Retired German NATO general stirs Churchill war strategy debate
Klaus Naumann,
ex-chairman of the NATO military committee and former chief commander
of the German armed forces.
BERLIN (AFP) - A retired German NATO general said Monday that the British had planned the "extermination of the German civilian population" with the Allied bombing of major cities at the end of World War II.
Joining a historical debate launched by a new book, Klaus Naumann, the ex-chairman of the NATO military committee and former chief commander of the German armed forces, told Berlin's daily Tagesspiegel that the raids had no clear military purpose.
"What you have to deplore is that the British systematically put the extermination of the German civilian population at the center of their war strategy," Naumann said.
"I have my doubts as to whether one can justify that."
Naumann, 63, gave a joint interview with historian Joerg Friedrich, whose new book "The Fire: Germany Under Bombardment 1940-1945", has whipped up a controversy in both his native Germany and in Britain.
The book denounces "terrible crimes" wrought by British air raids on German cities, notably Dresden, Hamburg and Cologne, in which 650,000 civilians, including 75,000 children, were killed.
Friedrich claimed that the strategy had little military justification as the German armed forces were already mortally weakened in the final months of the war.
He said that wartime British prime minister Winston Churchill had ordered the raids to break German morale out of vengeance, and raised the question of whether he is guilty of war crimes.
Asked by the Tagesspiegel whether he believed Churchill had had an alternative to the bombardment of German cities, Naumann acknowledged: "Perhaps he did not know another way out."
Friedrich said he had been struck by the at times angry reaction to his book in Britain, where he said that the bombardments were still considered a "military necessity".
He said that the postwar relationship between the Allies and disgraced Germany had strongly colored the historical debate in the decades after the war.
"The image of burning civilians running out of their houses was difficult to mesh with the image of the British and Americans who protected and fed us and brought us the rule of law," he said.
"History takes time."