Date: Tue, 16 May 1995 00:13:00 -0500 Reply-To: H-NET List on German History Sender: H-NET List on German History From: H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers Subject: Re: Victimization There are six messages below, all unfortunately delayed by a slight problem with H-German that has now been resolved. We are back to normal operation. 1) Submitted by: Mark Lindsay David Neal Miller's recent comments re: the bombing of Dresden and the appropriateness of grief have elicited perhaps the strongest debate seen on the list this year. It strikes me, however, that the debate is 50 years old. I wonder if I may be permitted to approach the issue from a slightly different angle? When the Allied authorities were drafting the protocols for the Nuremberg Trials in 1945, they explicitly rejected tu quoque arguments as a valid basis for defence. The 'Charter of the International Military Tribunal' was signed on August 8, 1945 and, under its conditions, the defendants were indicted on one or more of the four counts of: conspiracy to wage aggressive war; war crimes; crimes against peace; and crimes against humanity. That the legal technicalities of the Charter were, at best, problematic, is illustrated by the fact that an SA member who left the organization in 1922 could still be judged guilty of conspiracy to wage aggressive war, and of war crimes [see 'Trial of the Major War Crminals before the IMT' vol.8, pp.464-465]. With regard to tu quoque arguments, the Allies were placed in an uncomfortable position. If the Luftwaffe had bombed London, Coventry, Liverpool...the Allies had meted out similar destruction on German cities. As for the first count of the Charter, British plans for a 1941 invasion of Norway implicated that country in conspiracy to wage aggressive war. Further problems were raised by submarine warfare - in which the differences in tactics between the Allies and the Germans were negligible - and the Katyn massacre. The solution to the dilemma was simply to forbid any challenge to the IMT's authority [see IMT, Article 3, vol.1, p.10; vol.8, pp.178-179]. In other words, there was a (hidden) recognition that some aspects of Allied tactical warfare were not substantially different from some aspects of German tactics, but that this was ruled inadmissable for defense purposes. The question of whether tu quoque defences are/should be legally valid is not the issue here (perhaps a topic for later list discussion?). What I'm interested in is: does the IMT's rejection of tu quoque hint at an unspoken, perhaps unconscious, sense on the part of the Allies that 'We're not as unstained as we'd like to be'? If this is the case, it adds weight to the criticism of Mr. Miller's posting. How? For it suggests that Allied authorities understood that, in pursuing their own war aims, they themselves had caused massive - and civilian - suffering. I do not, of course, suggest that the Allies must, therefore, have regretted their actions; the stakes of the war were too high for that. But it does allow for the possibility that in certain (rare) circumstances, one can justify the means by the end and still retain a genuine sorrow for the grief and hardship imposed on the innocents in the process. (Hiroshima & Nagasaki are perhaps other examples of this, as is the situation of a ship's commander refusing to stop to pick up survivors from another boat, on account of the risk to his own men.) All this is simply to say: if the Allies - who experienced first-hand what this debate has been about - were sufficiently troubled by certain aspects of their own war record to make it a significant issue in the IMT Charter - significant because of its exclusion - do we, 50 years on, have the appropriate perspective from which to refuse the sufferers of Dresden the right to grieve? (Please note: I realize that there were other, more juridicial and pragmatic reasons for excluding tu quoque. Nevertheless, the possibility of the 'guilt reason' which I've suggested is not, on that basis, ruled out.) Mark Lindsay (lindsaym@uniwa.uwa.edu.au) Ph.D student, History Dept. University of Western Australia. 2) Submitted by: Sidney Bolkosky I would agree that competetion in tragedy is pointless--our century seems marked by the search for the worst genocide. It is not I who initially raised the question of comparison, but many Germans who would prefer monuments to the war dead to supplant monuments to Jewish dead. The exile of Germans after the war, the murder of Dresdeners and other civilian victims are all tragic--they are not the Holocaust. The distinction ought not be dismissed, and it ought not be reduced or discussed in simplistic ways. Sid Bolkosky 3) Submitted by: Shelley Baranowski I can understand what Roland Wagner is trying to suggest, especially since, as some of Guenther Grass' novels make clear, the refusal to grieve was one way in which West Germans could avoid coming to terms with the Third Reich. The primary issue, as I see it, is not that Germans don't have the right to grieve, but that grief has to be linked to the remembrance of how Dresden, the expulsion of Germans as the Soviet armies moved west, the hardships of the immediate postwar period, etc. actually came about. We can legitimately question the morality of various Allied initiatives during World War II and the damage they did to civilians, yet we can't forget that it was the rapaciousness of the Third Reich that brought about the war in Europe in the first place. More to the point, although many Germans had difficulty with the extremity of Nazi racism and the recklessness of Nazi expansionism, opposition to the Third Reich was minimal, ill-coordinated, and largely lacking in critical distance until late in the day. Yes, Germans should be allowed to mourn. Nevertheless that mourning should include the Third Reich's multitudinous victims who suffered because a fundamentally popular regime was allowed to inject its paradigmatic ethnic cleansing on the continent. There is such a thing as cause and effect. Shelley Baranowski The University of Akron 4) Submitted by: Janis R. Coulter This ongoing debate regarding the appropriateness of feeling grief for the victems of Dresden is problematic. For those who were wrapped up in the chaos of their times and chose not to fight their way out of the madness that was "the Nazi Machine," i.e. chose not to oppose their government, should we feel grief? should we feel justified that they "got what they deserved" or got a taste of what their governments (and therefore themselves by implication) were perpetrating on others? I have one thing to say. Yes, it is true that survivors have the chance to reconcile themselves, to ask forgiveness, etc. The dead do not have that opportunity. Who are we to pass judgement on the dead? It seems to me a fruitless and irrelevant debate. Let the dead lie. They are buried, along with their guilt and/or innocence, and we arein no position to get their story. Leave the dead alone and feel grief for that which all of humanity lost in WWII and the Holocaust. 5) Submitted by: Paul Lawrence Rose Re: David Miller on Dresden: I don't think that some of David Miller's critics quite understand the nature of a frank opinion and in their shock at plain speaking mistake the point he is making. Mr Miller is no more interested in killing innocents than were the RAF pilots who dropped the bombs. His point is that if one starts mourning the other side's losses, one loses sight of the fact of the essential evil of the other side. Any attempt at sympathy tends to slide into relativizing of causes, through such arguments as "we are all partly guilt"/"partly innocent". In normal life this sort of argument may indicate a strong moral sensibility, but in conditions of war where the innocent are always consumed with the guilty, it is irrelevant and morally destructive. Hitler himself used it rather cunningly in many of his speeches where he lamented the Allied air attacks from 1940, appealing to humanitarian principles quite cynically. And in the years leading up to war, the awfulness of the suffering a war would bring was the basic psychological mainspring of appeasement, as Hitler well realized - and exploited. Miller's note should bring home sharply the point that a nation which provokes a cruel war and from the start raises its barbarism above the accepted level of barbarism, should expect a retribution in kind - and one should be confident enough of the morality of one's own side to accept that there is nothing immoral about feeling that justice has been done. Indeed it seems to me that those who criticize the bombing of Dresden are virtually accusing the Allied aircrews of murder. If an individual airman should feel regret or guilt, that is one thing; but anyonee lse who makes moral condemnations of Dresden should consider the implications of what they are saying. Paul Lawrence Rose PLR2@PSUVM.PSU.EDU 6) Submitted by: Michael Hughes The problem with claims to victim status by and for German expellees is not that they weren't victims in the dictionary sense of the term: They had after all suffered an evil or an injury. The problem is that claims to victim status almost invariably include a pretense of innocence. Such a pretense is explicit in Roland Wagner's references to "innocent ethnic Volksdeutsch" and "innocent civilians" and in expellees' repeated post-1945 assertions that they had suffered their fate "without any guilt of our own." Most adult expellees, though, had acquiesced in or even supported enthusiastically the German war effort--as long as it was going well and despite the vicious brutality with which it was conducted. To the extent they had supported that war effort they were culpable and hence were not simple or innocent victims. Whether their culpability, in each individual case, was commensurate with their sufferings is of course a separate and very difficult question. But just as blanket ascription of guilt is historically and morally wrong, so is the blanket ascription of innocence that flat demands for victim status imply. Michael L. Hughes, Wake Forest University .