1.
From the cockpit of an RAF Lancaster bomber, the approach to a major German city at night in 1943 must have been a bit like entering a brightly lit room stark naked—a moment of total vulnerability. Trapped in the blinding web of searchlights, tossed about by flak explosions, terrified of fighter planes attacking from above, freezing in temperatures well below zero, exhausted through lack of sleep and constant tension, limbs aching from having to sit in the same cramped position for many hours, ears tormented by the screaming engines of a plane fighting for its life, the pilot knew he might be blown to bits at any time. And that is indeed what happened to the more than 55,000 airmen in Bomber Command who lost their lives somewhere over Germany.
If they were lucky enough to make it through the flak, however, the bomber crew would have seen something of the inferno they helped to set off. Billows of smoke and flame would reach heights of six thousand meters. Essen, an industrial city in the Ruhr, was described by one bomber pilot as a huge cooking pot on the boil, glowing, even at a distance of more than two hundred kilometers, like a red sunset. Another pilot recalls: “This is what Hell must be like as we Christians imagine it. In that night I became a pacifist.”1
Now imagine what it must have been like to be stuck in a dark cellar in Hamburg or Bremen, gasping on carbon monoxide and other gases. Gradually the fires outside turn the cellar into an oven, so those who have not already been asphyxiated have to face the firestorms raging with the force of typhoons outside. Firestorms suck the oxygen out of the air, so you cannot breathe or, if you can, the heat will scorch your lungs, or you might die in melting asphalt or drown in a cooking river. By the end of the war, in the spring of 1945, up to 600,000 people had burned, or choked, or boiled to death in these man-made storms.
Then consider the aftermath, when concentration camp inmates were forced to dig out the charred remains of people in the air raid shelters, whose floors were slippery with finger-sized maggots. One of the rare German writers to describe such scenes, Hans Erich Nossack, wrote:
This Issue
October 21, 2004
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1
“So muss die Hölle aussehen,” Der Spiegel, January 6, 2003, p. 39.
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2
Quoted in W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (Modern Library, 2004), p. 35. An English translation by Joel Agee of Nossack’s The End will be published in December by the University of Chicago Press, with a foreword by David Rieff.
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3
Quoted in W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, pp. 103–104.
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4
“So muss die Hölle aussehen,” p. 42.
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5
From Ein Volk von Opfern? (A People of Victims?), edited by Lothar Kettenacker (Rowohlt, 2003), p. 163.
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6
Quoted in Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (Penguin, 1999).
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7
“The Doctrine of Destruction,” The New York Review, March 29, 1990.
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8
Verbotene Trauer: Ende der deutschen Tabus (Forbidden Mourning: The End of a German Taboo) (Munich: Universitas, 2002).
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