some of the prisoners when they could by giving food and water.  Likewise a small portion believed the Nazi propaganda that these were "subhumans" who deserved their fate - they joined in with the SS in tormenting the prisoners, or hunting down and killing those who tried to escape. The vast majority looked away or reacted in silence - whether out of indifference or out of fear of reprisals from the Nazi terror apparatus.

The one individual who makes frequent appearances throughout KL  - and who was responsible the management and expansion of the camp network from the early days to the end - is Heinrich Himmler.  I strongly recommend reading Peter Longerich's definitive biography Heinrich Himmler (see my review) along side KL. 

KL is not an easy book to read - the facts are too horrific to comprehend.  Nikolaus Wachsmann makes it readable, and any student of the Third Reich or of the Holocaust will need to add this work of immense scholarship to his/her bookshelf.

 

Review: The Berlin Diaries 1940-1945 of Marie 'Missie' Vassiltchikov

.Princess Marie ("Missie") Vassiltchikov was born in St. Petersburg in the waning days of the Russian Empire.  She was the fourth child of a member of the Fourth Duma, Prince Hilarion Vassiltchikov (fr) and his wife, the former Princess Lidiya Leonidovna Vyazemskaya. Missie and her beautiful sister Tatiana arrived penniless in wartime Berlin from Lithuania, but - thanks to their fluency in 4 languages and family connections - were able to find employment in the Auswärtiges Amt  (AA) the Information Department of the German Foreign Ministry.  The AA turned out to be a refuge for aristocrats, most of whom opposed the Nazi regime.  Missie was the assistant to Adam von Trott, a brilliant lawyer who was also the great-great-great grandson of John Jay, America's first Chief Justice.  Missie kept a quite detailed secret diary during the war which was published only after her death in 1978.

The princess could write! In colorful, idiomatic English.  And what a story she had to tell. In her breezy style she describes scenes of horror of the almost nightly (later, both day and night) bombing of Berlin juxtaposed with champagne and oyster brunches with her aristocratic friends (from across Europe and beyond - and they all seemed to be somehow related by blood.) I have yet to read any better descriptions of what it was like to live during the Allied firebombing of Germany (and later, Austria).  Here is a typical diary entry - from November 1943 following a bombing raid:

"I decided to go out and try and reach my office, in the hope - wildly optimistic, as it turned out - of jumping into a hot bath as soon as I got there. Clad in slacks, my head muffled in the scarf and wearing a pair of Heinz's fur-line military goggles, I started off. The instant I left the house I was enveloped in smoke and ashes rained down on my head. I could breathe only by holding a handkerchief to my mouth and blessed Heinz for lending me those googles.

At first our Woyrschstrasse did not look too bad; but one block away, at the corner of Luetzowstrasse, all the houses were burnt out.  As I continued down Luetzowstrasse the devastation grew worse; many buildings were still burning and I had to keep to the middle of street, which was difficult on account of the numerous wrecked trams. ...At the end of Luetzowstrasse, about four blocks away from the office, the houses on both sides of the street had collapsed and i had to climb over mounds of smoking rubble, leaking water pipes and other wreckage to get to the other side. Until then I had seen very few firemen around, but here some were busily trying to extricate people trapped in the cellars. ...Many cars were weaving their way cautiously through the ruins, blowing their horns wildly.  A woman seized  my arm and yelled that one of the walls was tottering and we both started to run. ... Then I saw my food shop Krause, or rather what remained of it.  Maria had begged me to buy some provisions on the way home, as the one in which her coupons were registered had been destroyed. But poor Krause would be of no help either now."

But something else was going on in and around the Auswärtiges Amt , and we first catch wind of it in Missie's diary entry of August 2, 1943:

"Later I dragged a suitcase over the Potsdam and went to be early...Unfortunately sleep was postponed by the arrival Gottfried Bismarck, Loremarie Schönburger and Count Helldorf...It is all very  hush-hush, but Loremarie, who has also moved out to Potsdam, keeps me informed about what I call 'the Conspiracy'. She is feverishly active, trying to bring various opposition elements together, and acts often in a head-strong and imprudent way.  Gottfried, however never breathes a word."

This is Missie's first reference to the July 20 plot.  Missie's boss, Adam von Trott, and others in the Foreign Ministry were very much involved in the plot.  Missie says little about the details in her diary, but she must have been more involved than she lets on - for she reveals the exact date it was to happen.  After Operation Valkyrie fails, the diary takes on a somber tone as one by one Missie's friends are arrested.  Most of them - including Adam von Trott -  are horribly tortured and executed by the Nazis. 

It was something of a miracle that Missie herself wasn't arrested.  To avoid the fate of her friends she left Berlin for Vienna where she worked as a nurse in the Luftwaffe hospital. Conditions there were awful as rations run low.  As the war winds down we see the princess -half-starved - stumbling over dead bodies in the streets of Vienna following yet another bombing raid.  The elegant champagne brunches in Berlin are a distant memory.

Footnote: The Berlin Diaries has been translated into Russian (Берлинский дневник 1940—1945) and French - but, as far as I can tell, not German. This is unfortunate, since it is a great read, not to mention an important historical document.  I first encountered MarieVassiltchikov's diary through excerpts (in German) in Oliver Lubrich's interesting Berichte aus der Abwurfzone:Ausländer erleben den Bombenkrieg in Deutschland 1939 bis 1945 (2007) (See my review)

Related Post: Review: Antje Vollmer's Doppelleben

National World War II Museum - The Road to Berlin

We spent last week in New Orleans for both work and pleasure - okay, more for pleasure, enjoying the best music and food any US city has to offer.  This great city is still - ten years on - traumatized by Hurricane Katrina.  Every New Orleanian will tell you that this was a MAN-MADE disaster, and there are visible scars scattered throughout the city.  Besides the outstanding restaurant and incomparable jazz, there are plenty of other attractions and activities for any taste.  I had a couple of free hours and visited the National World War II Museum which is located just in the Central Business District. 

This is how the City of New Orleans describes the museum:

Since its opening day on D-Day – June 6, 2000 – nearly two million visitors have toured the National WWII Museum. A must-see for history lovers and all patriots, it has been designated by the U.S. Congress as America’s official WWII Museum. Powerful images and extraordinary artifacts bring to life the American Spirit, the courage, teamwork and sacrifice of the young men and women who won the war and changed the world. From the 1930s prelude to war, to the Normandy Invasion and the battles of the Pacific Islands, visitors trace America's role in the war and on the Home Front.

Visitors to the museum can choose between following a Pacific Theater track - "The Road to Tokyo"  - or a European/North Africa track - "The Road to Berlin".  I chose the Road to Berlin, which took me through a series of interactive exhibits from the preparations for war, the Pearl Harbor attack and Hitler's declaration of war, the setbacks in North Africa and invasion of Italy, Normandy Invasion and the aerial bombing of Germany.  Visitors are presented with a magnetic card  a "dog tag" - which is attached to an actual soldier, sailor or pilot which one can "follow" throughout the course of the war. 

Each exhibit is devoted to a particular battle or phase of the war and contains amazing footage, sound effects, artifacts, and oral histories.  I found the exhibits on the Merchant Marines, Normandy Invasion and Battle of the Bulge particularly effective.  The exhibits showed American troops in victory, but also defeats, retreats, friendly fire incidents, etc. I get it that this is the "National" - i.e. American - war museum, so the emphasis is on the American experience.  But I still think there could be more information on America's allies - especially the role of the Soviet Union - in defeating the Nazis.  Also, the exhibit on the the firebombing of Germany emphasized the targeting of military-industrial targets rather than the civilian population.  The section on the bombing of Dresden features Kurt Vonnegut (who was a POW in the city at the time of the bombing) and little about the firestorm that killed over 25,000 citizens in a city that had zero military-strategic value. 

Still, the National World War II Museum is an impressive effort and a must-see for any visitor to New Orleans.

There was one other - much happier - connection to Berlin during my stay in New Orleans:  we were able to listen to the amazing jazz pianist David Torkanowsky perform one evening.  "Tork" is a true New Orleans treasure and is the son of the Flamenco dancer Teresa Romera and the Berlin-born conductor and violinist Werner Torkanowsky.  Only in America could the son of a German Jew carry on the rich tradition of New Orleans jazz.

Review: Nicholas Stargardt's The German War

If you plan to read one history book this year, I strongly recommend Nicholas Stargardt's The German War : A Nation Under Arms 1939-1945.  The Oxford historian Stargardt has written the definitive work on the the German Home Front  - how ordinary people lived during wartime Germany, what they thought, what they knew.  He bases his research on the letters, diaries, memoirs, interviews with average citizens, but the book is also anchored with frequent references to the voluminous diaries of Joseph Goebbels and the surprisingly frank reports on public sentiment by Himmler's Sicherheitsdienst ("Security Service"). 

What is clear from The German War is that when Hitler launched his attack on Poland in 1939 there was not widespread enthusiasm among the broad populace for war.  Nevertheless, the vast majority of Germans believed the propaganda that  it was a legitimate war of national defense - defense against Bolshevism and "the international Jewry."  And this sense of legitimacy persisted to the very end in 1945 and beyond. “The worse their war went, the more obviously ‘defensive’ it became,” Stargardt writes.  Also, there was the collective belief that the “cowardly submission” of 1918 must never be repeated.  Even after Stalingrad, when it was apparent to many (most?) Germans that the nation was facing defeat there was little resistance against the regime. “However unpopular the war became, it still remained legitimate—more so than Nazism itself.”

Even the Church (both Catholic and Protestant denominations) was a steadfast supporter of the war effort.  This is one of the more depressing parts to read.  I had always admired Cardinal Clemens August Graf von Galen - the "Lion of Münster" for speaking out forcibly against the Nazi program of euthanizing mentally ill and physically disabled German children (and adults - more than 200,000).  But Galen refused to speak out on behalf of murdered Jews, and even after the war defended the campaign against "Judaeo-Bolshevism."

There were distressingly few examples of resistance.  Stargardt follows a young Jewish woman - Marianne Strauss - who had gone into hiding in 1943 when her family had been deported.  She was passed from house to house by an underground network of socialists - the "Bund"  - and managed to survive until liberated by American forces.  Then, of course, there was the group of aristocrats around Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, whose botched July 20 coup was too little and too late to succeed. 

Stargardt spends much of the book exploring the question: when and what did the German people know about about the mass killing of Poles and Russians in the east and then the mass extermination of millions of  Jews? Early on and quite a bit, is the answer.  German soldiers were often "execution tourists" who eagerly photographed the mass killing of Polish and Russian citizens ("Partisans"); the rolls of film were sent home to be developed, and the prints were widely circulated among families and neighbors.  Millions of Germans witnessed or participated in the mass deportations of German Jews, and then squabbled over the left-behind possessions.  Hitler left little doubt as to the fate of these deported Jews, boasting in radio broadcasts to the nation of the Ausrottung ("extermination") of Jews as revenge for their treachery against the German Volk.  When British and American bombs rained down on German cities, this was seen by the population as Vergeltung ("Payback") for the treatment of Jews:

"Time and again people linked the bombing to the pogrom of November 1938, a connection which might seem strange in a society awash with rumors about the mass killing of Jews in the east. But 1938 had been the last anti-Semitic action which many people had witnessed and actively participated in throughout Germany: in its aftermath, most of the Jews who remained in the Reich had moved to larger cities.  In some places there was also a direct connection to the bombing war.: in Wetzlar, Braunschweig, Solingen, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Siegen, Cologne, Emden and Hamburg, massive concrete bunker towers had been erected on vacant sites where synagogues had stood until November 1938. In Cologne and Aachen, people connected the burnt synagogues with the churches destroyed in the air raids, evoking a sense of divine retribution. As a clerical informer summarized such views for the local Gestapo: 'Yes, it's deserved...everything avenges itself on earth.' Thus, many people saw 1938 as the start of the German war against the Jews, which set in motion the chain of escalating mutual retaliation. By the late summer and autumn (of 1943) such hitherto rare admissions of German responsibility and guilt had spread to parts of Germany which had not been bombed at all."

This, according to Stargardt, was the main reason why the war effort was supported long after it was apparently a lost cause: Germany's enemies (primarily the "Bolsheviks and World Jewry) would exact revenge on the people for what Germany had done to then, and therefore the "defensive" war must continue.  And this view persisted long after Germany's unconditional surrender.  A survey conducted in 1946 found that 37% of respondents believed that 'the extermination of the Jews and Poles and other non-Aryans' had been necessary for 'the security of the Germans.'  By 1947 a clear majority of Germans believed that  "National Socialism had been a good idea carried out badly." It would not be long before the myth of Germany as Opfer - with its double connotation of sacrifice and victim - began to seep into the national conscience.  

See also my reviews of:

Peter Longerich, Davon haben wir nichts gewusst

Bajohr & Pohl, Massenmord und schlechtes Gewissen

Ian Kershaw, The End

Review: Richard Overy's The Bombers and the Bombed

British historian Richard Overy's book The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War over Europe, 1940-1945 is the most comprehensive study yet of the bombing campaign that left many of Europe's great cities in ruin by 1945.  The book is neatly divided between the Anglo-American perspective of how the bombing program evolved and was executed and the story of the German victims and the efforts to defend against the aerial attacks.  Overy also breaks new ground in writing about how the bombing campaign we extended beyond Germany to Italy and Bulgaria, and - most controversially - to German-occupied countries: France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark,

The rationale for "strategic bombing" was that “bombing alone might unhinge the enemy war effort, undermine popular war willingness, and perhaps even force the politicians to sue for peace before the need to undertake dangerous, large-scale, and potentially costly amphibious operations.” But in practice this did not work out this way.  For the campaign was largely a failure for the first two years of the operation.  Overy writes about how the initial bombing attacks caused negligible damage of Germany's manufacturing infrastructure but did result in very high casualties of the bomber crews and the loss of aircraft.  Overy points out that in the beginning of the air war it was illegal to target areas where civilians could be negligently killed, but as the war went on " the ethical restraints imposed at the start of the war were eroded step by step as a result of the decision [in 1940] to initiate ‘unrestricted’ bombing of targets in urban areas.” 

The turning point in the air war was when the RAF decided to deploy incendiary instead of explosive bombs.  The British High Command was impressed when the Luftwaffe set the City of London on fire with 100,000 incendiary bombs during the December 29, 1940 raid.  While the Germans dropped 57,000 tons of high explosives and incendiaries on Britain, at a conservative estimate, Bomber Command and the U.S. 8th Air Force alone dropped over 1.6 million tons on Germany. The "success" of the new strategy with incendiaries was demonstrated in Operation Gomorrah when in July of 1943  British and American planes bombed Hamburg for a full week, creating a giant firestorm that killed 42,600 civilians and wounded 37,000 and virtually destroying most of the city. Overy writes about the plight of civilians as they try to survive the firebombing and cope with loss of shelter.  The best book about that aspect of the air war is still Jörg Friedrich's Der Brand (2002).

So did "strategic bombing" meet the objective of hastening the end of the war.  The verdict, Overy writes, is mixed, and controversial even today.  To be sure, the bombing forced Germany to divert resources from the Eastern Front to construct air defenses in every German city.  Also, the Americans were especially effective in decimating the Luftwaffe and destroying Germany's synthetic fuel plants.  By 1945 Allied air power was supreme and Germany lacked virtually all defense capabilities against the bombers. On the other hand, if the intent was to destroy and disrupt Germany's industrial output, the results were less than satisfactory: while the inner cities were destroyed, manufacturing infrastructure - even for armaments - was largely intact when the war ended in 1945. 

One other major failure of the "strategic bombing":  the idea was that the constant bombing would demoralize the German civilian population so much so that they would turn against the Nazi regime in revolt.  But, as Overy writes, just the opposite occurred:

"The effect of bombing was not, in the end, as the Allies hoped, to drive a wedge between people and regime, but the opposite, to increase dependence on the state and the party ad to prompt willing participation by civilians in structures designed for their own defense with a remarkable degree of social discipline. The experience of being bombed did indeed create widespread anxiety, demoralization, social conflict, and limited political criticism, but it was balanced in the end by the capacity of the dictatorship to exploit racial policy unscrupulously to its advantage (redistributing Jewish apartments and furnishings, using camp and foreign labor to clear up debris, etc.), while ensuring that minimum levels of social provision, flexible propaganda, administrative competence, and targeted coercion would prevent anything like collapse."

One interesting point that Overy mentions only in passing: the German civilian population harbored very little animosity against the British and American bombers who were causing so much death and destruction all around them.  They were far more fearful of the Russian Red Army troops advancing from the east. Why this stoicism among the civilians towards the bombing?  This is the question explored by W.E Sebald in his last book Luftkrieg und Literatur (see my review) and by the historians Frank Bajohr and Dieter Pohl in their book Massenmord und schlechtes Gewissen (see my review).

Merkel: USA is responsible for Syrian refugee crisis

No, not the chancellor, Angela Merkel, but rather the law professor Reinhard Merkel. Unlike the chancellor, Reinhard Merkel is a Putin loyalist.  After Putin followed Hitler's playbook in his 1938 Anschluss of Austria by holding a phony plebiscite in Crimea, Professor Merkel gave Russia his seal of approval for taking the peninsula. "Hat Russland die Krim annektiert? Nein." Ever since then, Prof. Merkel has been an honored guest on the Russian propaganda outlet RT Deutsch.

In his most recent pro-Putin piece in the FAZ, Prof. Reinhard blames the US for Assad's slaughter of Syrians and the ensuing refugee crisis:

Am 24.März 2013 erschien in der „New York Times“ unter der Überschrift „Waffenlieferungen an syrische Rebellen ausgedehnt - mit Hilfe der CIA“ ein detailreicher Bericht. Er weist mehr als 160 Frachtflüge mit Kriegswaffen nach, die seit Anfang 2012 aus Saudi-Arabien, Qatar und Jordanien regelmäßig am türkischen Flughafen Esenboga entladen und von dort über die Grenze nach Syrien geschafft wurden - alle mit logistischer und vielfacher sonstiger Hilfe der CIA. Das zeige, konstatiert die Zeitung nüchtern, dass die Vereinigten Staaten entgegen regierungsamtlichen Bekundungen ihren arabischen Verbündeten sehr wohl „auch bei der Förderung der tödlichen Seite des Bürgerkriegs“ zur Hand gingen.

No mention of Assad's brutal murder and torture or demonstrators who took to the streets - initially in peaceful protests against the dictatorship.  And what weapons does Assad's army use?  Kalishnikov rifles and Russian RPGs. Assad's most potent weapons are Russian MiGs and gunships, which are used to drop barrel bombs on Syrian citizens.  Yet Russia - Assad's most powerful ally - in not mentioned once in the FAZ piece.

Is the US really to blame for the mass slaughter in Syria?  The Washington Post has a timely update on the civil war - Islamic State has Killed Many Syrians, but Assad's Forces Have Killed More: 

BEIRUT — President Bashar al-Assad’s government has killed far more people in Syria this year than the Islamic State, monitoring organizations and analysts say, even as the extremist group grabs headlines with its shocking brutality.

Between January and July, Assad’s military and pro-government militias killed 7,894 people, while the Islamic State killed 1,131, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain. In a single day last month, government airstrikes are said to have killed more than 100 people in a residential area of Douma, a suburb of the capital, Damascus.

“No human being should have to endure what Assad is putting us through,” said Hassan Takuldin, 27, who witnessed the Douma attacks.

Government forces are responsible for many more of the estimated 250,000 deaths in the four-year-old conflict than are the Islamic State militants and rebel groups, analysts and monitoring groups say. The figures, they say, underscore how Assad’s indiscriminate use of violence has empowered the Islamic State and other extremist groups and forced millions of Syrians to flee to neighboring countries and Europe. [...]The government’s Russian-supplied aircraft can fly practically unopposed over rebel-held areas to launch airstrikes, which include releasing barrel bombs, metal drums packed with explosives.

Why did Professor Merkel fail to mention once the most important international player in the Syrian conflict?  Maybe he wanted more exposure on RT Deutsch and Sputnik.  But the more important question is:  why did the FAZ - a newspaper I respect - print such a  distorted piece on such an important topic?

 

Review: Ralf Rothmann's Im Frühling sterben

I've read several novels that deal with the last days of World War II: Uwe Timm's Die Entdeckug der Currywurst is a fairy tale about a young Wehrmacht soldier gone AWOL who finds refuge in the arms of war widow who happens to be an excellent cook. Arno Surminski's Winter Fünfundvierzig oder die Frauen von Palmnicken deals with the Holocaust in East Prussia which raged on even as defeat was certain. On the non-fiction side, historian Ian Kershaw in The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944 - 1945 attempts to understand why the fighting and killing continued even though the generals, the soldiers, and the population knew that the Allies would prevail.

Senseless fighting and killing of those final days is also at the center of Ralf Rothmann's new novel Im Frühling sterben ("To Die in the Springtime") - one of the best books of the year.  Like Surminski's Winter 1945, Im Frühling sterben is structured as a "frame novel": a son seeks to unlock the secret of his dying father's life.  In this case, the father was a coal miner who is emotionally detached from his wife and son but on his deathbed he starts to open up about the horror of his wartime experiences.

The narrative then takes us back to March 1945 as the father - seventeen year-old Walter Urban - and his best friend Fiete Caroli are working as apprentice dairy farm laborers in northern Germany, waiting for the war to end.  The Brits and Americans are on the doorstep in the West and Russians are advancing rapidly from the east; everyone knows the Third Reich is doomed. But the boys are lured by the promise of free beer to a dance at the community center where they are ambushed by SS officers and forced to "volunteer" (zwangsrekrutiert) to enlist in the Waffen SS. After a few weeks of "training" the boys are sent off to war: Walter as a driver for supply routes and Fiete to the front.

Im Frühling sterben has some of the best writing about war, perhaps surpassed only by the fiction of Gert Ledig, Novelist of War.  Rothmann has a good ear for dialogue.  Okay, I wasn't there in 1945, but the dialogue seems pitch-perfect and authentic to me. In one section, Walter is granted a three-day leave to find the grave of his father, who was had been killed on the front.  He moves through a surreal landscape of death and total devastation, the Wehrmacht and SS officers he runs across are engaged in drunken orgies, waiting for the inevitable.  

Neither Walter nor Fiete believe in the cause, but only Walter has the instinct to survive.  Fiete is an impulsive character and goes AWOL, is caught and held for execution.  In the pivotal scene in the novel. Walter approaches the commanding officer of his unit - the SS-Sturmbannfuehrer- and makes an impassioned plea for his friend's life.  But the officer is more interested in correcting Walter's grammar and orders him to be part of the firing squad for Fiete's execution:

"Aus Menschlichkeit, natürlich.  Weil du sein Freund bist, wie du sagst. Da wirst du gut zielen, damit er nicht leidet."

("For humanitarian reasons, of course.  Because, as you say, you're his friend. Then you will aim well so that he won't suffer.")

 Of course, the penalty for refusing to obey the order to execute Fiete is certain death.

There is an interesting gay subtext to Im Frühling sterben.  Walter encounters several homosexuals - euphemistically called 175er - and rebuffs their advances.  Fiete is described as a small boy with delicate, feminine features, and Walter's displays of affection toward his friend have homoerotic overtones.  Walter goes on to wed his girlfriend Elisabeth, but, as we learn from the narrator at the beginning of the novel, it was apparently a loveless marriage, although it did produce a son - the narrator. FIete was the love of his life, and Walter was forced to live the rest of his life "innocently guilty" (unschuldig schuldig) that he had been forced to kill him. The Walter we encounter at the beginning of Im Frühling sterben is emotionally dead.

Ralf Rothmann has written a powerful novel. I'm sure it will be translated into English and will find an enthusiastic audience also in the US.