the RAF and USAAF killed over 40,000 Germans in Hamburg, some 2.5% of Hamburg’s population.....in 1943

Operation Gomorrah

The free world, and Jews in particular, are fortunate that in 1943, during Operation Gomorroah, there was no Facebook, Instagram, X, or Tik-Tok , that the NYT, Haaretz, and The Guardian still had some sense of morality, and that the UN didn’t exist. Op-ed.

It is in some respects, Hamburg of 1943 and Gaza of 2023 have remarkable similarities.

It is undeniable that the photographs and footage coming out of Gaza are deeply shocking and disturbing. And it is easy to understand how these graphic images influence public opinion. To be sure, every dead Gazan, every Gazan child crying over a destroyed home, every young Gazan mother holding her dead baby is a gruesomely effective propaganda tool for the Hamas against Israel.

All the explanations and all the historical context in the world can never combat the heart-wrenching sights of the consequences of the war in Gaza.

Hamas claims a current death-toll of some 40,000 dead, about a quarter children, and up to 100,000 injured, including about 10,000 permanently disabled.

Though these figures are taken directly from Hamas and are inherently suspect, the UN and most of the world’s media cite them as though they are definitive.

In fact, well over 20,000 of the dead are identified Hamas terrorists. Some of them are indeed children; but a 14-year-old boy brandishing an AK-47 Kalashnikov or an RPG is just as much a combatant, and just as dangerous, as a 26-year-old man brandishing the same weapon.

This means that even according to Hamas's propaganda figures, more than half the deaths in Gaza are combatants. This is a better ratio than just about any other urban conflict in the world.

This week marks 81 years since Operation Gomorrah, the massive bombing of Hamburg..

The population of Hamburg in 1943 was around 1,700,000; the population of Gaza in 2023 was around 2,100,000 according to Hamas figures (which are almost certainly exaggerated).

The Royal Air Force launched Operation Gomorrah on the night of the 24th-25th July 1943, using over a thousand aircraft, including 791 bombers. Among the targets on that first night were the municipal water-pumps, making it impossible for the fire-department to combat the subsequent fires which caused such catastrophic destruction.

Then on the late morning and afternoon of Sunday 25th July the United States Army Air Force attacked Hamburg with almost 500 bombers.

For seven nights the R.A.F. bombed Hamburg, and for eight days the USAAF bombed Hamburg. The single heaviest raid was carried out by the RAF on the night of the 27th-28th July, when 729 British bombers dropped 2,326 tons of bombs on Hamburg.

All in all, in that week-and-a-half from the 24th July to the 3rd of August, the RAF and USAAF killed over 40,000 Germans in Hamburg, some 2.5% of Hamburg’s population almost all of them civilians (most of them killed in that one RAF raid on the night of 27th-28th July).

More than quarter-of-a-million houses, some two-thirds of the houses in Hamburg, were destroyed or catastrophically damaged.

Out of 9,251 factories in Hamburg, 4,301 or 46% were destroyed.

By the 3rd of August, not one hospital was left functioning anywhere in the city. By the 8th, a million people, 59% of the population, had fled the city. And those still remaining in Hamburg were reduced to foraging for food in the rubble, and sleeping in the ruined buildings.

The entire world, and we Jews in particular, are fortunate indeed that there was no Facebook, Instagram, X, or Tik-Tok in 1943, that the New York Times, Haaretz, and The Guardian still had some sense of morality, and that the UN didn’t exist yet. Otherwise, these would all have inundated the world with heart-wrenching images of dead Germans, of German children crying over destroyed homes, and of young German mothers holding their dead babies, in a gruesomely effective propaganda tool for Nazi Germany against Britain and the USA

The more-than 40,000 Germans killed in Operation Gomorrah, and the hundreds of thousands more crippled, orphaned, widowed, bereaved, and rendered homeless, were just a minuscule fraction of the more-than 3,500,000 German civilians killed in the Second World War.

Yet it was Operation Gomorrah which changed the course of the war. Several years later, Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister of Armaments, wrote that “Hamburg had put the fear of G-d in me” (Inside the Third Reich, chapter 20).

On the 2nd of August, as Operation Gomorrah was ending and Hamburg was still burning, Speer informed Hitler y”sh that armaments production was collapsing, and added the further warning that a series of attacks of this sort, extended to six more major cities, would bring Germany’s armaments production to a total halt (ibid.).

Years afterwards, the British Army officer and military historian Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart revealed that the ancillary nature of strategic bombing of German cities as forerunner of land invasion was laid down in the Casablanca Conference of January 1943.

It was there that the directive to the Allied Air Forces ordered “the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened” (History of the Second World War, part VII, chapter 33).

Maybe the most graphic depiction of the effects of the Hamburg bombing is that of the Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Göbbels y”sh, who wrote in his diary on 29th July:

During the night we had the heaviest raid yet made on Hamburg… Kaufmann [the local Gauleiter, Nazi political regional governor]…spoke of a catastrophe the extent of which simply staggers the imagination. A city of a million inhabitants has been destroyed in a manner unparalleled in history, we are faced with problems that are almost impossible of solution. Food must be found for this population of a million. Shelter must be secured. The people must be evacuated as far as possible. They must be given clothing. In short, we are facing problems there of which we had no conception even a few weeks ago… Kaufmann spoke of some 800,000 homeless people who are wandering up and down the streets not knowing what to do” (cited by William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, book 5, chapter 28).

The former Mayor of Leipzig, Carl Goerdeler, wrote to Field Marshal Günther von Kluge after the Hamburg bombing that “the work of a thousand years is nothing but rubble”.

Goerdeler was genuinely and ideologically anti-Nazi, and had frequently intervened to protect Jews under his jurisdiction from Nazi persecution. He knew that von Kluge was a devout and loyal Nazi, but apparently hoped to influence him to support an assassination of Hitler out of self-interest.

Goerdeler was involved with the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler on 20th July 1944, was arrested, and hanged on 2nd February 1945. Von Kluge remained loyal to Hitler y”sh till the end of his life; knowing that he was nevertheless suspected of being involved in the plot, he committed suicide on 19th August 1944.

The descriptions of Hamburg during and after Operation Gomorrah are eerily similar to the current descriptions of Gaza. Of course there are also major differences:

-In July 1944, Britain and the USA killed 40,000 Hamburgers in a week and a half, while Israel has [allegedly] killed a similar number of Gazans in over nine months.

In Hamburg, almost all the casualties were civilians, while in Gaza well over half are combatants.

-In 1943, Britain and the USA never gave any warnings to the civilians of Hamburg to take shelter or flee. In Gaza, Israel almost invariably gives warnings, usually days, sometimes weeks in advance.

-In 1943, neither Britain nor the USA allowed any humanitarian aid into Germany, much less supplied any such themselves. Israel is both allowing several tons of humanitarian aid (food, water, medications, blankets, etc.) into Gaza for the civilians there, and also actively supplying such.

The innocent civilians of Hamburg in 1943 (and indeed throughout Germany) had genuine, legitimate, and justified grievances for their horrific suffering. But those genuine, legitimate, and justified grievances were against their own Nazi government which had led them into a war of aggression and genocide, not against the Allied bombers which were raining down such death and destruction.

It was the civilians of Gaza who created the Hamas as a genuinely popular movement. Hamas was not some outside organisation foisted on the innocent civilians of Gaza; it was the population of Gaza who created the Hamas, voted them into power by an overwhelming majority in 2006, supported them in their seizure of complete power the following year, and have kept them in power ever since. The civilian population of Gaza is far more responsible for their Hamas government than the Germans were for their Nazi government. Hence the population of Gaza is far more responsible for its own suffering than the population of Germany was for its own suffering in the Second World War.

If the Gazans have genuine, legitimate, and justified grievances for their suffering, then those genuine, legitimate, and justified grievances are against themselves for bringing this Hamas government into power and keeping it in power, and for overwhelmingly supporting this war of aggression and attempted genocide.

Killing civilians arguably constitutes a moral price to pay for victory.

But that price was unarguably worth paying to defeat the ultimate evil that was Hitler y”sh and Nazism.

And that price is equally unarguably worth paying to defeat the murderous evil that is Hamas and its genocidal psychopaths.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/393834