- Long-suppressed recollections of Allied bombings help
fuel opposition to U.S.-led push for war
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- Kassel, Germany -- More than 150 people listened silently
in a small church one recent evening to a reading about the bombing of
German cities in World War II. They heard about how a boy carried the charred
remains of his parents in a wash basin. About how the rush of air from
the bomb blasts decapitated people when they peered outside to see what
was happening. About the piles of dead.
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 "The
world forgets too quickly what happened 60 years ago," said Erika
Paar, who was 17 when a wave of British bombers leveled this city in a
single devastating attack in 1943. "It forgets the suffering that
comes from war."
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- For most of the six decades since then, memories of the
suffering that German civilians endured from Allied air bombardment were
largely suppressed. Though some stories were passed on within families,
few public discussions or commemorations took place. Published records
barely exist of the collective destruction, which obliterated 161 German
cities over just two and a half years and killed between 350,000 and 650,000
civilians. Feelings of guilt and shame for the Holocaust and for Germany's
havingstarted the war kept most Germans from publicly mourning their own
losses.
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- Now, an outpouring of memory is changing the public view
of World War II, strengthening the German opposition against a threatened
war in Iraq as well. While opposition to an attack on Iraq is widespread
in many countries, in Germany it is overwhelming -- with about 70% opposed
to a U.S.-led attack under any circumstances. The German government stands
unequivocally against a war, no matter what weapons inspectors may find
in Iraq. Damaging as that position is to Germany's ties with the U.S.,
it resonates deeply with the German people -- reinforced by their new consciousness
of the horrors their countrymen suffered in World War II.
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- Helping to stir the long-buried memories and feed antiwar
feeling is a book called "The Fire" by Joerg Friedrich, the first
comprehensive account of what happened in the cities and towns that were
bombed. For the first time, many Germans are openly considering themselves
not just as perpetrators of war, but as victims as well.
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- That's no small step, because the notion of German victimhood
is often associated with right-wing extremism. In some bombed towns, neo-Nazis
in the past have used anniversaries of the destruction to march for German
nationalism.
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- Nonetheless, some towns and cities are, for the first
time, considering ceremonies that would commemorate their destruction.
Dresden has long publicly marked the anniversary of the massive firebombing
it suffered in the last months of the war, when around 80,000 civilians
were killed. Now, as the 60th anniversary of many Allied air raids approaches,
other cities such as Essen, Dortmund, Pforzheim, Hamburg and Kassel are
pondering their own events.
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- The recollection of World War II horrors goes beyond
the city attacks. Popular newspapers and magazines have run long pieces
on the murders and mass rapes of German refugees who fled the Soviet Red
Army at the end of the war. Last summer, Gunter Grass published a novel,
"Crabwalk," based on the Soviet sinking of a ship that carried
thousands of German civilians, mostly women and children, near the war's
end.
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- Even the German soldiers that failed to take the Soviet
city of Stalingrad in 1943, considered a turning point in the war, are
being considered differently. Books, radio and television programs have
emphasized the horrific conditions at the infamous battle and how only
a small number of the encircled German soldiers made it back from Stalin's
gulags after the war. A radio station last autumn read letters from German
soldiers from the Russian front.
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- That this comes as the world is bracing for a U.S.-led
war in Iraq seems to be no accident. "Germans have a deeper knowledge
on matters of bombing campaigns," says Mr. Friedrich, author of "The
Fire."
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- 'River of Tears'
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- His readings from the book have helped prompt the long-delayed
national outpouring of memory and emotional release. Published in November,
the book is near the top of best-seller lists. A recent television documentary
largely based on the book drew 5.5 million viewers, making it one of the
most-watched historical documentaries here. The director of the station
that ran the film, Joerg Muellner, said nothing he has shown has prompted
so many e-mails and phone calls. "It was a river of tears," he
says. "Many said that all politicians need to watch this, so they
can see what happens when bombs fall."
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- Germany's politicians are far from united on the question
of war in Iraq. Opposition leaders have assailed the governing coalition
for what some call naive pacifism, as well as for plunging Germany's valued
relationship with the U.S. into its worst state in years. But Chancellor
Gerhard Schroeder, facing a tight race in a country suffering from a sick
economy, won re-election in September after taking a strong antiwar stand.
The election "turned on memories of the air campaign," Mr. Friedrich
believes. "These feelings are so rooted in the German population that
you only need to scratch a bit and they explode."
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- In the southwestern city of Freiburg, more than 1,000
people, many middle age or older, recently crammed an auditorium to hear
Juergen Todenhoefer, a media executive and part-time activist, denounce
the U.S. move toward war. "The Iraqi people simply do not deserve
to be attacked with bombs," said Mr. Todenhoefer. The room rattled
with applause. Afterward, Erhard Kuhlke, a 67-year-old retired carpenter,
said, "We were told after World War II there will never again be a
war from German soil."
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- In Kassel, the main evidence of what happened 60 years
ago is that the place looks just like every other German city that was
destroyed in the war and then quickly rebuilt, anxious to start anew. In
the late 19th century, Kassel, an ancient city on the Fulda River in central
Germany, was a thriving industrial and cultural hub. The Brothers Grimm,
the famed collectors of fairy tales, lived here. Kassel was also the summer
home of Emperor William II at the beginning of the 20th century. More than
200,000 people lived within its medieval walls, many in half-timbered homes
set along narrow, winding cobblestone lanes.
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- The Kassel of today is a place of wide, smooth streets
lined with department stores, pizza parlors and shiny office buildings.
After the war, "the city was rebuilt without a face," says Karl-Hermann
Wegner, director of the city museum.
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- Kassel's face was removed on one night in October 1943.
As both the site of plane and tank factories and an important transportation
link, the city was high on the Allies' list of bombing targets. Kassel
had also been a staging ground for huge Nazi rallies, led by Hitler, in
the years before the war.
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- On Oct. 3, 1943, under cover of darkness, 479 British
planes flew over, dropping 1,500 tons of bombs. Because of a mapping error,
most missed, falling on the countryside and small nearby towns.
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- On Oct. 22, the Allies tried again. Flying on a clear
night, and this time using the twin steeples of a church as a guide, 444
British planes unloaded 1,812 tons of bombs in a span of 22 minutes. First
came high-explosive bombs that destabilized buildings, and then firebombs
that set the place ablaze. By the next morning more than 10,000 people,
including 2,000 children, were dead. Most died in their basements of carbon
monoxide from the fire above. The city was rubble.
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- "It was the first time I had seen a dead person,
and there were thousands of them," says Werner Dettmar, 75, who had
manned one of the city's antiaircraft guns. Corpses were laid out on the
street for relatives to identify. Others had to be dug out of cellars with
steam shovels, he recalls.
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- Hanno Warlich, 75, who also was an antiaircraft gunner,
and who lost an aunt and uncle in the raid, remembers being astonished
at how small the burned bodies looked. He also recalls feeling his first
real hatred of the Allies. "My anger was not against Hitler but against
Churchill and Roosevelt," he says.
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- Hans Gemandi, 77, honorary sexton of the now-rebuilt
church the bombers used as a guide, remembers the pain in his stomach as
he saw a chalked message on a stone where his home had stood, saying his
parents and sister were dead.
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- After the war, those memories were shared only privately.
Given the horrors of the Holocaust and the death and destruction Germany
had unleashed on others, "it was not for us to bring up the issue
of our own people as victims," says Mr. Dettmar. "It was something
we just wanted to forget."
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- Cold War tensions encouraged that, diverting attention
to the Soviet threat. In the 1950s and 1960s, western Germans labored to
rebuild their economy and political system and become a respected member
of the western alliance. It was a success. "But it came at a price,"
says Mr. Friedrich. "It required an amnesty of memory. The new coalition
partners offered a deal: We forget, if you forget."
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- That deal began to erode in the late-1960s and 1970s,
as the postwar generation came of age and began to ask what their parents
had done during the war. This time brought the first full assessment in
Germany of the Holocaust, along with inescapable questions of responsibility
and guilt.
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- In Kassel, the backlash against forgetting prompted the
opening of the city museum in 1979. Next to exhibits of Kassel's 1,000-year
history, the museum shows video footage of its Nazi period and a remarkable
scale model of the city after the 1943 raid. "The museum was a reaction
against the unhistorical rebuilding of the city," says Mr. Wegner,
who founded the museum. "The city had completely lost its identity."
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- Mr. Dettmar, meanwhile, had been using his free time
since the war to research the raid. "I wanted to find out how it was
possible to destroy a whole city in less than one hour," he says.
He amassed a vast collection of photos, documents and other materials.
He published a book in 1983 on the 40th anniversary of the bombing and
displayed his findings in an exhibit in the town hall.
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- The timing was good: Germans were consumed in that period
with protests against the stationing of U.S. missiles on German territory,
fearful of being a battleground in an atomic war. Thousands saw Mr. Dettmar's
exhibit. He says he drew sharp criticism at the time for not showing that
Germany had caused its own suffering by setting off the war.
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- "I wanted to show another side," he says, "but
still I was afraid to say directly that Germans were victims, too."
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- Impressed by his historical work on Kassel, four other
cities hired Mr. Dettmar to research what had happened when they were bombed.
What started as his hobby became his full-time work, after retiring.
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- Today, as another international crisis brews, many Germans
want to be on the side opposing war this time. "There is certainly
an attraction to being on the side of the angels, no question," says
Christoph Bertram, director of the German Institute for International and
Security Affairs, which advises the government on foreign policy.
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- For some older Germans who followed Hitler into war,
now is a chance to speak up. "Last time, we kept our mouths shut,"
says Mr. Warlich, one of the former antiaircraft gunners at Kassel. "This
time, we feel we can do something positive."
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- In a far corner of Kassel's main cemetery, behind a row
of trees, lies a grave with 6,000 bodies from the 1943 air raid. Hitler
had forbidden mass graves for German civilians, but the city had no choice
because so many bodies couldn't be identified. Walking among the unmarked
stones recently, Mr. Dettmar mused that spending so much time on a topic
like the bombings wasn't so healthy, and maybe he should find a new hobby.
But then he doubts this will be possible, he said. "I always feel
that it could be me lying in there."
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