Bombs Make No Moral Distinctions Where They Fall

[unhappycamper]

Bombs Make No Moral Distinctions Where They Fall
by Robert Fisk
Published on Sunday, January 2, 2011 by the Independent/UK

To Mannheim for its annual film festival and I am gripped by Armadillo, a documentary on a Danish NATO unit in Afghanistan, real bullets whizzing past one of the bravest directors of photography in the world, real soldiers falling wounded, one with a Wilfred Owen pallour of death on his face.

But he survives. Others don't. After storming a Taliban position, the Danes find at least three Afghans, apparently still alive. There is a crack of gunfire and they are dead. "We eliminated them in the most humane way possible," one of the Danes says afterwards, right there on the soundtrack.

I am stunned. The words "war crimes" are in my mind. Then I stumble out into the cold afternoon to walk back to my hotel past the back of the 19th-century Kunstalle and there are shrapnel gashes up the red stone walls, deep wounds in the brickwork of the school next door, a slash in the basement window casing. Was this from the British fire raid of 1940, or the first attempt to raze the city on 16 April 1943, or the American raids of 1944? Well protected with underground bunkers, only 1,700 Germans were killed here, a mere 0.6 per cent of its residents. War crimes?

I find a small bookshop in a bleak, freezing street - the 1950s block architecture proves how much of this city much we destroyed - and I ask for a history of Mannheim in the Second World War. My request is received without emotion by a stooped, middle-aged man who brings me two beautifully produced volumes - "the last we have," he says - and I buy them at once: Mannheim under the Dictator and Mannheim in the Second World War, both produced with photographs and documents from state and city archives. I flip open the second book and there is a nurse bending over a carbonised corpse. Three women lie on their backs, all in coats; obviously caught in the open, perhaps during the great raid of 5-6 September 1943, in which 414 residents were killed. Two of them are elderly, one of them a much younger woman with high cheekbones and closed eyes.

Opposite is a page of death notices in the Neue Mannheimer Zeitung - like all papers in Germany, controlled by the Nazi party - printed a few days after the raid. Heinz Laubenstein was five when he was killed, his sister Ruth was 17, their father and mother, Hans and Bienchen, were 36 and 35. Katherina Witwe was 68, Berta Werle was 29. Anna Schindler was 56, her husband Anton eight years older. A victim of the 1944 bombing, a gaunt woman - her face like a skull - staring wildly, helped by a civil defence worker and a man who may be her husband clutching a ragged child, stands amid rubble. The Nazis liked to emphasise their own civilian suffering; and they gloated over their enemies. An amateur photograph shows two captured Allied fliers hiding their faces from the camera, trailed by two grinning schoolboys on bicycles; another shows a smouldering British Hereford bomber that has crashed plumb into the middle of a street across the Rhine in Ludwigshafen.

[bowens43]

1. So we really don't have smart bombs?

They need to stop calling them that......