WSJ: "After WWII...there will never again be a war from German soil."

[jenk]

The Wall Street Journal has an article today on German citizens' opinions toward the US official stance on Iraq. If, like me, you've been wondering how the memories of WWII were affecting the German anti-war stance, this article provides some answers. I added the bold below.

A Flood of War Memories Spur
Germany's Current Iraq Stance

Long-Repressed Recollections of Allied Bombings
Help Fuel Opposition to U.S.-Led Push for War
By CHRISTOPHER RHOADS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

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.

"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."

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 having started the war kept most Germans from publicly mourning their own losses.

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.

'The Fire'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

'River of Tears'

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."

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."

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

Real Hatred

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.

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.

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."

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."

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.

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."

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.

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.

"I wanted to show another side," he says, "but still I was afraid to say directly that Germans were victims, too."

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.

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.

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."

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."

-- Almut Schoenfeld in Berlin contributed to this article.

Write to Christopher Rhoads at christopher.rhoads@wsj.com2

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB104612491376731183,00.html

Hyperlinks in this Article:
(1) http://online.wsj.com/page/0,,2_0869,00.html
(2) mailto:christopher.rhoads@wsj.com
(3) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1046036133593352783,00.html
(5) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1046037531705690543,00.html

Updated February 25, 2003

I'm not sure a war with Iraq is right, or wrong. But somehow I find it hard to argue that Germany should take a pro-war agressive stance.

Update: After talking about it a bit with jw1776, I think the key thing to take away from this is that the German people are investing so much into dealing with their past - which is not a bad thing - that they may not be able to view the present except through the prism of the past.

The French & British people may be dealing with some of the same (note Tony Blair's not winning friends among the subjects right now) but they've done more processing of WWII because they didn't feel too guilty to deal with it. Germany had what - 50 years? - of denial first.