Hans Krampe, a German-Canadian, sent out a letter written by another German-Canadian living on the other side of Canada – Walter Ruthard – and it is such a great letter that I am posting it here. It was written in response to an editorial in the Daily Mail by Peter Hitchens. Ruthard lived through the bombing and knows of which he speaks.

Don't confuse Peter Hitchens wih Christopher Hitchens, his brother, who was famous and recently died. This article by Peter Hitchens seeks to pin all the blame on Bomber Harris, none on Winston Churchill who led the British war effort -- keeping Harris in place and approving of what he was doing. Hitchens engages in typical scapegoating with the goal of covering up rather than exposing the truth, thus retaining a patriotic narrative for the folk. ~CY

The Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park, London, which was unveiled by the Queen Thursday, June 28.

I am referring to your column “The heroes of Bomber Command deserve their memorial... unlike the butcher who led them”, which was published in The Daily Mail Online on June 30th , 2012 and updated on July 1st , 2012 and which I received today,  July 6th, 2012.To me as a German who survived the treatment meted out by Bomber Command, it is indeed interesting to read what you, a Briton, have to say about these dreadful years although you did not live during the 

time of the nightly terror attacks on German cities.

However, I am surprised about your rather polite interpretation of the events that led to the Second World War and especially to the fight between the British and the Germans. Other Britons are not so

civil when, as you write, “the football crowds who crudely chant Bomber Harris’ name to tease modern Germans”. Ah, yes, “Sir Harris” the knighted war criminal, also known as “Butcher Harris”:

“No doubt he had been brave in his time...”. Brave? Already in the

early 20th century he established his reputation of a ruthless

terrorist during the Iraqi uprisings against British rule. At that

time he was the commander of the 45th squadron of the Royal Air Force

in Iraq. Together with Winston Churchill, who was Minister of War in

1919, he expressed the idea of forcing the rebellious Iraqis to

surrender to the Empire’s wishes by attacking them with bombs and

gas! Churchill himself wrote: “I do not understand the opposition

against the use of gas. I am very much in favour of employing poison

gas against uncivilized tribes.” And: “It is not necessary for the

gas to be deadly but it must cause great pain and spread extensive

terror.” After a bombing raid in 1924, Harris noted: “Arabs and Kurds

have begun to believe that if they could tolerate a bit of noise,

they could also bear being bombarded and still be able to negotiate.

They now know what real bombardment means in terms of losses and

devastation. They now know that within 45 minutes a whole village can

be eliminated and a third of its inhabitants killed or maimed by four

or five airplanes which don’t present a real target to shoot at and

which don’t give them a chance to fight like brave warriors or take

flight.” Later, after realizing that the inhabitants often were

running away when a British plane approached, they used time fuse

bombs which killed the fugitives after their return to their houses.

This is also what Sir Harris, the nobleman, and his criminal air

crews did to German civilians!

Now, Mr. Hitchens, please tell me where was the bravery in Butcher

Harris’ and Winston Churchill’s long and honourable military careers?

There, in Iraq, they tested what they perfected in WW II on a much

grander scale.

“To this day, few British people know what we actually did to

Germany. We know of and are rightly angered by the Luftwaffe attack

on Coventry and by the London Blitz.”

Well, here are some more facts that are kept from you, and maybe

after checking them out, you could extend your anger against Bomber

Command and its criminal bosses:

September 5, 1939 the British attacked Altendeich near Wilhelmshaven

with one bomb;

September 29, 1939 they attacked Vechta with one bomb;

December 3, 1939 they attacked the coast of Helgoland with 21 bombs;

December 12, 1939 they attacked Borkum with five bombs;

December 14, 1939 they attacked Sylt with five bombs;

December 18, 1939 they attacked Borkum with seven bombs, Juist five

bombs and Amrum five bombs;

December 20, 1939 they attacked Hörnum near Sylt with 3bombs;

December 21, 1939 they attacked Rantum near Sylt with four bombs.

And this was only the beginning. I could go on and on. In order to

not to stress your attention too much, I now will quote your own

Undersecretary of State, Spaight, the foremost authority on  the law

of air warfare, who wrote in his book  Bombing  Vindicated,

published  in London in 1944:

“We  began bombing  targets in Germany before  the  Germans  did  so

in England. That is a historical fact that has also been publicly

admitted. We sacrificed  London, because the  retribution was

certain. It is not absolutely positive, but nevertheless very likely,

that the  Germans  would  not  have  attacked  London and the

industrial  area. Germany sought a moratorium in the bombing war

whenever there seemed to be the slightest chance of  such.”

And another British historian in Oxford, A.J.P. Taylor, wrote this:

“The British initiative (for the air war) is perfectly clear. The

German bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam was part of a military

campaign, an expansion of a previous shelling of defended cities. The

Blitz (the German air raids on London) began only after the British

had already bombed German cities for five months.”

And to round this up, read what another British nobleman had to say:

Sir Hartley Shawcross, chief British prosecutor at the Nuremberg War

Crimes Trials, remarked recently on a British TV program, that at the

time of the trials, he found himself wishing that the "great Allied

war criminals" be put on trial. Sir Hartley has also been quoted as

saying that neither Adolf Hitler nor the German people ever planned

or wished for World War 2".

Source: “Spotlight”, February 17, 1997, p. 13.

And he also said this:

“Step by step, I have arrived at the conviction that the aims of

communism in Europe are sinister and fatal. At the Nuremberg Trials,

I, together with my Russian colleague, condemned Nazi aggression and

terror. I believe now that Hitler and the German people did not want

war. But we declared war on Germany, intent on destroying it in

accordance with our principle of balance of power, and we were

encouraged by the ‘Americans’ around Roosevelt. We ignored Hitler’s

plea not to enter into war. Now we are forced to realize that Hitler

was right. He offered us the co-operation of Germany; instead, since

1945, we have been facing the immense power of the Soviet Empire. I

feel ashamed and humiliated to see that the aims we accused Hitler

of, are being relentlessly pursued now, only under a different label.”

Source: The British Attorney General Sir Hartley Shawcross in a

speech at Stourbridge in March 16, 1984 (AP).

So, there is no reason for you and the British people to be angry at

the Germans for bombing Coventry on November 15, 1940 and the “Blitz”

because “you asked for it”. The attacks on defenceless German

civilians and cities were planned and executed by the British.

2,050,000 German civilians died in those terror attacks according to

the Zurich paper Die Tat.

This is what your “very best, brightest and bravest young  men in

Britain, the Commonwealth and the Allied countries” accomplished.

Look around you, Mr. Hitchens, and you will see a world that was made

possible by your “very best, brightest and bravest young men in

Britain, the Commonwealth and the Allied countries. This is the

England  they “fought” for. And for what? No German ever threatened

you. But you, their descendants, now have to live in it with its

glory of boundless crime, brought in from your former colonies,

unemployment and the real Britons marginalized and afraid to go out

at night. As you said: “they asked for it”. Not the Germans, no, not

the Germans! “They devastated the following German cities, ”... not

just [in] Hamburg and Dresden but [in] dozens of lesser cities.”  

Here are a few of the “dozens of lesser cities”:

Berlin, Hamburg, Dortmund, Essen, Dresden, Frankfurt/Main, Nuremberg,

Düsseldorf, Hannover, Bremen, Wuppertal, Vienna, Duisburg, Munich,

Magdeburg, Leipzig, Mannheim, Stuttgart, Kiel, Gelsenkirchen, Bochum,

Aachen, Würzburg, Darmstadt, Krefeld, Münster, Mönchen Gladbach,

Braunschweig, Ludwigshafen, Remscheid, Pforzheim, Osnabrück, Mainz,

Bielefeld, Gießen, Düren, Solingen, Wilhelmshaven, Karlsruhe,

Oberhausen, Heilbronn, Augsburg, Hamm, Knittelfeld, Lüneburg,

Cuxhaven, Kulmbach, Hagen, Saarbrücken, Freiburg, Graz, Koblenz, Ulm,

Bonn, Bremerhaven, Wanne-Eickel, Worms, Lübeck, Schweinfurt, Kleve,

Wiener Neustadt, Wiesbaden, Paderborn, Bocholt, Hanau, Hildesheim,

Emden, Siegen, Pirmasens, Halle, Bayreuth, Kreuznach, Witten,

Aschaffenburg, Kaiserslautern, Gladbeck, Dorsten, Insbruck,

Neumünster, Linz, Klagenfurt, Reutlingen, Recklingshausen, Reuel,

Regensburg, Homburg, Elmshorn, Wetzlar, Villach, Hameln, Königsberg,

Moers, Passau, Solbad Hall I.T, Coburg, Attnang-Puchheim,

Friedrichshafen, Frankfurt/Oder, Danzig, Bozen, Chemnitz, Rostock,  

Schwerte, Plauen, Bad Kreuznach, etc., etc.

“I don’t call this a ‘war crime’ because the phrase is more  or less

meaningless. As those who have actually fought in wars know, all war

is crime, mixed with hell. The question is whether it can possibly be

justified. Nor do I (as some liars will immediately claim) in any way

compare it with the crimes of the Germans against the Jews. The two

are not remotely equivalent and anyone who says so is a fool and a

scoundrel.”

This is typical English pious platitude. A war crime is a war crime

no matter who committed it, even if they were English bomber pilots

and their masters Harris and Churchill. There is no question about

it. Only the vanquished were brought to “justice” by the glorious and

ever so guiltless victors. And, of course, you have to mention the so-

called Holocaust. It sounds like you have to please some authorities

that have impaled your  rational thinking and made you aware that

your career depends on you behaving like a docile pupil. I think it

is impossible for an Englishman to grasp the possibility that there

was no Holocaust at all. That is the power of propaganda and you fell

for it like untold millions of others. It is a pity that you as a

journalist, having enjoyed an investigative training, are still

incapable of seeing through a monstrous lie.

“The [their] death rate was an appalling 44 per cent – 55,573 of them

gone for ever, and our ill-led, sloppy and declining country has felt

their loss every day since. Heaven knows it is time their sacrifice,

and the equal bravery of those who survived, was marked. A medal

would be nice, too.”

For every Allied airman killed, there were 37 Germans murdered by

them. Now, who has more reason to be angry? There were also Canadian

bomber pilots over German cities trying their best to kill Germans.

Recently, one of them boasted publicly that he killed 50,000 Germans

and that he is proud of it. And there is this English nobleman, John

T. Saxon, Esq., of  Lake Worth, Fla. who in his letter to the Barnes

Review (May 1997, p. 31) proudly announced this:

“... as the captain of a Lancaster heavy bomber, having witnessed the

destruction of English cities, I was delighted to partake in 91

bombing missions, including the fire bombing of both Hamburg and

Dresden, and I would happily go back and do the same all over

again. ... Speaking of myself, and many other crews, we were

delighted when the met (meteorology) boys forecast strong winds, in

any direction over a major German city, and immediately changed our

bomb load to one Tall Boy (a 10-ton bomb of high explosives plus two

tons of small incendiary bombs, dropped at the same time.) The

catastrophic results were almost guaranteed; ask the citizens of

Hamburg, of whom over 2 million trudged out of the city over a period

of months to get away from the firestorms. We saw them from the air,

endless miles of people running away from the firestorm, and we had

no sympathy for them then, or now. They started it, and we replied in

kind, with far greater bombs, and better fire ignitions. I visited

both Hamburg, Wilhelmshaven, Dresden, Essen and other cities we paid

a visit to, after the war, and saw the destruction which the

firestorms inflicted upon the German population, and I lost no sleep

over it at all. ... The Germans asked for it, and we gave it o them,

good and strong. In war, to achieve victory, you must be ruthless, or

you will end up speaking German for a long time.”

Now, Mr. Hitchens, these were your “... bomber boys [who] did what

they believed was their duty and asked few questions.”  Yes, they

delighted in what they were doing, the “brightest and bravest young

men in Britain”. Today, Canadian veterans of Bomber Command get riled

up when it is suggested that their activities were war crimes. They

need not fear; it never ever happened that an Allied war criminal was

brought to justice and it will never happen. That is reserved for

Germans only. And “lesser” people like Irakis, Afghans, Libyans and

more.

You do not have to believe what I just wrote but you owe it to

yourself to prove me wrong. Can you do it? I do not think so.

Sincerely,

Walter Ruthard