Date: Wed, 10 May 1995 17:41:23 -0500 Reply-To: H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers Sender: H-NET List on German History From: H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers Subject: Re: Victimization There are two messages below: 1) Submitted by: Mark Karau It is hardly disputable, personally, that the Allies were fully justified in their attacks on Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima, etc. Clearly Nazi Germany was the aggressor and was guilty of unspeakable crimes against humanity; however, to feel a "grim satisfaction" at the death of any human being, no matter how deserved that death may be, is wrong. After all, it seems, to me at least, that the very fact that "we" (as in the Allies and their descendants) do feel a certain sense of remorse and guilt over some of the decisions that were made during the war is part of what sets "us" apart from the Nazis. Mark Karau Florida State University 2) Submitted by: Arthur Brenner David Neal Miller's remarks about victimization, pointing specifically to Dresden, have evoked considerable controversy in this forum. Everyone who has partaken of this discussion and/or read it here would be well advised to read the fine piece by Norman Davies in the May 25, 1995 issue of the New York Review of Books, entitled "The Misunderstood Victory in Europe." Davies identifies and discusses nine categories (not meant to be an exhaustive list) of "selectivity" which distort our knowledge of the war. These include such things as the selectivity of propaganda, personal perception, geography (i.e., parochialism), stereotypes, statistics, special interests, of professional historians (well worth considering as an admonition to our profession in its own right), of the victors. Davies' final category is moral selectivity; he complains that even in peacetime, as in war, "double standards abound." He points not only to Dresden, but also to the destruction of Hamburg in 1943, and says "if it was wrong to obliterate Coventry to no great military advantage, it was wrong to obliterate Dresden. It was not right or necessary to have pursued a just war with unjust methods." He goes on to explicate one incident of Allied immorality, when Allied officers at the end of the war were ordered to repatriate Russians, which meant certain death at Stalin's hands upon their return. "If it was wrong for Adolf Eichmann to plead that he was only obeying orders, it is wrong for British officers [who were given these orders] to plead the same." Arthur Brenner William Paterson College .