Bomb War Research Articles

Cosmopolitanizing Colonial Memories in Germany

Cosmopolitanizing Colonial Memories in Germany

A Woman’s Petrified Gaze at the Dead: Uncovering the Troubled Ethics Behind an Iconic Image of Bombing War Against Nazi Germany

A Woman’s Petrified Gaze at the Dead: Uncovering the Troubled Ethics Behind an Iconic Image of Bombing War Against Nazi Germany Christoph Weber (bio) In 2003, the German historian Jörg Friedrich published the picture book Brandstätten: Der Anblick des Bombenkriegs (Scenes of Fire: The View of the Bombing War), a visual counterpart to his bestselling 2002 monograph Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940–1945 (The Fire: Germany in the Bombing War 1940–1945). The gruesome photographs of charred and disfigured corpses in the chapter “Bergung” (rescue) sparked a controversy in Germany, as they had been presented without proper historical context. Reviewers jumped to the conclusion that Friedrich’s selection of shocking images constituted an attempt to balance “German crimes with German suffering,” thereby perpetuating “the myth of the Germans as Opfer.”1 For instance, Heinz-Peter Preußer argues that in Germany, “these photographs cannot be regarded without denoting the emblem of industrial mass killing, the destruction of European Jewry.”2 Viewed in isolation, without the critical reexamination of the historical circumstances that led to the destruction of Germany’s urban centers, the images of dead German civilians are vulnerable to misappropriation by revisionists and their accusatory claim that the Allies had perpetrated a “Bombing Holocaust.”3 This demonstrates the fundamentally problematic nature of showing violence in what John Berger calls “public photographs.”4 Because public photographs are “like images in the memory of a total stranger,” they “carry no certain meaning in themselves” and thus “lend themselves to any use.”5 With the easy access to and rapid proliferation of images on the internet, the question as to how photographed atrocities are being used in the service of an ideological standpoint becomes all the more pressing. David F. Crew concludes his analysis of online treatments of the bombing war in Germany since the 1990s with the remark that “numerous websites depend on inflammatory rhetoric, shock images, emotional appeals, and narrow perspectives to focus users’ attention exclusively on German suffering.”6 The “new emphasis on anger and outrage” informs the way these internet sites employ “[p]ictures of desolate ruins and gruesome [End Page 10] corpses” and ultimately “does not encourage viewers to think about the differences between the moral valence and the emotional impact of an image or series of images.”7 A possible strategy for blunting the emotional resentment and controversy that the photographs of the Allied bombardments are able to generate to the current day is to integrate them into what Berger has called the context of social and political experience: “The aim must be to construct a context for a photograph, to construct it with words, to construct it with other photographs, to construct it by its place in an ongoing text of photographs and images.”8 In fact, what has been barely explored in the debate about the ethical implications of publishing photographs of the German bombing dead is the context in which they were taken. Michael Kimmelman points out in his review of Brandstätten that “Mr. Friedrich is mysterious about their origin. They seem to have been amassed by the country’s efficient record keepers and collected in town archives.”9 Friedrich briefly mentions the involvement of unnamed professional photographers and officials with photo permits—fire officers, city architects, air raid wardens—in the documentation of the bombing war and who later in life donated their private photo collections to city archives.10 Yet it remains unclear what kind of socio-political forces pushed for the photographic documentation of the devastating air raids in the first place. Friedrich himself justifies the publication of atrocity images by stating that Joseph Goebbels “forbade these photos of our victims from the German papers” and “[i]n a way we’ve obeyed his orders until this day.”11 As the Allied bombings intensified, press directives issued by the Reich Ministry of Propaganda had indeed proscribed the newspaper publication of photographs of dead German civilians.12 However, the sheer volume of surviving images attests to a particular interest among Nazi officials in meticulously documenting the horrors unleashed by the so-called Anglo-American “terror attacks.” Contrary to Friedrich’s polemical claim, photographs...

Bodies and Ruins: Imagining the Bombing of Germany, 1945 to the Present by David F. Crew

Reviewed by: Bodies and Ruins: Imagining the Bombing of Germany, 1945 to the Present by David F. Crew Tony Joel Bodies and Ruins: Imagining the Bombing of Germany, 1945 to the Present. By David F. Crew. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Pp. 274. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-0472130139. From the Kaiser’s cumbersome yet imposing Zeppelin airships and the more threatening Gothas during World War I, to the Condor Legion’s obliteration of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, through to heavy Luftwaffe assaults during the early phases of World War II, Germany played a pioneering role in directly targeting—or terrorizing—an enemy’s home front population. Hermann Göring’s bombers had “sowed the wind,” remarked Royal Air Force Bomber Command chief Sir Arthur Harris in his postwar memoir Bomber Offensive (1947), and in time all Germans living in the Third Reich were to “reap the whirlwind” (52). The Western Allies’ bombing offensive, which gained momentum from February 1942 onward and continued until the final weeks of World War II, damaged or wholly destroyed over 130 German cities and towns. Statistics on the devastation caused by the bombing war against Germany are imprecise, but commonly accepted estimates include some 600,000 civilians killed, around 900,000 others wounded, and 7.5 million left homeless. Countless historically and culturally significant public buildings and artifacts were also lost. How all these “bodies and ruins” have been imagined and reimagined, particularly by German authors of local publications in the half-century following the war’s end, is the central focus of this new book by David F. Crew. Bodies and Ruins explores both textual and pictorial representations of the bombing war against Germany, but the role of visual imagery is given special consideration. Crew’s stated aim is to gain an understanding of “how authors of local publications tried to use pictures to create meanings and to tell stories” (8), and, furthermore, to search “for what were considered to be the ‘right’ stories and the ‘right’ pictures of the bombing war in local publications and picture books from 1945 to the present” (9). Crew’s repeated emphasis on local representations should not be misconstrued as a sign that this work restricts itself to a few carefully chosen case studies. On the contrary, a wide range of cities feature—some fleetingly, others more prominently—throughout this temporally and topographically ambitious survey of how Germans have imagined the bombing war through selected books and other media spanning seven decades. Bodies and Ruins is structured around six chapters, which follow a loosely chronological order while each is driven by its own thematic bent. Chapter 1, for instance, examines the “local master narrative” (10) established by (West) [End Page 195] German accounts in the immediate postwar period, whereas chapter 2 explores the “essential role played by images, primarily photographs, in these local publications” (10). Chapter 3 asks why “shock pictures” (of dead bodies) were not as prevalent as photographs of ruins. Chapter 4 probes how the themes of “mourning, denial, and celebration” were visually conveyed in picture books (again, limited to West Germany). Chapter 5 claims to focus on the anticapitalist/anti-Western Marxist interpretations of the bombing war promoted in the GDR. The sixth and final substantive chapter covers the post-reunification period, especially how the advent of the internet shapes and reflects ways in which Germans now attempt to remember the bombing war. Crew can be commended for attempting such an ambitious project, and for producing a thoughtful and at times thought-provoking account. While there is much to like about this highly readable work, it ultimately suffers from trying to do too much. A tighter focus—perhaps on a shorter time frame or fewer cities—would have enabled deeper analysis and greater clarity of argument. To cite just one frustrating shortcoming: there are periodic, vague references to the Cold War throughout the book, but it is unclear what function it actually serves. The early chapters concentrate on West Germany almost exclusively, so there is no comparative analysis. Then, suddenly, Dresden emerges as the main case study in the latter chapters. Again, however, no comparisons are made with West German...

Interview with Richard Overy

Richard Overy is Professor of History at the University of Exeter and the author of more than twenty-five books on the age of the World Wars and European dictatorship, including The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.Airpower has been used in armed conflicts since World War I. Aircraft have been deployed in support of the army on the ground and the navy on the surface. However, the twentieth century, with two World Wars, has also seen aerial bombardment of cities that fell outside the traditional use of airpower. During World War II, as part of the ideology of “total war”, cities were deliberately selected as targets of such attacks with the purpose of undermining the morale of the enemy's population and “winning the war”. Nowadays, although the deliberate bombing of entire cities is prohibited, it is still believed that aerial bombardment can produce certain political dividends for belligerents. In this interview, Richard Overy provides a historical perspective on the evolution of aerial bombardment since the World Wars, and puts in context the use of airpower in contemporary armed conflicts.

Legacy of a Bomb: The Manhattan Project’s Impact on the Scientific Community

Legacy of a Bomb WAR TECH SPRING WAR TECH The Manhattan Project’s Impact on the Scientific Community Above the pillared entrance of the University of dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of California Berkeley’s Doe library, the fair face of Athena, thousands of civilians and forcing Japan to finally surren- goddess of wisdom and war, smiles down on its visitors. der. Dual-natured Athena’s presence seems both fitting, yet odd After World War II, two of these three facilities on the Berkeley campus. While Berkeley may be the home remained important contributors to scientific discovery and of many reputable anti-war protests, the university’s technological innovations. Hanford Site remained a nuclear research department plays a large role in weapon develop- facility; it ran multiple reactors and produced tritium for ment. However, Berkeley is not alone in this dichotomy production of hydrogen bombs during the Cold War since many universities across the United States also con- (D’Antonio1993). In 1968, a major reactor was deactivated tribute to the development of war-related technology. Some in Hanford and most of the structures were encased and may protest that this research not only has negative effects buried. By 1987, all of the reactors were shut down. Today, on society, but also is antithetical to the progressive educa- Hanford Site is no more than a museum and remains an tion that students receive at such schools. area that demands extensive clean-up due to the early, leak- These critics, nevertheless, underemphasize that age-prone reactors. such research has a beneficial impact, especially on the sci- In contrast, the Los Alamos facility, now named the entific community. There is one specific military research Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), is still running. project that demonstrates well the complex relationship The LANL has continued to participate in military research between war and science: the Manhattan Project. This oper- and development. Even today it manages America’s nuclear ation ended the Second World War but also contributed to arsenal as part of the Nuclear Weapons Stockpile the making of the Cold War. It ushered in a Stewardship program. The LANL runs new age and raised many misgivings and threat detection and reduction programs fear as well. As will be demonstrated, how- and develops new technology for defense ever, the Manhattan Project’s legacy does and intelligence purposes. This lab also not entirely have to do with the military for researches in the areas of energy, material the operation also made an indelible mark science, computing, nanotechnology, and on research and education as well. the life sciences. The LANL has con- In 1941, while World War II was tributed significantly to the development of still raging, the Manhattan Project was com- biotechnology as well. In 1983, it began its missioned to develop the first nuclear partnership with Lawrence Livermore weapon. The majority of the project was National Laboratory and together the two Bust of Athena, Doe Library at the completed by the United States, although labs developed the National Laboratory University of California, Berkeley two other Allied nations, Britain and Gene Library project. The project conclud- Canada, both contributed to the undertaking as well. In the ed in 1995 after generating many libraries of the human United States, the bulk of the Manhattan Project was han- genome. The LANL has also made major advances in dled by three facilities that were constructed specifically for immunology. It published the first genetic sequence of the the project: Hanford Site, Oak Ridge, and Los Alamos. Oak HIV virus. Furthermore, the lab has built an impressive Ridge lab conducted research and development of success- database of genetic and immunological codes of various ful and controlled chain reaction and designed facilities pathogens. This database is available for all researchers to necessary to produce plutonium. Hanford Facility produced use. While the LANL remains a military research center, its plutonium and separated plutonium from uranium and fis- contributions to research and general science are also unde- sion byproducts (Brown & MacDonald 1977). The later niable. stages of the production of the first nuclear bomb were The Oak Ridge laboratory, now called Oak Ridge completed in Los Alamos. In 1945, as a result of this col- National Laboratory (ORNL), was less military-oriented laboration, the first atomic bombs were constructed and after the war, but like the LANL, its research has also http://www.alumni.berkeley.edu/imgs/Alumni/California_M onthly/2002_Feb/building_150athen150athena_bust.jpg by Jany Huan Gao

Refuge from misery and suffering

rhile working on our new book, Loving and Hating Mathematics.. The Emotional Side of MathematicalLife, we were surpr ised at how many wellknown mathematicians have created mathematics while in prison. We found five prisoners of war from three different wars, plus two political prisoners, and one pr isoner convicted of evading military service. Mongs ide these, there was one mathematician who used mathematics to escape an excruciating toothache, one who was revived to life by a mathematical p rob lem while bedr idden and almost 90 years old, a novelist who was distracted by mathematics from his decadeslong writer 's block, and an idealistic youngster who was he lped to endure the agony of part icipating in a senseless, brutal bombing war. Of all escapes from reality, mathematics is the most successful ever. It is a fantasy that becomes all the more addict ive because it works back to improve the same reality we are trying to evade. All other e s c a pe s s e x , drugs, hobbies , w h a t e v e r a r e ephemera l by compari son . . . . The mathemat ic ian becomes totally committed, a monster, like Nabokov 's chess p layer who eventual ly sees all life as subordina te to the game of chess [13].

On the History of Man-made Destruction: Loss, Death, Memory, and Germany in the Bombing War

For the last five years, remarkably, Germans have been fighting the war all over again–in illustrated magazines, television documentaries, the feature sections of their newspapers, big-box-office films, fat books with many, many footnotes and still others with many, many pictures. In Germany, the Second World War is 'in'. This essay examines one key aspect of what historian Norbert Frei has called the 'battle for memory'–the renewed interest among many Germans in the consequences of the Allied bombing campaign in the Second World War. It focuses in particular on an immensely popular account of the bombing war, Jorg Friedrich's Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945, Munich, 2002 ('The Conflagration: Germany in the Bombing War 1940-1945', English translation forthcoming). The essay locates the current discussion about the bombing war in the 'memory landscape' of contemporary Germany and it offers suggestions of how it might be possible to write a history of the bombing war that moves beyond the binary of victims and perpetrators framing Friedrich's account.

Trauma and Guilt: Literature of Wartime Bombing in Germany by Susanne Vees-Gulani (review)

296 Reviews Friedrich Georg Jiingerprecisely from Nebel, at that time his teacher (as a substitute fora couple of weeks) of German and boxing, another of Nebel's passions, in Cologne (Nebel also told Boll that the teaching of boxing in the German schools originated in the mixed Anglophile/phobe inferiorityfeeling ('Minderwertigkeitsgefuhl') of the Nazis). The very firstletter in the correspondence (27 June 1938) is written by a still relatively young Nebel, anxious to learn what Jiinger thought of a piece of writing of which the latter was the main subject. The correspondence reached its peak in 194750 , the time when Jiinger,longing for a charismatic comeback on the German scene and tryingto counter numerous attacks in the press, rallied his supporters in a manner that was as energetic and dignified on the surface as it was manipulative and calculating in the background (the correspondence is an invaluable source for studying this early stage of Junger's post-1945 career). Nebel quickly gained Junger's confidence through public speeches and articles in his favour. Jiinger even feared lest these be perceived as a touch cloying at times; judging by the compliments Nebel was dispensing in his letters, Jiingerwas probably right (on 12 November 1948, forexample, Nebel wrote: 'Sie sind in der Prosa das, was Holderlin in der Poesie war. Sie lassen sogar Goethe zuriick' (p. 254)). The natural culmination of this process was Nebel's 1949 book Ernst Jiinger: Abenteuer des Geistes (the correspondence thoroughly docu? ments the writing process and Nebel's keeping Jiinger informed of the business at every twist and turn). Soon afterwards, however, Nebel was given to understand that he was not the only custodian of Junger's reputation. The letters furnish evidence of the mostly amicable but nevertheless palpable competition between Nebel and Armin Mohler for an insight into Junger's inner life as a writer and thinker, and indeed for his exclusive trust (which in the end he did not grant to either aspirant). The point of crisis was reached in 1951, when Jiinger broke offthe correspondence until 1960, apparently because of various indiscretions on Nebel's part. The previous intensity was not restored again until 1966-68. The edition by Ulrich Froschle and Michael Neumann, with the wealth of infor? mation contained in the letters and in the detailed and learned commentaries of the two editors (even Karl Marx is glossed in the commentaries, with a dutiful indication on page 595 of the main fields of his work, as well as his birth and death dates?is the situation in the humanities so desperate?), will become a most helpful research tool for scholars working on Ernst Jiinger and German literary and intellectual history after 1945. Among other intriguing things, one learns about the failed plans, in 1949, for a bi-monthly journal ('Pallas') to be edited by Nebel in collaboration with Heidegger, Heisenberg, and Ernst and Friedrich Georg Jiinger; Heidegger stayed away, and that doomed the project (see letters 186-87). Lancaster University Galin Tihanov Trauma and Guilt: Literature of Wartime Bombing in Germany. By Susanne VeesGulani . Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. 2003. vii + 2i7pp. ?78. ISBN 311 -017808-7. Susanne Vees-Gulani's study is the firstin English to explore German literary re? sponses to the Allied bombing war. The author focuses on works by Hans Erich Nossack , Wolfgang Borchert, Gert Ledig, Alexander Kluge, Walter Kempowski, Dieter Forte, and?last but not least?W. G. Sebald, whose 1997 Zurich lectures, subse? quently published as Luftkrieg und Literatur (Munich: Hanser, 1999), more or less triggered media, public, and scholarly interest in the bombing war, and in the degree to which it had or had not been a theme of post-war German literature. Vees-Gulani, however, also discusses autobiographical and literary responses to the bombing by MLR, ioi.i, 2006 297 Germans with a Jewish background (Werner Schmidt, Victor Klemperer, Wolf Biermann , and Gunter Kunert), and by non-Germans (Kurt Vonnegut, Harry Mulisch, and Henri Coulanges). Depictions of the impact of the bombing depend, as VeesGulani 's selection demonstrates, on whether it was experienced by Germans, German Jews, or 'outsiders' such as the POW Vonnegut. Narrative perspectives, accordingly, vary; thus only Vonnegut and...

The shadow war against Hitler: the covert operations of America's wartime secret intelligence service

Introduction I. The Setting Historical Perspectives The Place of the OSS in American History Within the Secret Intelligence Service Anatomy of the OSS II. Donovan on the Offensive and America's Path to War The fifth column as a danger William J. Donovan's lessons for America On the eve of confrontation William J. Donovan as Director of Intelligence and the origins of the COI -The peace feeler of Federico Stallforth - Pearl Harbor The COI and the New Pattern Germany's Military and Economic Capabilities in the COI's calculations, 1941 - Assessing the Situation in the East Between Opinion Research and Counterespionage The Foreign Nationalities Branch and the Role of German Emigres - German-Americans, Exile, and Propaganda Excursus: Franklin D. Roosevelt, John Franklin Carter and Ernst Putzi Hanfstaengl The Secret Carter Organization - The S-Project: Ernst Putzi Hanfstaengl in the Service of American Secret Intelligence - Analyses of Germany and Propaganda Plans - The End of the S-Project The COI in Crisis and the Creation of the OSS III. 1943, The Turning Point Strategies and discourses State Department versus OSS: Initial Speculation about the German collapse, 1942 - The Discussion About Strategic Priorities, 1943 Lessons from Moscow and the OSS' Answer The National Committee for a Free Germany and the Beginnings of the Crisis Between the Allies - Secret Intelligence Initiatives for Mobilizing German Emigres Germany and the Germans The Mood of the Germans as Assessed by the OSS - A German Parallel: 1918 and 1943 Ideology and Economy in the Bombing War Theories and Experiences-The Enemy Objectives Unit (EOU) - From Casablanca to POINTBLANK - Tensions with the British and the philosophy of the EOU IV. Bern: the Big Window Onto the Fascist World Allen Dulles and the Establishment of the OSS Outpost in Bern - Psychological and Military Warfare - Opportunists and Conspirators - The German V Weapons and the Attack on Peenemunde - The Wood Story V. Media War and Black Propaganda The Difficult Beginnings of the OSS Morale Operations - From the Hamilton Plan to Operation Sauerkraut - Blankenhorn's Soldiers Councils Project and the Neues Deutschland movement - OSS Radio War: Joker and Matchbox - Operation Musac: American Pop Music in the War Against Hitler VI. Penetration of Germany Conceptions The Infiltration of Agents into Germany in the British Calculation - American Secret Intelligence Plans for Operations in the German Reich - The Post-invasion Syndrome and the Significance of the OSS Labor Division for Operations in Germany Excursus Paul Hagen, the Origins of the OSS Labor Division, and the Trade Union Contacts of British Intelligence - Goldberg's 'Philosophy of the Underground' and the FAUST Plan Operations Special Operations: Foreign Workers and CALPO Communists as Trojan horses - Infiltrating SI Agents into the Reich VII. Gotterdammerung - Between Peace and War Phantom Stronghold in the Alps: The as an Idee Fixe? Defense of the Alps and the Ideological Phantom of the Nazi Underground - The in the Calculation of the OSS - The Alpine Fortress from the Perspective of British Intelligence - The Redoubt Psychosis of the Americans and the Perspective of Gauleiter Hofer - Eisenhower, Marshall, Roosevelt Last-minute Putsch The Munich Pheasant Hunt and American intelligence - The Peace Feelers of Ritter von Epp - The Munich Putsch of April 28 - Operation Capricorn: Simulated Resistance Under the Sign of Zodiac Good and Bad Germans Allen Dulles as Promoter of Postwar German Politicians VIII. The Dream of the Miracle War: the Legacy of the OSS Conclusion and Summary The End of the OSS and the Origins of the Myth - Outline of the Shadow War: A summary - The Legacy of the OSS 3

Is the End of the World Nigh?

'Nothing new in that', you may sigh. 'Anyone guided by history can see that very destructive weapons will always be used in war recklessly, and those guided by science will tell you that a hydrogen bomb war would be enough to wipe out humanity.' But an alarming thing about the cosmologists' argument is that, as was said just now, it is not straightforwardly inductive. The result is that no re-evaluation of the lessons of history or of the destructiveness of hydrogen bombs would serve to dismiss it, nor, for that matter, would getting rid of the bombs themselves. The argument might even seem to put us in the position of the helpless pawns of the Greek Fates, unable to defend themselves against their destiny no matter how hard they struggle. 'If hydrogen bombs fail to do the job,' the argument can seem to say, 'then the greenhouse effect will, or a monstrous rock from outer space, or something as yet undreamed of.' The Doomsday Argument runs like this. One might at first expect the human race to survive, no doubt in evolutionarily much modified form, for millions or even billions of years, perhaps just on Earth but, more plausibly, in huge colonies scattered through the galaxy and maybe even through many galaxies. Contemplating the entire history of the race future as well as past history I should in that case see myself as a very unusually early human. I might well be among the first 0.00001 per cent to live their lives. But what if the race is instead about to die out? I am then a fairly typical human. Recent population growth has been so rapid that, of all human lives lived so far, anything up to about 30 per cent figures quoted in this area vary according to,

The Conditions of Disarmament

THE PRESIDENT electrified the Geneva conference when he suddenly proposed an exchange of military blueprints with Russia, followed by mutual aerial reconnaissance, in order to eliminate the fear of surprise attack. Was this, the world wondered, the bold new plan which could banish the fear of an atomic war? The conviction that some radically new approach would be required was growing in all parts of the world as the fantastic character of the technological revolution in warfare began to permeate men's minds. How fundamental this revolution really is can perhaps be grasped in terms of this simple fact. In the last war a ton of TNT cost $iooo. Today, the same explosive effect can be delivered via the hydrogen bomb for io cents. This is a stepup in destructive power by a factor of io,ooo. Now differences of degree of this magnitude are tantamount to differences in kind. This is not simply an aggravation of a condition that we have somehow managed to survive in the past: it is in a fundamental sense a new kind of situation. For example, even the relatively small number of deaths suffered by our armed forces in World War II, when the war never reached our shores, would if multiplied by io,ooo be almost twice the population of the whole world. Moreover, this leaves out of account the radiation effects which could well turn out to be far more dangerous. One authority has estimated that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, and the various atomic tests undertaken up to now, have raised the level of radiation in the atmosphere about I/IOOO of the distance to the level which would be fatal to human survival. Now it is readily possible, even likely, that an all-out hydrogen bomb war could diffuse 999 times as