Fire-bombing Hamburg and Dresden was in no sense revenge for the blitz on London and Coventry; it was the prosecution of War to its conclusion, once the policy of “Unconditional Surrender” had been agreed. The way to avoid the fire-bombing of Dresden was to have behaved, so that the Western Allies would always have wanted to keep open the door to possible negotiations. Then it would have been politically inexpedient for them to have gone too far. To the Anglo-Saxon mind, Germans who accept these unpalatable truths have expiated their war guilt, by recognising that they started it all, they opened Pandora’s box. Those who haven’t accepted these truths, remain deluded. The only mistake the Western Allies may have made was to agree the slogan “Unconditional Surrender”, which suited Joseph Stalin.
Let us consider a little more deeply how German war guilt may be expiated in reconciliation? Let us not limit ourselves to the Anglo-Saxon point of view. The horror of war, and the slaughter of war, is so awful, that for two people, one English and one German, to find their own happiness in the aftermath of it all is of course a kind of reconciliation; but hardly one where you could say, “Good has come out of evil”. To be able to say that, one must be able to rise above what has happened, to transcend the situation; and then one may be able to say that the “good” which is achieved is something which it was hardly practicable and maybe impossible to have achieved before the conflict. This raises the question of what the Second World War was really about, what it was that had to be expiated, and whether the Allied policy of “unconditional surrender” was politically wise, or politically foolish? Though I have misgivings about it, I think this policy probably was right. Germany had plunged Europe into world war twice in a generation, wars which between them destroyed Western civilization as it existed pre-1914, and in their first chapter launched communism on the world, destroyed the ailing Turkish Empire and destabilized the Middle East, and awakened Islam to the folly of so-called Christian culture. In their second chapter, Germany in a war of revenge sought world conquest, and very nearly extinguished freedom in Europe, perhaps for the duration of a 1000 year Reich. Incidentally in the two wars about 100 million people were killed.
It all arose from Germany regarding War, not as an instrument of policy, but in the end as policy in itself. The Schlieffen-plan aimed to conquer France with the same expedition as in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870; and this plan had been carefully filed away years before 1914. It was not clobbered together at the last moment. It went wrong for a number of reasons; jealousy in the German High Command, stiffer resistance from the Belgians and the British Expeditionary Force than expected, the fact that the younger von Moltke was only the shadow of his uncle, and the audacity of Marshall Joffre in the valley of the Marne.