They were not war-crimes; they were not revenge for the bombing of London and Coventry; they were part and parcel of the total war which Adolph Hitler had unleashed. Besides the worthy citizens of Dresden had allowed over 5000 fellow-Jews to be sent to the death-camps; but a few remained who expected to be executed the following morning. For them to see Dresden go up in flames meant life, and health, and freedom when the Americans came. Who is going to weigh in the balance their joy at seeing their would-be executioners being reduced to charcoal, with the anguish of the guilty city? Germans who complain about Dresden have not even read the first page of Clausewitz’s On War, where he ridicules the idea that kind-hearted people might think that in war one uses minimum force. War is violence, and you use the maximum force that is politically expedient. Besides, if in the final months of Germany’s defeat, the Western Allies were expected to become a little more kind-hearted and humane, one might have thought that Germans too would have become more lax about the order that men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer were not to survive the Third Reich. But no; he was dutifully executed in April 1945. Does the German mind absolutely preclude any interpenetration by an Anglo-Saxon mind? Was no mutual understanding between them possible while Hitler lived? And even years after he had gone, was there still the same impassable gulf between the English mind and the German mind? Perhaps I was lucky only to dream about something which was utterly impossible. The only thing that may have been unwise was to agree the slogan “unconditional surrender”, which suited Joseph Stalin. The bombing of Dresden was a brutal act of war. The Russians asked for it to be bombed; and whether necessary or not, it will have helped to din into the minds of some people that if you unleash total war on others, others may unleash total war on you. For me the moral is simple; don’t open Pandora’s box unless there is no alternative. War was not necessary for Germany in 1939; and the bombing of Dresden was trivial compared with the invasion of Russia.
Now these are not matters which easily form subjects of convivial conversation, particularly not with a member of the defeated nation. So it follows that any reconciliation between England and Germany must either ignore these matters, or transcend them; I chose to transcend them. So my choice inevitably involved rejection by someone too young to recognise the necessity of choice. But the same excuse does not exculpate the clergy of the C.of E. They are perfectly intelligent, many of them highly so; and they are very far from being immature. If they lack the experience necessary to recognise the necessity of choice, is it unfair to conclude they chose not to have that experience? They chose not to consider adequately the nature of forgiveness, and the preconditions for reconciliation?