Today marks a somber anniversary. Seventy years ago this evening, at just around 10:14 p.m. local time, the bombardiers of RAF Bomber Command pressed the release keys and several hundred tons of thermite and high explosive bombs began to rain down on a medieval city in the far east of Germany.

Dresden – the name Drežd´any originates in the Old Sorbian tongue, and means “forest swamp dwellers” – had not been visited by the war thus far, or at least not much. As the capital city of Saxony (Bach had visited and played there from time to time) it was a major traffic center, a place where the Elbe, still navigable year-round that far inland, was crossed by major rail and road lines. The traffic that was crossing at Dresden in February, 1945 was to a large measure decidedly non-commercial, and in fact not even military. Because by then what Dresden mostly trafficked in was what the U.S. came to label “DPs,” or displaced persons.  In February, 1945 they were streaming through the east of Germany by the hundreds of thousands.

From Prussia, West and East, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Saxony, what had once been Poland (and before that Prussia and before that Poland and . . . well hell, you get the point) they came. On foot, in ox-carts, pushing prams, hand-carts, kids’ wagons, anything with wheels, in trucks scrounging rides from sympathetic soldiers, and by train. Any way they could, in fact, manage to escape the Red Army and its vengeance. I have an aunt (by marriage). Her home town is so far in East Prussia it ended up in the Soviet Union after the war. Their father had already been killed on the Eastern Front. He commanded an anti-tank squad, armed with what we called a bazooka and they knew as the Panzerfaust (“armored fist”). In a – successful – effort to avoid a friendly fire incident he deflected the launcher at the moment of launch, and the back blast blew his guts out. Or at least that’s what the family was told. That left their mother and four daughters, the youngest only three or so. To make a long story short, they escaped their town on the last plane to make it out of the airfield, on the way to catch which they were strafed by a Soviet fighter.  During the ride there the oldest sister looked through the rear window of the staff car they were in, and as she described it to me years later, the entire horizon was lined with nearly biblical pillars of smoke and flame from burning farms and villages. A friend of their mother’s didn’t escape. When the Soviets came, she was raped up to 20 times. Per night.

Of course, as the Germans themselves had discovered and exploited wherever they went, a terrorized population getting underway en masse, with no idea of where it’s going or how to get there, plugging the roads and bridges with swarms of desperate humanity, makes a marvelous tool of strategy. Plays all kinds of hell with troop movements, food supply, demands on medical care (just because you’re eight months pregnant doesn’t mean the Red Army is going to slow up by a single pace), lodging (hint: this was in 1945, before George Bush invented global warming, and it got not just cold, but colder than it had in generations . . . and the next winter it got worse), in short, with everything.

The Western allies were concerned with the Soviets’ progress for any number of reasons, not the least of which was the suspicion, already entertained by Churchill in the form of dead certainty, and more-or-less with understanding by at least those who weren’t Stalin’s dupes (e.g., Roosevelt, who to his death thought Stalin was just another ward boss from New Jersey whom he could wheel-deal out of what his soldiers had won and were prepared to defend to the death), that wherever the Red Army stood on the day Germany surrendered was where the borders were going to be drawn. Stalin knew exactly what his military was capable of doing, and thanks to sundry American traitors he had a real good idea of what the Americans were shortly to be capable of.

But of especially the British Stalin would have nurtured scarce other than contempt. A tired, clapped-out, proudly imperialist power, only enjoying the position it did because it drew (“sucked” is the verb Joe would have used) on the manpower and wealth of a good portion of the human population? Stalin could do sums as well as anyone (like how many Ukrainians he could starve to death in any single year), and he would have known precisely how bankrupt Britain was and how negligible a factor it would be in the post-war carving-up of the world (a carving-up Stalin had every intention of seeing happen, no matter what nonsense about One World his acolytes surrounding Roosevelt might think). This was an understanding communicated pretty plainly to Churchill at Yalta. All of which is to say that for the British at least the question of demonstrating itself still to be a puissant world power was very much an issue by early 1945. This realization by the British should not be dismissed as an influence on their decision-making. It was the same reason that in 1914 Austria-Hungary reacted as it did to Franz Ferdinand’s assassination – the convenient removal of someone whom virtually no one in any position of influence in the empire was the least sorry to see laid out on a slab was seized upon as a pretext to “crush the Serbian viper” and prove to the world that a crumbling, imploding, clapped-out, bankrupt, once-glorious empire was still a Player.

So what does all this have to do with Dresden? By early 1945 the Allies had bombed to rubble almost every significant center of manufacturing that could be reached by air, which is to say pretty much all of it. We’d destroyed about as thoroughly as you can with dumb bombs (interesting to contemplate what might have been done with smart ordnance). On the other hand, as Albert Speer showed, unless you hit an industrial machine directly, it’s not all that hard to get it back up and running. Running electrical cable, steam lines, and hydraulic lines isn’t hard. Even re-building rail lines isn’t hard, as long as you’ve got milled rail (which is why Sherman took care to heat and twist them on his marches – “Sherman’s neckties” they called them, and they made the rails useless without being re-milled). Filling holes in roads is something you can do with the rubble of the buildings beside the road. You can bomb the factory until the rubble bounces and unless you destroy the machines – or kill the men who operate them – you’ve not really made all that much a dent on your enemy’s productive capacity. And in fact in Exhibit A, Essen and the Gußstahlfabrik of Krupp, which first the British and then the Americans and then both together, as often as they could gas up the planes and load the bombs to do it, production increased steadily until the last months of the war. What finally ground Krupp to a halt was not the “precision” bombing of the 8^th Army Air Force or the carpet-bombing of Bomber Command, but rather that the Ruhr choked on its own production. We destroyed enough dams, canals, bridges, and tunnels that they couldn’t move – physically move – their output any more. William Manchester tells the story brilliantly (and movingly; the book is dedicated to Krupp’s smallest victims, the infants buried in Buschmannshof, in Voerde-bei-Dinslaken, who until after his book “no other memorial”) in The Arms of Krupp.

What about Dresden, though? As you might suspect, as capital of Saxony Dresden did have some manufacturing capacity, mostly what we’d describe as light industry – optics and so forth. But it was all located in the suburbs. The core of Dresden had not been changed all that much since the 18^th Century, and in quite a number of neighborhoods even longer. It had been a Residenzstadt, the official seat of the Electors of Saxony (and later, when August the Strong was elected to the job in 1697, the King of Poland), and as such most of the downtown area was given over to the kinds of activities that monarchy and its hangers-on generate. Nowadays we’d call it a service economy, with cottage industry (luxury smithing, tailoring, and so forth) mixed in. The key thing to remember is that with two exceptions there were more or less zero military targets in downtown Dresden. There were no factories to speak of, no barracks, no facilities for what we could call “C-3” – command, control, and communications – no major political nodes like in central Berlin.

The two exceptions were the bridges over the Elbe, rail and road, and the main train station, the Hauptbahnhof. Destroy those and you really put a crimp in the Wehrmacht’s ability to move troops and supplies to the front, and to get those damned civilians (and casualties) to the rear. Leave those operational and you’ve done no more than create a large garbage-disposal job for prisoners of war carrying shovels, brooms, and crowbars.

Let’s summarize through date: We have a largely untouched city, built of wood and stone (and that wood would have been centuries dried, wouldn’t it?), with no targets of any military value in the urban core, but with two sets of targets of great value, both easily identified from the air. And in February, 1945 it was — and was known to be — choked with civilian refugees, unfamiliar with the city and its environs, not knowing where the air raid shelters were (to the extent there were any . . . the local Gauleiter wasn’t among the more competent, and for most of the city the only air raid protection was the cellar of the building that was being bombed over its head), hungry, sick, stricken with frostbite, and above all numbed by shock and misery. And the Western Allies had a point to prove to Stalin.

In the end, the temptation proved too great.

Let us now take a brief digression to contemplate the mechanics of destruction. Ordnance can generically be categorized as being suited either to soft targets or hard targets. “Hard” targets are of course things that are specifically armored, such as tanks, battleships, bunkers, pillboxes, and other things that are built of materials which resist penetration. Like concrete, stone, and metal. “Soft” targets are everything else. Wood, glass, and so forth. Flesh. Clothing. Ordnance for use against hard targets has to be larger, carry a greater explosive charge, and be itself constructed of materials able to penetrate the target. I’m 6’4″ tall, and somewhere I have a picture of myself standing beside a 16″ shell as administered by USS Alabama during the war. That shell comes up to my eye socket. The “tall boy” bombs which finally sank Tirpitz in 1944 were 21 feet long, tipped the scales at 12,000 pounds, and carried a charge of 5,200 pounds of Torpex. Her sister Bismarck had absorbed 14″ and 16″ armor-piercing rounds by the fistful in 1941 but was finally sunk when her own crew opened the seacocks; two tall boy hits capsized Tirpitz. Ordnance for soft targets can be much smaller (so its deployment systems can be smaller, faster, more mobile, and cheaper to build; think “Saturday night special”) and the projectile can carry a far greater proportion of its own weight in explosive payload. Anti-personnel rounds have thin walls and are packed with explosive and shrapnel.

Among the more common civilian hard targets are railroad facilities and stone, concrete, or steel bridges. Why are they “hard”? Well, because unless you actually strike and obliterate the substance of their construction, it’s really easy to get them back up and fulfilling their function. You can vaporize the ticket booths, the train sheds, the platforms, the benches, the arrival and departure boards, the restaurants and restrooms, but unless you actually so damage the rails, ties, and switches as to render them impossible of further use, you really haven’t done any meaningful harm to a railroad station. As long as trains can arrive, load, unload, and depart in the desired sequence, you’ve still got a working railroad station, even though you have to shovel the dead bodies out of the way to do it. By like token, you can blow the bridge deck to hell and gone, but unless you sever the supports from which the deck is suspended, or destroy the piers on which those supports rest, a few hours with some cutting torches, welders, lumber, and basic steel frame members will have the bridge able to accept normal traffic in a day or two. In contrast, a hospital that is blown apart cannot be used as a hospital any more. It must be completely re-built, which is to say replaced. An apartment building once burned out – with as little as a can of kerosene and a single match – is useless.

You can tell what any mission is targetting by the kind of ordnance that is loaded. If you are carrying ordnance which physically cannot destroy a specific sort of target, then you may not ask me to accept that you were really aiming for that kind of target. Kindly do not insult my intelligence.

Which is why, when we ponder the data point that the bomb load which Bomber Command carried on its two missions over Dresden on February 13-14, 1945, consisted of overwhelmingly (by number of bombs) thermite bombs weighing right at 30 pounds, we are not obliged to accept at face value the statement that the attack on Dresden was intended to take out the few military targets in that city.  In the first wave of the attack there were roughly 500 tons of high explosive dropped, in bombs weighing from 500 to 2,000 pounds each.  If you go with the light end that’s 1,000 bombs.  That first wave also dropped 375 tons of incendiaries; at 30 pounds each that comes to 25,000 bombs, more or less.

We are even less obliged to accept the suggestion that something other than the civilians of Dresden were the specific target of the mission when we observe where the Mosquitoes (very light, built of plywood, extremely fast planes whose mission was to drop marker lights on the target aim point for Bomber Command missions — the British did not go in for daylight bombing; that was a fatuity of the USAAF) were ordered to drop their markers: directly over the center of the old city. The train station was (and is today) well outside the central downtown district; the bridges are over the river.

No, the attack on Dresden was planned and executed to see how many civilians we could kill in the course of an evening.  The RAF even admitted as much, at the time.  In its briefing memo to the aircrew on the night of the attack, it pointed out, “In the midst of winter with refugees pouring westward and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium, not only to give shelter to workers, refugees, and troops alike, but to house the administrative services displaced from other areas.”  The answer to the question of how many can be bagged at once has never been entirely established. So many of them had just got to the city that day or in the preceding few days. They weren’t registered anywhere; no one even would have known their names, or the fact that they were there. Their relatives would at most have known that they’d left their homes in the east, and sometime around mid-February they vanished, somewhere. Maybe buried in a shallow grave hacked into the frozen ground beside a road somewhere. Maybe reduced to ash in a cellar in Dresden. Maybe shot out of hand by the Soviets and just left for the crows and other wild animals to pick clean. Once they were here; now they are not. I’ve seen guesses – and that’s all they can be – from 25,000 on the low end to upwards of 200,000 at the high end. That upper end number is commonly accepted as bunk now, put about by, among others, the notorious Holocaust denier David Irving (who wrote one of the earlier books about the bombing of Dresden; I have a copy of it, in German, at home). But that 25,000 figure also seems suspect, too low.

Why? Can’t you just count the corpses, after all? Well, after your usual conventional air raid you might be able to do that. Count the skulls you find; one skull per body produces the total dead. But what if you can’t get an accurate count of the skulls? In a nuclear attack you have victims who are simply vaporized; there’s nothing left to gather up.

Dresden was a conventional attack, not a nuclear one. But in Dresden Bomber Command managed to hit a sweet spot which was something of a technical feat. They produced a “firestorm.” Now, “firestorm” is a word that remains in common currency today. When some idiot like an NBC newsreader claims to have been in a Chinook which was shot down, but was really nowhere near it, showing up only an hour or so after the crew had succeeded in landing it, we say his dishonesty and his employer’s defense of that dishonesty is producing a “firestorm of criticism.” By that we mean that a lot of people are more or less simultaneously expressing outrage that an organization supposedly in the very business of propagating the truth about observable facts would knowingly harbor as the face it presents to the world a man who is a serial fabulist about his news-gathering activities.

But O! Gentle Reader, a “firestorm” is a very specific physical manifestation. It occurs when you ignite a highly dense concentration of very combustible facilities – apartment buildings, stores, and offices will do very nicely – over a wide area and within an extremely compressed space of time. When you do that the heat of the conflagration develops massive up-drafts which generate tornado-force winds, winds which will pick a streetcar train up and hurl it the length of a boulevard. The winds also propagate the flames horizontally, not only by blowing them – say, across 100 feet of main thoroughfare – but by fanning their own flames to an intensity which will spontaneously combust nearby fuel sources that haven’t themselves been hit. Remember that the heat of a fire is a function of how much energy is released and over what period of time. High-energy fuels like coal or petroleum will generate good heat even at fairly low rates of fuel consumption because they are so energy-dense. Wood (and human flesh) is much less energy-dense and so at normal rates of combustion simply won’t generate heat that is much more sufficient than to keep the fire itself burning. But when you produce a firestorm, Gentle Reader, you turn an entire city’s downtown into a blast furnace, and then you can generate heat and destruction of an entirely different order. Think of a firestorm as being a non-volcanic pyroclastic flow and you won’t be too far wide of the mark.

The first modern firestorm was produced over Hamburg in 1943, during the course of several nights’ consecutive missions. We managed to take out something like 46,000 civilians, which is pretty stout. In fact, even producing a firestorm in Hamburg was something of a technical achievement, given how much of that city is water. Not even Bomber Harris could light off water (and he would have given it a try if he’d thought he could). As I recall, we managed another over Braunschweig. Wikipedia lists some other attacks which may have generated firestorms (the deadliest being Tokyo, with something like 100,000 dead, although it’s not confirmed to what extent it was a “genuine” firestorm . . . as if that mattered to the dead).

Dresden was Bomber Command’s masterpiece. Everything came together just perfectly. The weather over Central Europe, which sucks at that time of year, produced a gap in cloud cover just over the city, just at the right time of night. The city’s defenses had long since been stripped to bare minimum, to free 88mm batteries for the Eastern Front. The city was full to bursting with ignorant civilian refugees. And it was very densely built and tinder-dry. The RAF’s tactics, honed to perfection over the rest of Germany, worked like a finely-tuned machine.

First came the Pathfinders, dropping the strings of colored flares which the Germans knew as “Christmas trees” over the old town, the Altstadt.  Then came the Mosquitoes to drop specific marker bombs.  Within minutes the Lancasters were overhead, decanting tons upon tons of thermite bombs down onto the city. There was some high explosive mixed in, to break water pipes and so forth, the better to hinder firefighting, but the big thing was to get the fires started. Because then, roughly three hours later, came the topping: a second wave of Lancasters. Why the delay? Why not a steady stream of aircraft? Because, Gentle Reader, you have to give time for the organic firefighting forces to deploy, and for the resources of the surrounding district to arrive and get into the fight. So that your second wave not only fully blooms your firestorm, but also kills as many as possible of the people trying to put the thing out.

And so it came to pass. The fires of Dresden so lit the night sky that the bomber crews could read by their glow . . . over 100 miles away. I forget how many corpses they gathered together over the ensuing days, but on the Altmarkt, the old market square, there’s an outline in red paving stone, several yards long and several wide. There’s melted metal drizzled between some of the stones inside the outline, with the inscription that over 6,800 corpses were burned on that spot alone. There were many such places throughout the city. And with the heat generated by a firestorm, human bodies vanish, reduced to ash. So we’ll never get a reliable body count from Dresden.

The next morning the 8^th Air Force, not to be outdone, showed up to make the rubble bounce. By that time in the war it went on missions escorted by phalanxes of P-51 Mustangs, among the very best propeller-driven combat planes ever built. While the B-17s added of their plenty, the fighters dropped down low to strafe.

At this link the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has an article, with some pictures, of what Dresden looked like by February 15, 1945.

I first visited Dresden in February, 1986. They’d re-built the Zwinger and a few other of the baroque jewels of the city. Whatever other sins must be taxed to the commies of East Germany, when they went to re-build a place like Dresden they did it right. The Hofkirche was still, if memory serves, a shell, and several of the other major landmarks were likewise as they’d been left in 1945. The Frauenkirche was still a pile of rubble with a couple of chunks of blackened wall protruding.

I next went there in 2011, by which time the Hofkirche, the Semperoper, the Schloß, and the Kreuzkirche had been re-built, the latter only to a limited extent. What I’d really gone to see, however, was the Frauenkirche, re-built from 1993 to 2005, in painstaking exactitude, and with something like 35-40% original stones. I’d not realized it when I first saw it in 1986, but it was the largest dome structure north of the Alps, and exceeded anywhere only by very few buildings (such as St. Peter’s in Rome).

So what to make of the attack today? Was it “unnecessary” in either a tactical or strategic sense? Was it a “war crime”? The first question is much the easier to answer. It did close to nothing at all to hasten the war’s end or alter the circumstances of its ending, or to facilitate any other significant military operation, or to avoid any knowable casualties to the Allies. If Bomber Command and the USAAF had dropped their payloads into the North Sea and flown home they would have done precisely as much good for the Allied war effort. If it was meant to impress Joe Stalin it couldn’t have fallen more flat. This was, after all, a man who slaughtered his own people by the million, and who had observed what the Germans themselves had done to his country on their advance and on their retreat.

The second question is one which I confess I can’t answer. You’ve got so many imponderables to factor in, from the civilians who shouted and rejoiced and voted the Nazis into power, who managed not to notice as their Jewish neighbors disappeared, family by family (except when several thousand at once were rounded up and marched through downtown to the train station), who congratulated each other as their soldiers marched across a continent, one harmless nation at a time. On the other hand it’s hard to tar the children with that brush. You’ve got the feedback loop of total war, where every blow is its own purpose, its own justification; it’s no easier to explain than why climb a mountain. You are enemy; your homes are enemy; your churches are enemy; your fields and forests are enemy; your land itself is enemy. Whether I can put a number to it or not, all that harms you — however it harms you — is by definition part and parcel of my objective.

Maybe the best way to frame the questions to oneself, all in a lump, is to ask whether, knowing then what we know now, one would be willing to accept a bomb-for-bomb repetition of the attack, under the circumstances that existed and with the government in power that Germany had then.  Remember that cultural recollections of events like Dresden is a large part of why Germany so thoroughly abandoned the militarism and aggressive nationalism that had characterized it since Friedrich Wilhelm proclaimed himself King of Prusssia in the early 18th Century.  And this is where contemplation gets uncomfortable for me. As much as thinking about the city’s destruction, and all the dead civilians, and the horror of their deaths, and the wanton destruction of beauty can move me to tears (and it can, literally), if the price of destroying Nazi Germany, or any of its analogues of today, or even inducing another would-be conqueror to think twice, is the annihilation of a Dresden, then I have to confess to myself that I would more likely than not give the launch order. All over again.

Maybe that’s why we need to remember what happened in the skies over Dresden, 70 years ago today. It reminds us what we are capable of doing to each other, and why, and those are truths that are never reassuring to confront.  We can “promise” ourselves “never again,” but that’s not really a promise, is it?  It’s more in the nature of a hope, a prayer, the pronouncement of a totemic name — actually it’s a paraphrastic — by the speaking of which that primitive part of our brains which seems to run an awful lot of how we behave to each other somehow expects to exorcise the demon.  To borrow a line from Lincoln, fondly to we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war will never again visit us.

Realizing that hope, that prayer, must start within each of us.  Therefore we remember Dresden.

“I’m Rinso-white”; that’s a line from one of the scenes in Hair, specifically the lead-in to “Ain’t Got No.”  The expression is actually older than that, and comes from the laundry detergent’s old advertising campaigns.  Rinso-white apparently was the thing to be.  In Europe the equivalent was and remains Persil.  John Mortimer uses the brand-name as a nickname for a notoriously “bent copper,” D.I. “Persil” White.  In the late 1940s and 1950s the product’s name acquired a more sinister overtone, at least in central Europe, and among a very definable group.

It’s very much true that success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan.  And seldom has there ever been a more orphaned orphan in that respect than the Nazi state.  After May, 1945 all those tens of thousands — hell, millions — of Germans who cheered themselves hoarse as Hitler and his jack-booted thugs, his legions of soldiers, fleets of tanks, and swarms of aircraft marched, rumbled, and screamed past mysteriously vanished into the ground, as if they’d never been there.  Whatever else they may have said among themselves, publicly at least you couldn’t find a True Believer with a search warrant.  It’s sort of the flip side of the phenomenon that after the war the entire population of France turned out to have been active in the Resistance (makes you wonder how they managed so effectively to round up and ship off their Jewish population . . . perhaps the Jews self-deported?).

[In that connection I’ll observe that when my father served in Army counterintelligence, stationed in Germany from 1964-65, he was alerted to listen very carefully to what the slightly older Germans, the ones who would be in their mid-40s by that point, got to saying when you’d poured enough beer down them.  Sure enough, it was even so.  Paul Fussell may have noticed a reluctance to speak — while sober and with an American present — about just exactly what one was doing during those twelve years from 1933 to 1945, but maybe that’s because he didn’t get drunk enough with enough Germans of the right ages and backgrounds.  The expression “the good old days” meant something very specific to Germans of a certain age range, and it was an expression they used not infrequently among themselves.]

The inability to find anyone who’d ever agreed with the Nazis, either as a philosophical proposition or just from the standpoint of practical politics — by which I mean taking over Europe and subjecting it to direct rule by or effective subordination to Germany — was nowhere more pronounced than among precisely those groups who had been the most effective at implementing the take-over.  The very senior officials of Nazi Germany were unredeemable, by and large.  Too many corpses about the place and all.  Too bad, that; for them the “good old days” would never come again.  Oh sure, there were exceptions — Field Marshal Erich von Manstein (who point-blank refused to join the anti-Hitler conspiracy with the statement that “Prussian field marshals do not mutiny”) comes to mind — who managed to pick back up their old Nazi careers under the federal German banner, but by and large they were, officially at least, tainted goods.  It was in the next level down, among the faceless bureaucracy, still pretty senior and able not only to implement policy but to have had a direct hand in formulating it, in steering the “right” — by which is meant the wrong — people to the right places, that post-war Germany presented a conundrum.  There were way too many of them for the networks of mutual support to keep up outside active employment; they had no skills other than being government bureaucrats; and they couldn’t all run to the welcoming arms of South America.

These were the people at the level of Adolf Eichmann.  His defense, if you recall, was that he was just a functionary implementing decisions his superiors had made, that he was bound to follow at peril literally of his life.  Except he wasn’t any such thing.  He was, in fact, the Holocaust’s johnny-on-the-spot for rounding up hundreds of thousands of Jews and shipping them off to be exterminated.  He was not just an executive but rather also a decision-maker.  And in the end he was convicted as such and danced at the end of a noose for it.

Eichmann’s central difficulty in defending himself may well have been his institutional affiliation.  He was SS, an organization which started out as Hitler’s personal bodyguard and by the end of the war had metastasized into nearly a state within the state.  Nowadays people associate the concept of “Auschwitz” with extermination.  What isn’t as well-known, at least not in the Anglosphere, is that the extermination camp was Auschwitz-Birkenau, or “Auschwitz II,” and that camp only came into its own as an industrialized killing facility towards 1943-44, by which time three-quarters of all the Jews who would die in the Holocaust had already been killed.  There was, however, more to Auschwitz than just Birkenau; there were extensive industrial facilities, owned and operated by the SS and manned with the inmates who had not been killed upon arrival.  The SS owned other industrial facilities all over Germany and the occupied territories.  By the end of the war the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), or the Reich Main Security Office, an SS sub-organization, had encompassed the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service), a secret police principally employed outside Germany in the East, and the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei, or secret state police), which was the principal secret and political police within Germany and in the West.  Then there was the Waffen-SS, the separate army run by the SS, and numerous other unsavory organizations.  The SS managed to liquidate and absorb the competencies of the Abwehr, the military counterintelligence department (in April, 1945 they hanged its former head, Admiral Canaris, and his assistant, Hans Oster, the latter among the most committed and vociferous anti-Nazis; it was Oster who went to the Dutch embassy on the evening of May 9, 1940, and told them, “Tomorrow morning at 4:00.”)  The entire SS and all its works were damned by the Allies after the war as a criminal enterprise.  No one wanted to know anything about it, to have had anything to do with it, even to admit that it had once existed.

Other organizations did not have the public relations problems the SS did.  One agency in particular managed for decades to maintain the fiction that it not only had never willingly cooperated with Nazism but had been a hot-house of active opposition conspirators.  We refer to the Auswärtiges Amt, the Foreign Office.  Internally it referred (and still refers) to itself as “das Amt.”  Its politico-cultural antecedents were the old nobility of Prussia and the Empire.  Commoners, the recently-ennobled, and of course Jews needn’t apply, in those days.  The Prussian foreign service was the preserve of people like Otto von Bismarck, who while still a junior diplomat simply took off, without formal leave, for several months to pursue an affair with another man’s wife.  When someone back at home office observed he might as well get back to the job he was being paid to do, Bismarck huffed that he had no intent of giving an account of his domestic arrangements to anyone, and carried on as before.  He suffered no career repercussions.  In 1862 King Wilhelm I called him to Berlin to become minister-president of Prussia and steam-roll the Prussian Landtag on the issue of army appropriations.  It was the place where the “mediatized” nobility, who had lost their sovereign powers and territories in the Napoleonic invasions and the subsequent pan-European settlement of 1814 but who were still considered marriageable by the remaining sovereign houses, found a home if they absolutely had to earn some income.  Not a few of them could — and doubtless did — sniff with Bismarck that the Hohenzollerns were no more than a “Swabian family no better than mine.”

After the Great War — a war, by the way, which the Amt played no small part in bringing about with its combination of ham-fisted confrontationalism towards France and Britain (e.g. the Agadir incident in 1911) and its crawling subservience to Wilhelm II — it remained to a large extent what it had been.  It did, a tiny bit, open its ranks up to a few Jews and the classes who formerly would have become officers in the army or navy.  But as the major national institution which survived intact (Versailles annihilated the army and navy, flat prohibited an air force, confiscated most of the merchant marine, and laid crippling indemnities on the economy which had to be satisfied from the major industries) it was able to preserve to a large degree its internal culture.

Then came 1933.  If you buy the official line from the post-1949 Amt, for the next twelve years its officials and functionaries seldom let a chance go by to pour sand in the gears, shove wrenches in the spokes, and generally gum up the works of the Nazi enterprise.  This was when they weren’t outright conspiring to bring down that horrid regime.  And so forth.  In truth there were senior members of the Amt who actively joined the opposition, or who publicly opposed the regime in the years after it seized power.  The latter group were mostly forced out well before the war started.  Of the former group, after the July 20 Plot failed most of them were executed. Hans Bernd Gisevius went into hiding in Switzerland and survived.  Ulrich von Hassell (irony alert:  Admiral Tirpitz’s son-in-law), who had been ambassador to Italy, didn’t.  Hans Bernd von Haeften was among the first group hanged at Plötzensee in August, 1944.  Friedrich Warner Graf von der Schulenberg had been ambassador to the Soviet Union; he too was executed.

Diplomats are schooled in sniffing out tiny hand-holds on sheer cliffs.  It’s their stock-in-trade, really.  Does Country X really demand thus-and-such, or might it be willing to accept so-and-so with a hint of this-and-that, which is pretty damned close to such-and-such but not quite, or not quite yet.  Sure enough, the (former and soon-to-be once-again) diplomats of the Wilhelmstraße realized that with so many of their actual anti-Nazis dead, there was no one to deny their own affiliation with the dead heroes.  And the myth of the Amt’s nobility and purity was born.

I say “myth” because you see, the Amt was in it up its well-bred shoulders.  Their senior officials voluntarily joined the party and its organizations in droves, even beyond the extent of politely obtaining a party card.  In the occupied countries they actively collaborated with the SD, the Gestapo, the SS, the Arbeitsfront (the slave-labor outfit headed by Robert Ley, who killed himself before he could be tried at Nuremberg; we got Fritz Sauckel, though, Goering’s field agent in the four-year plan program and the Nazis’ chief slaver in occupied Europe), and the entire rest of the Nazi machinery of death and oppression.  In fact, in several countries it was the Amt who took the lead in locating Jews and other candidates for deportation and who made suggestions to the SS/SD/Gestapo about how better to implement the Final Solution and the rest of the program of oppression.

How is this now known, what was for decades successfully hidden?  Because the German government a number of years ago commissioned a study to tell the actual, full story.  Granted, it was long after anyone personally implicated was available to have his pension revoked or — heaven forfend! — go to prison, but at least it was set as its task the puncturing of the thick web of lies.  And it did exactly that, publishing in 2004 an enormous door-stop of a book:  Das Amt und die Vergangenheit: Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik (The Office and the Past: German Diplomats in the Third Reich and the Federal Republic ), a copy of which I picked up in 2011.  They actually sat down and paged through the archives, finding who joined the party under what circumstances and when; who was pressed into early retirement when he wouldn’t join; who joined not only the party but specific party organizations . . . like the SS, for example; who was responsible for making precisely which decisions about specific actions and policies, who communicated with whom about what and when.

And most importantly, the book lays out in sordid detail who was involved after the war in the wholesale production of what became known as “Persilscheine,” or “Persil certificates.”  That’s what they called the official certifications of non-culpability that were the magic ticket to getting back on the government payroll, specifically in the new Auswärtiges Amt of the Federal Republic of Germany beginning in 1949.  Very briefly summarized, what happened was that the old Amt officials attested to each other’s anti-Nazi bona fides; the anchor points were tied to the now-dead, and therefore unable to contradict, actual anti-Nazis.  It was a mutual-exoneration society, in short.

At the center of it was Ernst von Weizsäcker, who’d joined the Weimar Auswärtiges Amt in 1920, after serving in the Kaiserliche Marine during the war (he’d been Admiral Scheer’s flag lieutenant at Jutland in 1916).  He became a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat, deeply embedded in the power structure of the Amt instead of out in the field for most of his career.  He was the go-to guy who made or broke careers by steering friends and stifling opponents.  And at various times he was also involved in the Amt’s policy-making process.  In short, he had pretty much full knowledge of what was going on in occupied Europe, and why, and what was happening to the victims.  And he sat at his desk for most of the war, working the levers, willingly in service to the regime.  There’s no credible indication at all that he was anything other than a willing servant of Hitler’s, although he from time to time did disagree on things like whether liquidating Czechoslovakia just in 1938 was a good idea . . . or whether they maybe ought to wait a bit before liquidating it . . . so as to be better able to fend off Britain and France while feeding on the corpse of Czechoslovakian independence.

We hanged his ultimate boss, Ribbentropp, at Nuremberg.  Ol’ Joachim was an outsider, though, a “Quereinsteiger,” whose first job in the Amt was as foreign minister.  He brought a bunch of his people with him, and they were of course thoroughly resented by the lifers (such as Weizsäcker).  When it came time to try the functionaries at what became known as the Ministries Trial, Weizsäcker was the lead defendant.  That trial was the next-to-last trial of the major Nazi war criminals, and by that point the resources, time, and patience of the prosecuting powers was nearing its end.  The lead prosecutor, Telford Taylor (who’d been chief assistant to Robert Jackson at the first, big International Military Tribunal trial at Nuremberg), had seen his case slowly sift through his fingers as he progressively lost the behind-the-scenes administrative battles to bring the full weight of the evidence to bear on the defendants.  By the time the trials started in January, 1948 he was down to a passel of figure-head defendants, including Weizsäcker.  He convicted almost all of them, but in the case of ol’ Ernst, the conviction was the object of an almost immediate and highly coordinated public relations campaign, which in 1950 succeeded.  He’d been sentenced to seven years in 1949 (inclusive of time served; he’d been arrested on his return from the Vatican, where he’d been ambassador since 1943, only in 1946); that was reduced to five years in 1950, and that same year they let him out.  He died the next year.

A key player in coordinating the exoneration efforts from the outside was his son, Richard von Weizsäcker, who in 1948 had been a law student and an active member of his defense team.  When daddy was convicted he became a central point of organization for the effort to have his father’s conviction set aside, either legally or effectively in fact (as the latter indeed happened).  Doing so also necessarily closely involved Richard in white-washing the war-time deeds of other Amt insiders, because of course their testimony in support of his father was only as useful as their own purity.  All of which is to say that Richard von Weizsäcker was as closely involved as was possible in sweeping under the rug the institutional guilt, the willing collaboration, of his father’s ministry in the butchery that was Nazi Germany abroad.

Over the rest of the 1950s the new Amt absorbed more and more of its former officials, each one holding (proudly? we can hope not) his Persilschein, attesting that he was untainted by his past.  Towards the 1970s and early 1980s these people began to retire, and almost without exception they receded into the twilight accompanied by fulsome official praise, and with full and generous state pensions.

And Richard von Weizsäcker?  Dutiful son, defender of his Nazi father, fetched up as Bundespräsident in 1984, an office he kept until 1994.  In Germany the Bundespräsident is the official head of state; the Kanzler is merely the head of government.  He is chosen by the Bundestag, and occupies a public position that is theoretically supposed to be above politics.  He is, to the extent a nation can be said to have a political conscience, supposedly the conscience of the country.  If there are unpalatable truths to be spoken, it is expected that the Bundespräsident will speak them.  Richard was Bundespräsident while I was spending my second junior year in Germany in the mid-1980s, and he was viewed, both then and later, as something of a secular saint.

He died last week, and yesterday Germany said good-bye to him in a state funeral.  At the risk of understatement, the parade of speakers somehow failed to mention his efforts in the concealment of war crimes, and the critical nature of his efforts in ensuring that war criminals and collaborators in war crimes not only were not punished, but returned to power in the same roles they had filled during the war.  Specifically mentioned was his address to the nation on May 8, 1985, the 40th anniversary of the surrender; he characterized that as a “day of liberation,” by which of course he meant that it was a liberation for Germany as well.  Which is true enough, but one has to ponder how much credit a prisoner is entitled to who viciously fights, to the death, those who would strike the fetters from his arms and legs.  His Christian faith was also praised as a center-point for his effectiveness as a politician and human (he served from 1964-7, and then again from 1979-81 as president of the Lutheran Council in Germany).  I’m sure he was a good Christian boy, as we say around here.

He also was a key figure in the white-washing of an entire institution’s active participation in the crimes against humanity of the regime his father so diligently served.  And in ensuring that the men on whose skirts, if not on whose hands, the blood of millions glared in bright red walked freely the halls of power in the reconstituted Germany.

For those who will never read Das Amt und die Vergangenheit (it’s not available in translation, more’s the pity), I guess that Richard von Weizsäcker is once and forevermore Rinso-white.