It seems fitting here to record what the veterans themselves have to say about the part they played in the Hamburg bombings. Most of the men I have interviewed seem to have demonstrated an understandable lack of imagination while they were actually flying over Germany: they were young, some still in their teens, and they pursued war with all the enthusiasm of youth. As they flew over the fires at Hamburg the typical reaction was not ‘Oh, those poor devils down there!’ but ‘Cor, this is a damn good show tonight!’ ¹³They rarely spared a thought for the people beneath the bombs, and even if they did it was usually only to register the notion that Germany had asked for it. For those who had lived through the Blitz on Britain, the Germans thoroughly deserved what they were getting.

Some of the veterans I have spoken to are unrepentant to this day. One who sees no reason to regret the part he played in the bombing says: ‘I don’t care about their cities. I was glad to see them burning… My only regret was that we got shot down when we did, because I would much rather have done a lot more.’ ¹⁴

Others seem to have softened over the years, if only to acknowledge the suffering of those who were, nevertheless, still legitimate targets. A few have taken the process further, and seem genuinely troubled by the thought of those who had to fight their way through the firestorm. In the years since the war they have had time to reflect on the terrible consequences of the fires, and even to question the part they played in events.

Colin Harrison of 467 Squadron is one such man. Some time after the war he came across a photograph of an old man and his wife, dead, on the street in Hamburg, and the image haunts him to this day. ‘I often thought about those two old people,’ he says. ‘The street was clear – all the rubbish had been pushed to one side. There was no rubble on the road. And I often wondered whether they had anything to do with me… I wondered if I’d done it.’ ¹⁵

If we are ever to lay this painful subject to rest, we could do worse than take a leaf out of Colin Harrison’s book. I do not wish to imply that he is right to feel any guilt for his part in the Hamburg bombings – far from it – only that his capacity for empathy is to be praised. The legacy of the last war will never be left behind until both sides learn to acknowledge the consequences of their actions, as he has done, regardless of whether or not we believe that those actions were justified.

* * *

And what of the people of Hamburg themselves? How do they view the ordeal they went through? Do they blame the British and Americans for the devastation that was wreaked upon their city? Are they angry? Whenever I have asked this question of anyone from Hamburg, I have invariably received the same answer, which exactly mirrors the sentiments of their enemies: ‘We started it.’ Or, even more tellingly, ‘We deserved it.’ Anger, resentment, indignation – even sadness – seem for most people to be irrelevant, because what reallymatters is that Germans are sorry.

Even during the war, many people in Hamburg realized that they were not blameless, and that, to a degree at least, they had brought the disaster upon themselves. Many saw the catastrophe as the logical consequence of the Luftwaffe’s attacks on Britain; some even believed it to be just retribution for the way Hamburg had treated its Jews. ¹⁶In any case, an unspoken sense of shame was already embedded in the German psyche long before the end of the war. As Hans Erich Nossack recorded shortly after the firestorm, it was difficult to view the Allies as anything other than the agents of some kind of divine justice:

I have not heard a single person curse the enemies or blame them for the destruction. When the newspapers published expressions like ‘pirates of the air’ and ‘arsonists’, we had no ears for that. A much deeper insight forbade us to think of an enemy who was supposed to have caused all this; for us, he too was at most an instrument of unknowable forces that wished to annihilate us. ¹⁷

After the war, the sense that Germany had deserved this retribution grew, fuelled by the news of what had happened at Belsen, and Auschwitz, and Hamburg’s own concentration camp at Neuengamme. The cold-bloodedness of the atrocities seemed to dwarf anything the Allied air forces might have done. As the Nuremberg trials came and went, Hamburg’s capacity for anger was smothered beneath a huge burden of communal guilt.

In such an atmosphere it was the Nazis, not the Allies, who were blamed for the catastrophe that had consumed the city in 1943. For example, when the famous memorial to the dead was unveiled at Ohlsdorf cemetery in 1952, the city’s first post-war mayor, Max Brauer, gave a speech in which he denounced the ‘inhuman dictatorship’ that had led the people like lambs to the slaughter. ‘This mass grave is a warning to us,’ he said. ‘We must recognize the danger [of extremism]. We must know that, in the end, as soon as mankind gives up its rights and freedoms it is stepping on to the road to self-destruction.’ ¹⁸

Those sentiments have been repeated in one form or another in every memorial since. On the fiftieth anniversary of the firestorm, Elisabeth Kiausch, the president of the city council, implored her audience never to forget the horrors of war, and the ‘sorrow that Nazism brought to innumerable people’. ¹⁹That same day, even as the student demonstrators were clamouring outside her church, the Bishop of Hamburg was praying for forgiveness for the wrongs that Germany had committed in the past – particularly against eastern Europe, against the Jews and against Gypsies. Her sermon was primarily an appeal for world peace, but also a plea that we should never forget the time of the Third Reich, when the ‘political blindness’ of the German people had led to war and atrocity. ²⁰

However, there is a feeling in Germany that such attitudes might slowly be changing. While newspapers, politicians and community leaders maintain the official line that Germany herself was responsible for the firestorm and its aftermath, many privately hold different opinions. It is not only those who lived through the bombings – German society has always made concessions for personalanger against the former Western Allies, so long as it is not voiced too loudly – there is now much more widespread resentment. A younger generation, which is not quite so intimately acquainted with German war guilt, has begun to question the readiness with which the Allies bombed civilians. Since 1989 there has also been an influx of ideas from the former East Germany. Understandably, the East Germans have never been quite so well disposed towards the way Britain and America bombed their country – an attitude that was encouraged by the country’s Communist leaders for more than forty years.

Those feelings came to something of a head in 2002, when Jörg Friedrich published an extremely controversial history of the bombing war. ²¹He claimed that the British insistence on area bombing made both Harris and Churchill no better than war criminals. Even more controversially, he deliberately described the bombings in terms usually reserved for Nazism and the Holocaust: so, for example, cellars are described as Krematoria(‘crematoria’), cities as Hinrichtungsstätten(‘places of execution’) and the destruction of libraries as Bücherverbrennung(‘book burning’). Needless to say, the book’s publication created a media storm, both in Germany and abroad. It also created enormous concern because it appeared to strike such a chord with the German people: there were immediate worries that Germans were beginning to see themselves as the victims rather than the perpetrators of war crimes, and that such books might even become a clarion call for neo-Fascists.