Keith
Lowe’s Savage Continent provides
excellent commentary on the dangers of distorting history. However, he frequently repeats commonly
accepted distortions. When
discussing the bombing of Hamburg he states, “the statistics were not
reliable. In a city where bodies
were concealed beneath a mountain of rubble, where some had been
fused together
by the intense heat while others were reduced to mere ashes, it was impossible
to measure the number of dead with any kind of precision.” Yet, when discussing the bombing of
Dresden he states the claims of 100,000 deaths are refuted by “most reliable
sources” who put the figure at 20,000.
Over ninety percent of Dresden’s city center was destroyed. It’s population had swelled to approximately 1.2 million with mostly women
and children refugees fleeing the Red Army. U.S. and British bombers had dropped 650,000 incendiaries on
the city creating a firestorm.
Anyone looking at photographs of the rubble and believing it resulted it
only 20,000 fatalities cannot be serious.
People claiming that Dresden was bombed for military reasons are not
aware that the city’s military borough, the Albertstadt, was never targeted.
Lowe
minimizes the atrocities committed during the expulsion of Germans from Eastern
Europe. He makes only a brief reference
to Henry Morgenthau who was instrumental in forming U.S. postwar policy. He makes no mention of Harry Dexter
White, the author of the Morgenthau Plan and a Soviet agent of influence. This plan was devised by White to push
the rest of Europe into the arms of the Soviets. Lowe does not believe that Europe was on the verge of going
Communist. Most foreign policy
experts believe the opposite. Lowe
claims “McCarthy’s portrayal of American Communists . . . was every bit as
irrational as eastern Europe’s anti-Americanism.” Senator McCarthy had no idea of how extensive Communist
infiltration was. His fears
were far from irrational.
There
is an acceptable narrative that must not be contradicted. Lowe mentions author John Sack who
wrote a book about atrocities committed by Jewish prison camp officials in
Poland. Sack’s agent refused to
represent the book and his published who had paid for the book decided not to
publish it. Lowe states, “like
James Bacque’s book about German POWs, was considered dangerous precisely
because it contained seeds of truth.”
The 1978 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records has a category
for Mass Killings. It placed Adolf
Hitler in third place after Mao and Stalin. The category did not appear in subsequent editions. Clearly there is an effort to suppress
information that does not conform to this narrative. My own work on the Morgenthau Plan deserves more coverage
than it has received.
