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"Dresden" Author Frederick Taylor Responds

The Germans Are Obsessed Too

Following a piece on Britain's ongoing triumphalism regarding World War II by SPIEGEL author Matthias Matussek, British historian and author of "Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945" Frederick Taylor responds. The Germans, he says, are also fixated on World War II.

Matthias Matussek's article

about the obsession of some Brits with the Nazis, though rather grumpy in tone, makes some good points, especially about the legacy of the British Empire and the causes of the continuing disaster that is the Iraq war. Nevertheless, it does seem rather one-sided. The tabloid press may have played up the role of the Brits in the Second World War to an almost comical degree, but most of the more serious publications here have been filled with discussion about who should really be granted the victor's laurels, with a general consensus arising that the determined, long-suffering soldiers and citizens of the Soviet Union, rather than Britain or America, should be awarded most of the final credit for defeating Hitler.

Moreover, it doesn't seem to me, as a regular reader of the German press and a frequent visitor to Germany, that in terms of quantity the British have recently showed any more "obsession" with the Second World War than their friends and close cultural relatives east of the Rhine. As Britain's Ambassador (to Germany) Sir Peter Torry has also pointed out, the German press and media have likewise been full of 60th-anniversary material, some -- though by no means all -- of a tendentious nature. (The German tabloid) Bild Zeitung has, sadly, matched the jingoistic idiocies of our own Sun and Daily Express.

I share Mr. Matussek's anger, by the way, that his son was forced to suffer the "Nazi" jibe at his school in London, and add my own shame and apology as a British citizen that this kind of thing can go on. We can only hope that one positive effect of the gradual retreat of the Second World War from memory into history may be that such attitudes fade as well. (Though I am told that for decades after the Napoleonic Wars, being French in Britain could also be tough!)

One thing continues to disturb me in his article, however, and that was his introduction into the discussion of the "bombing Auschwitz" controversy. There were of course good humanitarian reasons for the Allies to bomb the rail links to Auschwitz (with hindsight, to my mind overwhelmingly convincing) but there were also sound military reasons not to do so -- problems of distance, doubts about cost-effectiveness (railways lines were just about the easiest things to repair in war time), and in the spring and summer of 1944 the urgent need to concentrate Allied air forces on support for the Normandy invasion. And yes, at the time genteel anti-Semitism may also have played a role, in America as well as Britain, in the soft-pedalling that went on. So we Brits cannot feel too self-satisfied about that aspect of the war. There is a suspicion here, however, that Mr. Matussek is trying to make the Anglo-Americans co-responsible by omission for the terrible things done at Auschwitz by by the Hitler Regime and its cohorts. This is frankly unacceptable. It was the Nazis who set up and operated those extermination camps, no one else, and the responsibility for the millions who died is theirs. Period.

But the most perplexing of Mr. Matussek's remarks is that "instead of saving Jews, the British preferred bombing Dresden and other German towns in order to destroy the cultural face of their hated neighbour once and for all". The errors and prejudices packed into this single sentence almost took my breath away. Chronologically speaking, of course, Dresden was in fact bombed some weeks after the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army, which makes nonsense of the reference to "saving Jews" anyway (although it is true that many of the few Jews surviving in Dresden were in fact saved by the bombing of that city). But even if we ignore this, is he saying that the British (and the Americans) should have bombed Auschwitz all year round instead of bombing German centres of population, communications, transport and industry (i.e. German cities -- yes, including Dresden)? And if not, then what is he actually saying? Is he also claiming that the chief or, as the sentence implies, the only aim of the bombing of Germany was to destroy his country's cultural heritage? If so, where does he get this information? It was an accusation frequently levelled by wartime Nazi propagandists, for obvious reasons, but I can assure Mr Matussek that it is not supported by research in the records of Bomber Command. The Anglo-American bombing offensive was without question ruthlessly destructive, the decision-making processes involved sometimes reeked of philistinism, and most British people feel a justified degree of discomfort about what was done in their name, but to dismiss the entire strategic bombing campaign as crude, futile cultural vandalism is absurd.

I think it makes a lot of sense for our two peoples to make their own matching resolutions in celebration of the 60th anniversary of VE-Day. The Brits will promise to stop being so horribly, narcissistically smug about "winning the war" and pay attention to other, less palatable aspects of their history, and the Germans will promise to cut down on the chronic self-pity that can creep into the writings even of perceptive and sensitive observers like Mr Matussek. Do we have a deal?

With best wishes for Britain and Germany's relationship over the next 60 years

Yours,

Frederick Taylor