Slaughter of the Innocents

On the evening of February 13, 1945, 733 British Lancaster bombers dropped 650,000 incendiary bombs on Dresden, Germany, creating a firestorm that could be seen 200 miles away. Next morning, 311 American Flying Fortresses blasted the still-flaming city with high explosives, while escort fighters strafed survivors. The city burned for seven days and eight nights, and an estimated 135,000 persons were killed in the holocaust. While Winston Churchill was later to write that Dresden was "a communications center for Germany's Eastern Front," other observers--both during and after the War--claimed it was a civilian target of no strategic importance. Regardless of its military value, Dresden symbolized a drastic change in Allied attitudes toward the rules of war. Before Dresden, the large-scale destruction of civilian population centers was taboo; after Dresden, it became an implicitly accepted--although seldom discussed--weapon in the armory of modern warfare. Almost 22 years after Dresden, with the deliberate bombing of civilians once again not a threat but a distinct possibility, Hochhuth, now at work on a new play based on the destruction of Dresden, attempts to grasp the implications of this Allied "atrocity." The following was written in London, in February 1965, while Hochhuth--accompanied by David Irving, author of "The Destruction of Dresden"--gathered material for his forthcoming play.

--The Editors

If wing commander Maurice Smith had belonged to the British Fighter Command during the War, defending England against German flyers, instead of being master bomber under Sir Arthur Harris, he would then have had no time for us today, the eve of Churchill's funeral. For we have just seen in the Evening News, above the top headline, which announces the arrival in London of crowned and other heads of state, an eight-column picture that itself seems an official decoration and that shows especially deserving fighter pilots--14 men, again in their old, richly decorated uniforms--who tomorrow morning are to take their seats of honor in St. Paul's. That former bombardiers are also to appear at the state ceremony one reads nowhere. Fighter and combat flyers saved the island from Hitler--but England's bombers of that time embody today the still-unmastered past of the nation that has so sure a sense of fair play when it is the victor. Air Chief Marshal Harris suddenly left the country a few days ago--to recover from an illness. And the second-highest marshal of the bomber command, who supervised the preparation of all bombings of Germany during the War, Sir Robert Saundby, also will not be going to the ceremony: He has arranged for David Irving and me to meet him tomorrow afternoon in his country house several miles west of Reading (where Oscar Wilde was jailed, in Berkshire), above which on the evening of February 13, 1945, the Lancasters of the Marker and Bomber Group foregathered for the Dresden flight.

Mr. Smith greets us in the office of the aviation magazine (Flight) of which he is today editor in chief. Obviously, since I have come from Basel, he takes me for a Swiss; perhaps he was only ready to talk at all for that reason. So I say right off that I am a German.

His reserve grows; I am surprised that he allows Irving to use his tape recorder. Finally, though, Smith takes from a shelf behind his desk a navy-blue leather volume with heavy gold lettering and ornamentation--a book like a stamp album--on whose cover the owner's name had been stamped along with his rank and the years of his assignment as bombardier. Now before our eyes the retired wing commander, who is perhaps (continued on page 160)Slaughter(continued from page 153) 48, thumbs through orders to attack, target indications, pictures and technical aviation data, while he explains that he deplores the destruction of Dresden and that, before Dresden, he had been on missions against numerous military targets. But above all, that he found war repellent.

Because I want to repress it, the memory of the photograph-and-document collection--I think on parchment--of another officer disturbs me uninterruptedly while I look at the leather album. Its last page read: "And now there is no more Jewish quarter in Warsaw." I don't want to think of this now. I know that Herr Smith, in contrast to Herr Stroop, would never have come upon the idea--if he had, he could have acted on it after the War--of counting his victims, sticking pictures of corpses in his book and writing such a sentence as: "Total number of Jews seized and provably annihilated: in all, 56,065." Smith has not only not counted the dead; if possible, he'd rather not know their number, even today. He reported to Irving with uneasiness that he was told, 20 years ago, on the 13th of February, that he had the honor to lead the first British attack on Dresden. And like all the other flyers to whom Irving put this question, Smith confessed his inability to kill a man eye to eye. But this answer, I'm afraid, does not surprise me. I find it surprising only that Irving still attributes any significance to the question. As if it were not known that the most unscrupulous murderers of our epoch were seldom or never capable of delivering a death blow with their own hands. They performed their duties at their desks. Himmler (this was confirmed) began to scream when he was about to look at a massacre that he himself had ordered.

Then why this confrontation, which undeniably exposes one as a German to the massive suspicion of wanting to weigh Dresden against Auschwitz? Any such calculation would be objectionable and absurd. Let the record be clear: SS men who murdered in the camps or at bases or in their own home towns could avoid going to the front because they murdered. Bomber pilots who killed civilians staked their lives, and the British bombers, for example, suffered by far the greatest losses of all sections of the British services during the War. The bomber fleet of the R.A.F. lost more men than the entire British army in the period from the invasion of Normandy to the death of Hitler. It lost nearly 56,000 men, a thousand more than the number of Hamburg civilians it had been able to kill.

But above all: In air warfare, both parties to the War committed heinous crimes. The Jews, the Gypsies and the Polish intellectuals were killed by us just for having identities that would have been impossible for them to abandon. They were murdered for being born. In Europe before Hitler that would never have been grounds for the death penalty. One must also concede to the bomber pilots of all nations that insofar as they killed civilians deliberately--and we are talking now only of such pilots--they could imagine they made thereby a contribution to their country's victory. But this in itself is, of course, a highly questionable argument.

If I still bring together in the same proposition this related pair of towns, Auschwitz and Dresden, in which very likely more people were burned than in any other two places in the whole history of the world, it is only because it can cost us our very lives if the massacre of Dresden is not finally rejected by the military in the West as in the East--rejected with the same disgust that the generals, it may be hoped, feel for Auschwitz.

For our future depends on just this: whether the defenseless will again be taboo, off limits, for the combatants-- whether one can erase the crazy notion from the minds of today's air strategists that the method with which one proposes to kill civilians should determine whether one is to be considered a criminal or a soldier. The method, the style, the mode of operation determines nothing. Auschwitz can only be a lesson to us all when this doctrine reads quite simply: Civilians may never be the assigned target.

Simple? In Europe it was once so--before Guernica, before Lübeck, before Belgrade. The law of the Red Cross was commonplace for anyone who deserved the decent professional designation of "soldier." Today this commonplace seems rather a tall order to the military men-- a circumstance that makes one's flesh creep.

Both our defenders and our potential adversaries wish to hush up the fact that murder remains murder even when one does not propose to gas civilians, as in Auschwitz, but "only" to kill them by radioactivity, as at Hiroshima, or asphyxiate them, as at Dresden. To repeat: It can, it will cost us our lives, one day, one night, if we do not regard the destroyers of Belgrade or Rostock with the same contempt as we do the executioners of Treblinka or Bergen-Belsen. This is the irreplaceable worth of the war-crimes trials, and one hopes it will be a continuing worth: that through them the gassings in the camps were revealed as so objectionable, so "impossible," that even the gassers themselves, Eichmann or Hoess, did not try to defend their deeds, but only themselves.

On the other hand, since the destruction of cities was unfortunately never what the trials were about, the blockbusting pilots still in all seriousness believe today (and the world believes so, too) that they acted as soldiers. Mr. Smith is just saying it again: Of course, he did nothing but his duty. The doctrine has a following! The flyers of today take for granted what for the British bomber command was still at any rate problematic and what the American bomber crews rejected as undiscussible till January 1945: the deliberate killing of the defenseless. The opening of the rocket era by Hitler was a further step toward the wild and arbitrary extermination of the defenseless by air raids. One cannot say the defenseless were the target; there were no targets, but rather the procedure was targetless and limitless. Today--such is progress--no one complains about this monstrous product of the man from Braunauer and his Wernher von Braun, since this second-worst tool of Hitler has become the pride of all the advanced countries.

British Air Marshal Saundby, with whom one can talk quite freely and openly, agreed with me that the attacks of 1941-1945 would hardly have taken place if they had been discredited before 1939 by international agreement. But there were no such agreements, and still are none, although the Geneva Red Cross has fought for them since 1957. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris could recently say to Irving, and with some shade of truth, that the only international rule by which he and his bomber command could have felt bound during the entire War was an agreement from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 that forbade throwing explosive objects from gas-filled dirigibles. With his characteristic humor, Harris revealed that this ban had been strictly adhered to by the R.A.F. bomber command during all of World War Two.

It is true: There is a law for naval warfare and one for land warfare, but there is none for air warfare. And the major powers do not wish an air-warfare law that would compel them to spare population centers.

On our way to visit Smith, Irving showed me two of the many letters written to him before and after the appearance of his Dresden book. I quote from one sentence written in the bureaucratic German of a man in the Federal Statistical Bureau in Wiesbaden:

In the process of removing the dead, from the places where they were first taken, to the mass burning centers, switching from individual registration to wholesale numerical computation during assembly, and due to complete annihilation of groups of dead with flame throwers on account of incipient danger of plague, after rough computation of the number of the dead . . .

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I must think of this fragment of a sentence, which stops the breath and not just because of a missing comma, when I confront the colorless Mr. Smith, who naturally--come to think of it: why naturally?--is as uncriminal and normal (and just this is so frightful) as the brother, the cousin, whom each of us had in his own family--yes, like the image that, approximately, one finds also in one's own mirror.

In the other letter a Turk, who was a student in Dresden in 1945 and after the attack looked for his fiancée, wrote:

In the streets lay, among other things, naked women with children prematurely born (through heat and air pressure) between their thighs. In one case just the head of the child had come out and the feet were still in the womb. You [Irving] write also of naked dead, but do you mention why they lay around naked? Anyhow, I sought my fiancée among these dead women. She was pregnant, and I had to examine the teeth of likely looking dead women, for the faces were all charred. In the afternoon (February 14) we got to the part of town called White Stag. A mighty hurricane caused by the fires raged over the Elbe. On the Elbe bridge we had to hold onto the ironwork and crawl on the roadway so as not to be sucked up by the whirlwinds.

The bridges, Irving explained to me, the only military targets of the city, were not hit in any of the three attacks.

At the very time that I sit opposite Mr. Smith, I sense the injustice of bringing up his name in particular, and his "job," as he calls it, in these reflections on the fall of Dresden. Certainly, Smith led the attack, and yet: This man did the same thing that presumably all other pilots of all other nations would have done if they had reached the same level of technical training as Smith. And so a part of his guilt is transferred to us all. More guilty than this individual is the society that took over his conscience for that which he did in its name.

This society and its norms have not changed since Dresden. Still worse: For all bombing strategists, Dresden became the test case, the proof, in fact, that one could destroy a city from the air, even with conventional weapons. And since one could, it has never been doubted by the military that one was entitled to. Hannah Arendt said of Eichmann: "He never at any time put to himself just what he was doing." This is the most precise characterization ever made of the normal "man acting on orders from his superiors." And it fits, without modification, those of all nations who bombed cities in World War Two.

This applies to Smith, to Harris and to Lord Alanbrooke, Great Britain's highest-ranking soldier. Alanbrooke, who kept a daily diary, did not, it would seem, even mention Dresden--and he was a very conscientious diary writer and, incidentally, a very tender-minded ornithologist. With Sir Charles Portal, who personally gave the order for the attack, he was at table in Buckingham Palace during the week of Dresden, possibly the same evening, possibly one or two evenings earlier or later. This, but not the most colossal city fire in history, he thinks worth recording: "The King and Queen were as usual quite extraordinary hosts and made us forget at once the regal atmosphere of the meeting. The King thrilled about the new medal ribbons he was devising and had an envelope full of them in his pocket . . ."

What light-years away "men of action" are from their actions! Perhaps this is nowhere so clear as in the diary of Churchill's physician, who presents a shudderingly innocuous report on the night before the fire. It is quite clear that the man who ordered Dresden reduced to ashes retained not the slightest memory of giving such an order at the time when the catastrophe was imminent. The Yalta Conference in the Crimea was over, Churchill was preparing to return home on the Franconia, and his physician, Lord Moran, notes: "The chef of the Queen Mary, borrowed for the occasion, produces perfect food, and the white rolls take one back to times of peace." Then he records the highly animated table conversation that took place in the very hours when hell broke loose in Dresden. The Prime Minister "reverted to the natural conversation of old age, with its dislike of change. He bemoaned the passing of ritual. He had not really forgiven the King and his family for allowing the eight cream ceremonial horses to disappear. They could not be replaced now. The breed was extinct, or at any rate, since they came from Holland, and Holland was in a turmoil, their successors could not be bought. Black horses would draw the coach of state in the future; they were well enough, but--well, they were not the same thing." One might conclude from this conversation that the ability to forget what one is doing is a prerequisite of becoming great through one's deeds.

Smith stresses that air personnel harbored no feelings of hate or revenge. Obviously, he thinks this purely technical outlook is more human, whereas in reality it is the most shocking thing of all. "Quite certainly we had no fun doing it, though what we did interested us technically and we tried to do as good a job as possible." On humane grounds, I had hoped to hear Mr. Smith, in regard to Dresden, mention our German atrocities against the Jews. Not a bit of it. So I ask about this expressly. Yes, he says, more and more news of that was coming in, but he adds that, at the same time came the news of how extremely correct was the treatment given bomber pilots shot down in Germany. "As I told you earlier, if any attack had specially grieved me, it would have been Dresden, but that was really a personal affair--really a misunderstanding on my part, because we all had the idea that Dresden was a specially beautiful city, and we thought of it in terms of Dresden china, and I think some of us would sooner the attack had been on some less pretty old town."

David Irving diplomatically begins his new question with the prefatory note that it had less to do with him, Wing Commander Smith, who often had attacked much more rewarding targets than Dresden or Heilbronn or Karlsruhe in his capacity of master bomber--military and railroad installations, for example. But what had other officers of the bomber command thought, Irving would like to know.

Mr. Smith answers: "Well, I can imagine they would have felt a certain regret if they had indulged in such deeper droughts at all. And I don't think they would have concealed this by saying the Germans deserved it. I don't think they'd have said that. They would probably have said: There's a war on, and how can you separate this from war in general--the whole thing is rotten.'" The ground personnel, Mr. Smith concedes--and one accepts this human aspect of things as a kind of relief--the ground personnel, who came in closer contact with the destruction wrought by the Luftwaffe in English cities, would have tended, rather, to say: "Let 'em have one for us!"

Smith feels no hate, no pity. If the air photographs showed that a city can be totally annihilated, then the pilots' reaction was: Thank God we needn't go there again.

For the second attack on Dresden during the same night and before the Americans were to bomb it the next day, an officer was chosen as master bomber who already, in November 1944, had been requested to lead the mission to Freiburg. At the time he had rejected the request, since he had studied at Freiburg University and many of his friends lived in Freiburg. Evidently he had been permitted to say no without getting the feared formula LMF stamped in his pay-book. This meant Lack of Moral Fiber and made difficulties in an officer's career, though it did not quite mean "coward." Almost, but not quite.

Today the various directives for the attacks that one reads in Irving's account sound sadistic. But in intention they are simply matter-of-fact. They say, for example, that the second attack should not happen until enough time has elapsed to guarantee that fire-fighting crews from other Middle German cities have arrived in Dresden to get themselves annihilated in their turn when the second blow falls. If one reads such directives page after page, the main object of the raids might seem not the burning of cities but the extermination of people.

Harris, the Chief Marshal, with the forthrightness that characterizes him, and much to the discomfort of the Cabinet, made no bones about this, but stressed it, and thereby annoyed the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, who lied to Parliament persistently, year in, year out. Harris said: "Before we can win the War we must first kill a whole pile of German civilians." This and many similar expressions of leading Britons are what make it so hard to stand by what hitherto seemed to me the decisive difference between an Eichmann and a Harris. I said to myself: Eichmann cannot have believed the gassing of Jewish families brought Hitler's Germany one step nearer to final victory; this he cannot have believed.

And Harris? Without question, he believed the burning of the cities led to our downfall. But the burning of the citizens? A general is supposed to have believed that? Incidentally, Irving possesses a copy of the leaflet that the R.A.F. dropped on Dresden at the time of the attack, from which it transpires that London knew the city to be overcrowded with refugees from other parts of Germany. More ghastly still: Proof exists that this fact was one of the grounds, if not the chief one, for Churchill's ordering the massacre. Maurice Smith says that Harris was always known as a butcher. "Certainly, many people thought he was a butcher, and I have heard people defend him from the charge as well as attack him. But if a conclusion was reached, it was this one every time--whether or not he was a butcher, he too had his job to do, and so I don't know where one is to seek the final responsibility."

Harris says the responsibility is not carried by him. Actually, the massive area bombings had already been ordered by the Cabinet when he took over the command in February 1942. His deputy, Marshal Saundby, with whom we are to drink tea tomorrow, introduces Irving's Dresden book in a very relaxed manner:

When the author of this book invited me to write a foreword to it, my first reaction was that I had been too closely concerned with the story. But, though closely concerned, I was not in any way responsible for the decision to make a full-scale air attack on Dresden. Nor was my commander-in-chief, Sir Arthur Harris. Our part was to carry out, to the best of our ability, the instructions we received from the Air Ministry. And, in this case, the Air Ministry was merely passing on instructions received from those responsible for the highest direction of the war.

To read such words, almost precisely these words, you unhappily do not need Irving's book on Dresden. They are to be found today in every newspaper, in every speech, in which a German war criminal defends himself.