In Europe

medieval houses went up in flames.
    A sixteen-year-old medical student, summoned to help collect the bodies in Wuppertal, wrote that some of the victims looked ‘very peaceful’, having suffocated in the ensuing vacuum.‘Others were completely burned. The charred corpses were only about fifty centimetres long. We put them in zinc tubs and washbasins. A washbasin held three corpses, a bath seven or eight.’
    Ernst Jünger had business to attend to in burning Hanover on 16 December, 1944. ‘The streets were covered with piles of rubble and loose debris, and with the wrecks of cars and trams. The city was a mass ofpeople, running wildly back and forth like a scene from some oriental disaster. I saw a woman walk past: clear tears ran from her face like rain. I also saw people lugging lovely old pieces of furniture, now covered in mortar. An elegant gentleman, grey at the temples, was pushing along a cart containing a rococo cabinet.’ Jünger also wrote of a huge attack on Misburg that killed more than forty young female Luftwaffe clerks. ‘The force of the blast had torn all the clothes and underwear off their bodies, leaving them completely naked. A farmer who had helped to gather their bodies was completely shaken: “All such big, lovely girls, and heavy as lead!”’
    The story of the sinking of the
Wilhelm Gustloff
has since been described by Grass and others, but what happened to the survivors afterwards is almost unknown. Some 900 were put ashore at the port of Swinemünde (now świnoujście). Many of the women – some of them girls no older than eleven – were speechless from the traumas they had suffered. They had been raped, and after that the mothers had been forced to watch their children drown. Some of them begged the German naval cadets to shoot them. Along with thousands of other refugees, they were housed in abandoned holiday resorts along the beach. The harbour and the sea before them were full of even more refugee ships.
    The target the Americans might have been going for, the V-1 and V-2 installations at Peenemünde, had been moved to mountains in the Harz long before. Still, on the afternoon of 12 March, 1945, the area was bombarded by more than a thousand planes. The refugee ships in the harbour were adrift and burning, or had already disappeared under water, along with all those who thought they had found safe shelter in them.
    According to official figures, this ‘Swinemünde massacre’ claimed 23,000 lives, but the presence of so many unregistered refugees could bring the real figure to twice that. No mention of this is made in American military annals; the bombardment is listed only as an ‘attack on railway yards’.
    Jünger reports that an Allied pilot was shot down close to the village where he lived. A Dutch refugee attacked the pilot with an axe, and a farmer passing with his wagon was able to save the man only by risking his own life. But many other pilots were less fortunate: during the final year of the war, some hundred Allied pilots were lynched by Germans.
    During the German bombardments of England, 60,000 civilians were killed, 90,000 were badly wounded and another 150,000 were injured. The Allied raids of Germany claimed eight times that number, around half a million victims, including 75,000 children. Almost 800,000 people were badly wounded. Seven million Germans were left homeless, and a fifth of all the country's houses were destroyed.
    The effect of the bombings on the German war industry, however, was far less severe. Albert Speer estimated the total loss of production in 1943 at no more than nine per cent, a decrease for which the country could compensate. During later interrogations, he said he found the Allied tactic ‘incomprehensible’: why hadn't they attacked the country's basic industry (steel and oil) and transportation network? Now, despite the enormous fires, the industrial capacity of a city like Berlin remained almost intact until the final months of the war. It was only the Americans who finally began to focus systematically on oil refineries and other vital parts of the German war machine.‘The British left us with deep and bleeding wounds,’ Marshal Erhard Milch said after the war. ‘But the Americans stabbed us in the heart.’
    This disproportion between industrial damage and civilian casualties was no accident. It was a conscious policy. Even before the war began, the British had developed the tactic of ‘strategic bombardment’, a