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On 13.07.2012 02:42, Kenneth Morgan wrote:
The British maintained an effective blockade against Germany during World War I that resulted in a shortage of food and other basic supplies to the German civilian population. After the Armistice of November 1918, the blockade was NOT dismantled. It continued in place until the end of the Versailles Conference, June 1919. Several historians have suggested this resulted in tens of thousands of deaths after the last shot was fired. The continuation of this blockade after the Armistice, directed toward non combatants, was not only a criminal act, but also one of cowardice.
It was also, of course, designed to stifle the German Revolution - we shouldn't forget that at this time the Allies were also blockading revolutionary Russia.
Coming back to the debate about the terror bombing of Dresden and other German cities. I think that as Marxists that this bombing campaign was a war crime and a crime against humanity - in particular against the working class. The areas bombed weren't necessarily the industrial parts of the cities but the city centres, which were full of refugees in the latter part of the war and the residential areas.
I live in Chemnitz, one of the cities flattened shortly after Dresden. You can still recognise the traces of the bombing simply by looking at the architecture of the city. Many of main industrial areas of the city were west of the river but the bombing was concentrated east of the river where the city centre and the main working class residential areas were and still are. Even in the case of those factories east of the river most of them survived with relatively minor damage even when they were relatively close to the city centre and most of the factories in the city were still in use down to the beginning of the 1990s. This isn't to deny that some factories were damaged and a few were even destroyed, I'm simply pointing out that the main destruction wasn't in the areas where most of teh industry was situated. The bourgeois and petty bourgeois residential areas west of the river also suffered relatively minor damage - most of the housing there survived relatively unscathed and is still occupied today.
However, I think it's a serious error to describe this terror bombing as a holocaust or genocide - these are the terms used by the Nazis who attempt to use this Allied terrorism to rehabilitate Nazi Germany. There was no plan or attempt to exterminate all Germans the way the Nazis attempted to exterminate all Jews and Romanies or even to enslave them as the Nazis planned to do with many of the Slav peoples.
From the experience of the Blitz it was clear that terror bombing wouldn't lead to insurrectionary movements such as those that ended the First World War. Insurrectionary movements were the last thing that the Allied High Command wanted - as can be seen by their attitude to the Resistance in France and Italy. I believe that the bombing was also intended as a warning to the Russians not to advance beyond the Elbe, just as the A-bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a warning not to advance too far in Eastern Asia. Indeed when the capitulation occurred the Americans occupied the western outskirts of Chemnitz - the stopped at the autobahn while the Red Army occupied the rest of the city (incidentally Chemnitz is west of the Elbe). Later under the terms of the Potsdam Agreement the Americans withdrew from Saxony and Thuringia.
Einde O'Callaghan ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
