Book Review by David Shirreff
“I fully realise that … the killing of civilians when it is the result of bona-fide military activity is inevitable. But there must be a fair balance between the means employed and the purpose achieved. To obliterate a whole town because certain portions contain military and industrial establishments is to reject the balance.”
This is the Bishop of Chichester speaking in the House of Lords on February 9th 1944 about the Allied bombing of civilians in German cities. He could equally have been talking about the balance between means and purpose of Israel’s attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, or Russia’s attacks on Ukraine.
Gerfried Horst’s book Peace and War Over Königsberg is thought-provoking because it examines the fate of that city, which was flattened by Britain’s RAF Bomber Command in August 1944, with the benefit of hindsight and a good deal of research. The German Königsberg, now Russian Kaliningrad, became a shadow of its former self. An unidentifiable number of people died, perhaps as many as 10,000.
Imagine Edinburgh, capital of British Enlightenment, being obliterated in the same way. Königsberg was the capital of German Enlightenment (Aufklärung), made famous by the philosopher and teacher Immanuel Kant (1724 to 1804) who spent his entire life in and around that cosmopolitan, Baltic city. His circle of close friends there included two English merchants from Hull, Joseph Green and Robert Motherby.
A champagne flute survives, which suggests some convivial times. The inscription in English reads:
Secrecy in love and sincerity
in Friendship
Emanuel Kant M.A.
Anthony Schorn
Joseph Green
Robert Motherby
all happy together notwithstanding what
happened in the World
August of 30th 1763
Mr Horst’s mother was from Königsberg but he only paid his first visit to Kaliningrad in 1995. After that it was an almost annual pilgrimage until February 2022 when travel to anywhere in Russia became problematic.
Königsberg’s obliteration is for many lovers of German culture like the severing of a limb. The destruction was started by the Allies, and even today the inhabitants blame the British, rather than the Soviet army which took over the city in April 1945, for destroying the city’s culture.
Mr Horst examines at length the strategy of Britain’s Bomber Command. He notes that it was the British, not the Germans, who started bombing civilians, with its first raid on Mönchengladbach in May 1940. Coventry was not bombed until November of that year.
Bomber Harris, the celebrated implementer of that strategy, is still regarded by most Brits as a hero. But as early as 1944 the pacifist Vera Brittain wrote:
“I venture to prophesy with complete confidence that the callous cruelty which has caused us to destroy innocent human life in Europe’s most crowded cities, and the vandalism which has obliterated historic treasures in some of her loveliest, will appear to future civilisation as an extreme form of criminal lunacy with which our political and military leaders deliberately allowed themselves to become afflicted.”
Alas, notes Mr Horst, Vera Brittain was mistaken. Mr Horst is not revisiting history in favour of the vanquished. He is aiming at the truth, which would please Immanuel Kant – he argued that truth should always be told, even if no advantage is to be gained from it.
The book celebrates the elegance of the former city, almost none of whose mediaeval buildings survive. It also goes into great detail about the development of aerial warfare by the British, tried and tested over towns and villages in Somalia and Iraq, before being unleashed on the German population. Mr Horst reveals that the main destruction in many German cities was of civilian quarters rather than military or industrial assets. Lübeck was chosen apparently because its half-timbered houses would burn nicely.
The book is a lament, and a warning. The truth about today’s killing of innocents in the Middle East and Ukraine will be told sooner or later. Whether that will bring more peace to the world, as Mr Horst and his inspiration Immanuel Kant would like, is another question.
Peace and War Over Königsberg – Great Britain and the Destiny of Immanuel Kant’s Home Town by Gerfried Horst
Publisher: Independently published
ISBN-13: 979-8328405393
Thank you for this excellent notice for a book that deserves wide readership.
“He could equally have been talking about the balance between means and purpose of . . . Russia’s attacks on Ukraine.”
Not so. Russia’s toll of civilian life in the Ukraine is much, much less than the supposed equivalents in Germany or Palestine. It is impossible to avoid civilian deaths in a war zone, but Russia has gone out of its way to minimise these. The civilian death toll in Gaza in one year is around ten times that of the Ukraine in three years.
“Mr Horst examines at length the strategy of Britain’s Bomber Command. He notes that it was the British, not the Germans, who started bombing civilians, with its first raid on Mönchengladbach in May 1940. Coventry was not bombed until November of that year”, unquote. Whatever the British did wrong, which is much, before WW II, during it and afterwards, let’s not have any furphies. The Germans bombed Rotterdam on the 14 May 1940. It is inconceivable that that bombardement was a retaliation for the bombardement of Monchengladbach by the British. Besides, the bombing of Rotterdam was a deliberatie targeting of civilians, whereas the one at Monchengladbach was not. Then there was the invasion of Poland, and well before that, Guernica, before Monchengladbach, well-documented and exclusively targeted on civilians.