Figure 1.--Here we see a German family in the process of trying to furnish their basement. They move a heavy couch (not shown) and then a table and chairs. Here we see a boy of about ten carrying a chair up to a small table (apparently used for family dining). We see the boy only from the rear, but he is wearing a typical boy's clothes at home, a white short-sleeved shirt and suspender short trousers. The family isn't named in the film, but the activity gives us a rare look at what actually happened in German basements during the bombing raids.

A German documentary entitled "Firestorm" (directed by Michael Kloft in 2003) contains a lot of valuable historical footage about the bombing of German cities during the final years of World War II, especially Berlin and Dresden. There is an interesting section on air raid shelters in Berlin that helped save a lot of lives, especially those of women and children which as a result of military concription made up an abnormally large portion of the city population during the final years of the War. At the beginning of the bombing raids, before it was realized how devatasting the incendiary bombs would be or the intensity of the Allied effort, German families moved some of their furniture into the basements of houses with the idea that they could have some of the normal comforts. Many believed that basements would offer adequate protection. The families cut holes in the walls between party-wall houses so that people could move from one house to the other underground if their own house was destroyed and they needed to move into the next door house to survive. Later, of course, there was no thought of such comforts--only the hope of staying alive.

We see quite a number of children in the German news real footage. Some are even younger than the boy we see here (figure 1). We see children wandering around looking for lost parents (most likely dead) or rumaging in the rubble of the city to scrounge anything that might help them survive, materially or emotionally.

The director of the film is German and in no way attempts to minimize the horrors of the Third Reich. He does raise the question of whether the bombing of certain sites in Germany which had no strategic military importance was justifiable is raised in the film but not answered. Nor does he address the question of just what is a justifiable target. The question is simply posed as something to be considered without suggesting any definite conclusion and certainly without moralizing in either a pro or con direction. One fact that was not mentioned in the film and should have been is that it was the Germans who threated to bomb cities even before the War began. From the outbreak of the War, the Germans began bombing cities in Poland and continued to bomb cities until they lost air superiority. It is true that the Allied strategic bombing campaign was larger than the German effort, but that is only because Germany did not have the industrial capacity to build a strategic bombing force like America and Britain.

A reader writes, "The documentary seems quite fair to me. It doesn't make any excuses for the civilian population under the Nazis, but it does show how many suffered cruelly as a result of the war. It also shows the terrible persecution of Jews and other minorities in which many civilians cooperated. So I would say that the documentary shows the sufferings of World War II on all sides, but of course it concentrates on what happened within the Third Reich and only tangentially in other countries. The film is not very politically oriented. It doesn't moralize about the war so much as just show how terrible it was for everyone. "

Created: 2:45 AM 1/10/2011
Last updated: 3:02 AM 1/11/2011