by Tom Endress
This summer I realized a dream that had been growing for about a decade. This was to return to Germany and visit with Werner Dettmar, the author of a book on the 1943 firebombing of Kassel. When I lived in Germany for two years in the late 1950s I became acquainted with many survivors of the horrendous WWII firebombings of Kassel, Hamburg, and Dresden. But because I was connected with the Church of the Brethren European headquarters in Kassel I became intimately familiar with what the citizens of that historic city had suffered through. Consequently, these firebombing survivors I learned to know have been close to my heart through the years.
It is unfortunate that many Americans simply dismiss the citizen casualties of these bombings as “collateral damageâ€. “People get caught in the crossfire during war and die,†is a common rational I hear. But as Werner Dettmar carefully demonstrates in his book Die Zerstörung Kassels im Oktober 1943: Eine Dokumentation (The Destruction of Kassel in October 1943: A Documentation) the bombing of Kassel was a carefully planned operation by the British. They not only sought to destroy the armament factories in Kassel but also to kill as many of the citizens of Kassel as possible. Sir Arthur Harris, the RAF’s Air Marshall developed the philosophy, supported by Prime Minister Churchill, that if you killed the civilians and workers surrounding the armament factories and military installations by carpet bombing large areas, the surviving German citizens would rise up against their government and insist on an end to the war.
Well, the Germans never rose up in mass against their government but the surprise firebombing of Kassel on October 22, 1943 did destroy over 80% of the centuries old historic city of Kassel and killed 10,000 citizens in that one night. You can go to my blog titled Meeting Werner and discover more information on this book and my meeting with Werner Dettmar. I also have links on that blog to other writings I have on the internet regarding this bombing as well links to graphic photos of the aftermath. The fires burned so fiercely sending up columns of smoke hundreds and even thousands of feet in the air that Allied reconnaissance airplanes were not able to photograph and determine how much damage had been done for seven days after the bombing,
All right, you might ask, why dwell in the past? Simple. As has been said, the past is prolog for the future– if we ignore history. Towards the end of the war the US Army Air Force changed from their strategic bombing of military and munitions producing targets to the RAF strategy of carpet bombing. The firebombing of Dresden that was of no military significance strategically but was filled with refugees is a prime example. This new procedure of firebombing civilians continued after the war ended in Europe with the firebombing of Japanese cities. 100,000 people were killed in one night of firebombing Tokyo alone. And even today the philosophy continues with our more sophisticated use of drones. Different from the targeted “personality†killings aimed at dispatching known al-Queda leaders, the increasing use of “signature killings†to kill suspicious looking groups of males that “could be†militants is having the opposite effect than predicted
by such people as the former CIA director Michael Hayden. He, and others, thought this would discourage anti-American militants. Instead the drone killing of these suspicious individuals along with the death of nearby citizens (collateral damage) has intensified the hatred of the Pakistanis toward the US.
When I left Germany in 1958 after having worked in a refugee camp a German WWII ex-tank commander I had gotten to know well (Otto Gleichmann) gave me this warning. Although he had turned pacifist and joined the Mennonite Church because of his war experiences, he believed the United States has adopted the Prussian way of looking at the world. “You wait and see.â€, he said. “The United States will increasingly use military force in the world to solve international problems. They are becoming the new Prussia that believes in military might and their ordained right to use it in the world.†In other words, as Nazi Germany felt it was their God given duty to change the world in their image. Now the US is doing the same thing.
This statement by Otto has haunted me ever since along with the discovery of how the US resorted specifically to targeting civilians with the bombing toward the end of WWII. Please do not take this to mean I am unaware of how atrociously Nazi Germany treated civilians. I know that all too well. The refugee camp I worked in, helping young male refugees from East Germany, had previously been the notorious Stalag 10B POW camp for Russian prisoners. Tens of thousands of them had been either executed or starved to death there and I saw the mass gave where they were buried.
What does give me hope are people such as Werner Dettmar who has carefully amassed the evidence of the deliberate bombing of civilians in the Kassel firebombing. With the increased flow of electronic information, such as on the internet, it is now becoming more possible than before for people to share this type of information and render the behavior of nations and groups more transparent. Perhaps, in the end, civilians will rise up and demand an end to warfare. We can only hope.