Jörg Friedrich (author)

Life and career

Born in Kitzbühel in 1944, he spent his childhood in Essen. Jörg Friedrich became a Trotskyist and, during the Vietnam war, an antiwar protester. Following thereon, he began to write books on the history of the war in Germany and work as an independent historian, researching postwar justice and the Nuremberg Trials. His books have always been controversial and have largely sold through this controversial analysis and the publicity surrounding them.

Criticism of Friedrich's position

As a historian who has written strongly on the horrors committed by the German state under the Nazis, Friedrich's position has always been assumed to be anti-Nazi with antiwar tendencies focused towards Germany's taking responsibility for its actions during the war.

"his previous work examining Wehrmacht crimes and Nazi justice enables him to approach the subject without risking automatic dismissal as a right-wing apologist." (from the Peifer review of Der Brand)

Friedrich admits that Germany initiated bombing of civilians in the UK by bombing London, although he claims the first raid was accidental, thereby leaving Britain as the first nation to deliberately bomb nonmilitary targets. Less well-known bombings, such as that of the Polish town of Wieluń within the first two hours of the war and prior to any attack on Germany, either by air or land, are left out. Friedrich mentions the British use of explosive weapons followed by incendiary, a mixture designed to create large fires. He also mentions that the technique to create firestorms was a German development first seen in the bombing against British cities, such as the Coventry Blitz (14 November 1940) and the Second Great Fire of London (29/30 December 1940).

Friedrich was persuaded to publish his book of Dresden photographs by Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl;, with the condition that equivalent photographs of Polish and British victims should also be shown.

Friedrich has specifically attempted to claim the position of an objective historian, making no judgement about the morality of Allied bombing. Many reviews of his books have pointed out that the language Friedrich uses in his books, with words such as "Einsatzgruppen" (task force in English) used to describe allied pilots and "crematoria" (as in the crematoria of Auschwitz) to describe the air raid shelters in which Dresden residents died. This has led to accusations that Friedrich "is downright reckless" and is attempting to make the reader consider a parallel to "the Nazi dehumanisation of the Jews.".

Taken together, two explanations have been given for Friedrich's recent books and their choice of topics. The first is that Friedrich maintains strong antiwar feelings, and with the looming War in Iraq and other global conflicts, Friedrich wanted to join in the general German antiwar feelings and implicitly criticise the policy of attacks on foreign nonmilitary targets in Iraq. Friedrich has himself rejected this explanation, stating that he "is dismayed that "The Fire" has bolstered the pacifist argument against German participation in an Iraq war".

The second explanation that has been given is that Friedrich, whilst probably still anti-Nazi, has been acting as a German nationalist and trying to put into a reasonable perspective the crimes of some German officials in World War II as not different from, or not even worse than, the many atrocities committed by the other nations involved in the war.

Other related historians

Other German historians closer to the mainstream of historical research have also covered the suffering of the German people during the war. The bombing of Dresden had been covered in detail by Götz Bergander prior to Friedrich's book.

Friedrich has cooperated with historians from various countries, including Peter Maguire, during the creation of his book "Land and War".

Influence on German and international debate on the war

Friedrich's books have not been well received by some media outlets in Germany. ARD, a public television channel, wrote "the Fire" ("Der Brand") off as a "provocation", and Süddeutsche Zeitung recommended throwing his latest book, Places of Fire, directly into the garbage bin.

Even with these strong criticisms, Friedrich has had considerable public success. Der Brand was serialised in the German tabloid Bild and has had a serious influence on German national debate. Friedrich has claimed that this has meant that German civilians who had never previously talked about their wartime experiences have begun to tell about this phase in history, which was previously documented primarily from the point of view of influence on the war. At other times, revision of the outlook on the war has taken place, with Klaus Naumann, a former NATO General and friend of Friedrich's, saying, during a joint promotional interview with Friedrich, that he now doubted the legality and military need for Churchill's decision to attack Dresden, thereby implying that the attacks were war crimes.

Both in Germany and abroad, neo-Nazi groups have seized on the book as proving that the air war was begun by the UK. Claims that the book shows that bombings of German towns in 1940 were the first attacks on civilians of the war, based on the omission of attacks in Poland, are common. The equating of the bombing of Dresden with the Holocaust is made explicit and even inverted (?), with the actions towards Jews described as a decision of Hitler for strategic reasons whilst the needless incineration of hundreds of thousands of defenseless German civilians is reappraised as a war crime and a massacre.

It was not until 15 May 1940, two days after the Rotterdam Blitz, that the British abandoned their policy of using aerial bombing only against military targets and against infrastructure, such as ports and railways west of the Rhine, which were of direct military importance. It is also alleged that Rotterdam was bombed by mistake.

Reviews

Due to the level of controversy it has raised, a number of reviews of the German edition of "Der Brand" have been written in English and published in English language journals and/or made available on the Internet. These reviews, made shortly after the publication of the book and prior to Friedrich's public statements, have tended to treat the inaccuracies and omissions in Friedrich's books as carelessness, although criticism of the language used has been almost universal.

Comparison of reviews made in Germany with those in the U.S. and the UK is also interesting. Some of the differences may be seen as being due to different points of view; however, specific aspects of the book (for example, the most commonly mentioned failure to provide context) are reliably mentioned in English language reviews whilst being included strongly in some German reviews and missing entirely in others.

Review: Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg, 1940-1945, Douglas Peifer, Air and Space Power Chronicles, Spring 2004

Peifer provides a detailed review of the book, which finds that it is "Highly effective as a literary dirge and lamentation, it comes up short when judged by the standards of the history discipline". Perhaps more importantly he states that the language is "deliberately provocative", that the book's unclear chronology can be misleading and that the lack of clear references included makes it unverifiable. Even given these flaws, Fifer finds that "for those willing to make the effort, reading the piece is worthwhile".

Review of Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand. Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945; A Narrative of Loss, Joerg Arnold, Department of History, University of Southampton,

Perhaps best summarised by its final line, "As a narrative of loss, Der Brand succeeds like few other texts, but as a historical treatment of the allied air war, it is seriously deficient." this review analyses in particular the use of sources within Friedrich's work and also his refusal to apply analysis to the reasons for the bombing. A particularly strong criticism is in Arnold's contrast between Friedrich's overt claim that the bombing had nothing to do with the holocaust and his implicit linkage of the two subjects through his use of the language of the holocaust to describe the effects of the bombings; however, Arnold fails to clarify what exactly he means with 'language of the holocaust' and why it should not be used in relation to atrocities perpetrated against Germans.

Jörg Friedrich: Der Brand, Franz Kaessl, Öbib online (German Language).

From its opening sentence "The fate of German civilians in the Second World War was treated as a taboo topic for many decades", this review contrasts strongly with most English language reviews. It points to the example of Günter Grass as an author recently discovered the suffering of the war, whilst reviews elsewhere have claimed that Grass's work of the 1960s is actually a far more powerful portrait of the effects of wars on civilians. In the end the review concludes that the book should give a new view on history, not a new assignment of blame.

The Destruction of Germany, Ian Buruma, in The New York Review of Books

In a footnote to his article "Targeting the city: Debates and silences about the aerial of World War II", published in the International Review of the Red Cross, Charles Maier (Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University) collates several reviews of Der Brand:See the excellent reviews submitted to the H-German network by Joerg Arnold, 3 November 2003, and Douglas Pfeifer, 4 November 2003, which appropriately address, I believe, the strengths and weaknesses of this work — Pfeiffer's with more emphasis on the military and political issues, Arnold's with greater emphasis on the moral and conceptual problems. Others have also indicated the deficiencies of the book as a scholarly source. See for instance Horst Boogs’ summary list of errors in his contribution to Ein Volk von Opfern? Die neue Debatte um den Bombenkrieg 1940-45, Rowohlt, Berlin, 2003. Obviously many issues are contentious in this debate. The most parochial issues are those that concern historians as such. To what extent can the historian merely report or dissect the differing positions without engaging his own sense of moral judgment? Second, what sort of rhetoric is legitimate in a historical account?

The review on H-German network by Joerg Arnold is online.