RAIDS ON BERLIN

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 62, Issue 4429, 23 May 1941, Page 3

RAIDS ON BERLIN

GERMANS SOBERED BY AIR BOMBING. [By Joseph Harsch.] [Published by arrangement with “The Christian Science Monitor.”] BOSTON, March 12. It used to be said in the days before the blitzkrieg- that a Frenchman would fight to the end to defend his own soil. Many persons here in America say they would fight to defend American soil, but nothing else. But German soldiers have fought ever since 1815 — with a few minor exceptions—on foreign soil. And Germans enjoy war—■ or at least have less objection to it than any 'other western nation. German military leaders, in other words, long since discovered a basic military fact that war- seems less horrible and people are less reluctant to face war if the fighting is done away from home. German armies fight well on foreign soil, but whenever war comes close to German soil, they prefer making peace to exposing their own country and their own homes to the devastation which they are so ready to apply to others’ homes and cities. For this reason the English bombs which have fallen on German cities are the most important thing which has happened so far in this war. True, those bombs have not fallen yet in very large numbers. But they are the first instruments to carry the lesson of war home to German people since the forgotten days when Napoleonic armies gave Germany its last real taste of war on home. soil. ELEMENTARY STAGE. The lesson is still in its elementary stage. But it has profound significance. One already is justified in concluding from it that if the German people ever are forced to experience at home what they have inflicted on other people; if they are forced to learn that what they deal out to others can also happen to them; then they may acquire a new concept of the rights of other peoples and may learn what every nation must learn before it is mature, that it must expect to receive the same treatment it deals out to others. | In the present stage of their nat- | ional development, Germans have as ! dormant or limited a sense of the rights of other nations as they have I an acute and belligerent sense of their own rights. i My first shock on reaching Ger- | many just after - the war began came I in an introductory conversation with an official of the Propaganda Ministry The conversation was on Czkechoslovakia, and I asked,, him why they had felt it necessary to occupy the entire country when they already had it surrounded and at their mercy after taking the Sudetenland. He turned to me with real surprise and remarked: “But I surely you don’t think what happens I to Czechoslovakia has any import- : ance?” I Not long- after, when I went to Prague and met Czechs, I felt confirmed in my previous feelings that what happened to Czechs was just as I important as what happened to Geri mans. I could not grasp the German idea that just because Czechoslovakia was smaller than Germany it was less ! important and enjoyed fewer rights. Equally, my German acquaintances were unable to grasp my feeling. A mental chasm between points of view about national rights was revealed there which nothing to-day seems able to bridge. “BUT THEY ARE POLES.” Shortly after I was talking to a cultured, humane, Christian woman. She expressed horror and resentment over the atrocities committed by Poles in the heat of invasion and battle against Germans—atrocities which were being heavily emphasised in the German press and some of which were probably true. I agreed it was horrible, but added that Germans were killing, Poles too, and also that Poland was being invaded, and Poles were. seeing their houses destroyed and their children killed by German bombs when the atrocities were committed. I suggested that anyone experiencing such tragedy might feel intense hatred for enemies within their midst who were welcoming the invading army. “Yes,” she protested, “but they arc Poles.” Thus when Allied bombs first began to fall in Germany they produced two I reactions—profound shock and intense resentment. The shock was particularly acute when bombs fell on Berlin. Its citizens had been told that no enemy aeroplanes ever could penetrate Berlin’s multiple lines of anti-aircraft defences. They believed it, and their sense of security and comfortable remoteness from war wqs all the greater when France capitulated and they knew that any aeroplane flying to bomb Berlin would have to come, not from just across the Rhine, but actually from across the English Channel. But British aeroplanes did come over Berlin. I never shall forget the dazed, startled, unbelieving, resentful faces on the strbets the next morning. But their feeling of invulnerability was stubborn. For months after that, every time there was a lull of two or three days in the British raids, Berliners—including even well-informed air force officers—would insist with apparent conviction that there never

would be another raid on Berlin because ,they had found means of stopping them, BERLIN RESENTMENT.' They resented the raids intensely, and in the beginning were convinced easily that the British deliberately were bombing civilian objectives and their own pilots bombing only military objectives. In one of the early raids an incendiary bomb hit a building which formerly housed the German Academy of Arts. The papers the next morning played this up as an example of British vandalism. One German acquaintance cited it triumphantly as proof of the wickedness of the English. “But,” I remarked, “don’t you know what that building really is? If you don’t I’ll show you.” I led my acquaintance to the door, where a large metal plaque announced: “Ministry of Munitions.” My friend had nothing further to say. The same resentment and the same gullibility flared up when several Berlin hospitals were hit. The same acquaintance remarked that it must have been done deliberately, “because the English pilots must have been able to see the big red crosses on the roof.” “What red crosses?” I asked. I advised my friend to take a ride on the elevated railway which passes directly beside one of Berlin’s largest hospitals, the Charite, which had been hit the night before. From it you can see the roof of the hospital, and you can plainly see that there is no red cross on that roof. You also can notice that on the other side of the tracks is one of the largest railroad freight stations in Berlin. But now the lesson is beginning to sink in. One frequently hears expressions of regret over the sufferings of Londoners, and more than once I heard a German remark that the British pilots who fly all the way to Berlin from England must be very brave men indeed. Hatred and resentment begin to give way to respect. So general is this change of feeling that even the controlled press has been forced to drop its tirades against English ruthlessness and its attempts to portray German bombs as righteous retaliation. The German people are beginning to learn that war is a twoway business. IMPORTANT FACT. . The actual amount of damage done by British bombs in Germany is not. therefore, nearly as important as the fact that English aeroplanes have been over Germany night after night and that almost every German city has felt them, even if slightly. The full facts on damage from the British raids probably are not'known to more than a half dozen men in all Germany. In fact, it is quite likely that Reichmarshal Hermann Goering is the only man who has the full consolidated reports. Serious damage of a military nature is concealed with extreme care and skill. Even damage to civilian dwellings is removed or repaired at once to keep visual evidence of the meaning of war from the German people as much as possible. During the raid of December 15-16, four bombs fell in the middle of the Tauentzienstrasse, one of Berlin’s most important shopping streets. They came down at about 6 o’clock in the morning and broke every glass window within four blocks. When I went by two hours later a dozen crews were at work replacing glass. They worked all the next night and by the next morning the big plateglass shop windows- on the ground floors were all in again and makeshift window displays had been arranged. Within two weeks a stranger walking down that street never would have noticed the few scars remaining, unless they had been pointed out. But the Berliner is intensely curious about this bombing damage. All the next day after that raid the Tauentzienstrasse was a mass of people just walking slowly up and down staring silently at the empty windows. They do that whenever the damage is in a place that cannot be concealed. But where possible whole blocks are roped off so no one can get close enough to see what actually was hit. NO AEROPLANE OVER BERLIN. After one raid a few panes of glass were broken in the Lehrter Bahnhof, but that is the only damage I ever saw to any passenger railroad station in or round Berlin. On the night the British thought they hit the Potsdamer Bahnhof, there wasn’t even a shot audible in Berlin, or any sound of aeroplane motors overhead. This fact led some military observers to suspect the Germans had succeeded in fooling the British pilots with a fake outline of Berlin done in dim street lights somewhere in the country. They certainly Were not over Berlin that night. The mistaken claim about the Potsdamer Bahnhof was a most unfortunate one for British prestige in Germany. Up to that time Germans were inclined to believe British news reports more than their own. One German remarked to me after that episode: “I always knew our own reports lied, but now I know the English do, too.”

As for other cities in Germany, During January, Bremen apparently has suffered what approximates actual devastation, and Whilhelmhaven and Mannheim are reported by reliable sources to have suffered heavily. But so far as I could learn, no other German city has suffered seriously. The much-discussed raids of last

summer and autumn on the Ruhr and Rhineland districts certainly did much less damage than was believed. Up to Christmas time Hamburg had not been “pulverised” or anything like it. I took a trip through the Ruhr and Rhineland in August by autobus and saw evidence of only one bomb. On the other hand, beginning about September, I was requested a number of times by the Adlon Hotel management to turn off my radio to avoid disturbing “neighbouring guests from the Rhineland who are trying to catch up on lost sleep.” Beginning about the same time it became impossible to find rooms in any of the resort places of southern or eastern Germany—even if you tried to make reservations a month in advance. They were filled to capacity with the wives and children of the industrial magnates of the Rhineland and Hamburg escaping from the air raids.