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and small, cherished a sense of outrage about the Allied air assault. Guderian used the opportunity of a radio broadcast to deliver what he called “an appeal to the chivalry of our adversaries. I referred to the Anglo-American air terror. I regret to say that this desperate plea of mine was without success. Humanity and chivalry had both disappeared during those months.” Even those Germans who possessed no love for Hitler, and yearned for an end of the war, felt deep bitterness towards the Allied air forces. Lieutenant Helmut Schmidt, a post-war chancellor of Germany, witnessed the destruction of Hamburg. “The sky became black, the sun disappeared. The worst thing was the stench—like being in the kitchen of McDonalds . . . a smell of beef . . . but the beef was people.” Schmidt lost his parents, grandparents, parents-in-law and home to Allied bombing. “It was wholly unjustified, indeed it was inexcusable,” he said passionately, long afterwards.

Few Germans ever acknowledged the legitimacy of the role in which the Allies cast them, shareholders in a monstrous evil which placed them beyond the pale of civilization and the right to mercy. Instead, most of those on the ground perceived themselves as victims of a great injustice. They were oblivious of concentration camps and murdered millions. They saw only their own law-abiding, hard-working, civilized communities reduced to rubble by Germany’s boundlessly vengeful foes. In 1944–45 air attack and its consequences became the dominant realities of most Germans’ lives. “It was a war of despair and mounting torments,” wrote Paul von Stemann, the Danish correspondent in Berlin. “There were no signs that the bombings would lead to a collapse. It was incomprehensible how people struggled on . . . but there did not seem to be a breaking point. It was the great fallacy of the war, that civilians could be brought to succumb by conventional bombing.”

“I’ll describe to you today how our home town looks,” a Heuchelheim woman wrote in misery to her husband at the front.

The middle of Ludwigshaven is flat, and Ludwigstrasse a heap of ruins, only the Bürgerhaus is standing. Bismarck street is almost burnt out. Schiller, See Krak and Neidermann completely gone. Ludwig arrived on leave in the morning, and had the most terrifying experience that night: incendiaries on the house. He put them out, but all around is a ruin . . . he got terrible burns on his left hand. One horror follows another. Last week, Frankenthal and Opal Oppau got it. Mannheim and Ludwigshaven are dying cities. Helene Kruck can’t take it any more, she simply can’t . . . she hasn’t got even a bed, so I’m taking her in here so she can at least rest at night. Each successive attack is more terrible than the last. Horror and fear run through every street.

Frau Rothmeier of Idstein wrote to her husband: “We spend most of our lives in the shelters. Our little girl sleeps for 15 minutes, and then I have to get her up again . . . At noon today it was especially bad. Squadron after squadron of bombers were followed by fighters which fired on people and houses. They fly so low you can almost touch them.”

On 1 December 1944, Private Heinz Trammler went home on leave. “At 4 o’clock, I arrived in Hamburg,” he wrote in his diary.

At 5:30, I was standing in the ruins of my house. My heart stood still. It was here that I lived with my wife and children in peace and comfort. Who is to blame for all this? The English? The Americans? Or the Nazis? Had a Hitler not come, there would have been no war. If the Nazis had not talked so big, or put on such a show, or done so much sabre-rattling, we would have peace with those who are our enemies today. Had we retained democracy in Germany, we would still be in accord with England and the United States. It was with those thoughts that I stood before my ruined home.

Few Germans thought as clearly as Private Trammler, but his uncommonly penitent reflections availed him nothing. The diary was found on his corpse by American troops advancing near Hennamont on 13 January 1945.

Dr. Marcus