The Allied bombings in the early Federal Republic

Contrary to the oft-suggested absence of German historiography on the air war, several historical accounts appeared in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. While it is hard to determine the extent to which these works were read and influenced popular memory of the Second World War, clues can be found by looking at reprints and editions of works and by looking at the reception of these accounts in national newspapers and popular magazines.

Another indication is the political call for historical documentation of the air war, not only by political pressure groups, but also by the German government. As Robert Moeller and Norbert Frei have pointed out, in the West Germany of the 1950s, there existed a broad consensus that German civilians had been among the main suffering parties of the war and could be seen as a community of victims. While this argument has been made mainly with regard to the expulsions, the Allied bombings too became a central issue for official memory politics and public debate in the Federal Republic during the 1950s and 1960s.

The various historical accounts that saw the light in the Federal Republic during the 1950s and 1960s provide an important insight in these dynamics. The authors of books on the Luftkrieg were almost exclusively laymen historians, specialists in military practice and theory, former members of the German civil defense fire brigade or experts in international law. While professional academic historians largely ignored the subject, it was the work of these ‘specialists’ that formed the foundation of the early historiography of the air war.

Different studies of the historiography and official memory politics have pointed out that during the 1950s, West German historiography was still marked by a traditional craft of political historians. In the early Federal Republic the historical institutes were dominated by conservative-oriented historians, such as Friedrich Meinecke, Gerhard Ritter, Theodor Schieder and Hans Rothfels. These historians were strongly influenced by a historicist view of history. After 1945, nationalist-oriented historians were confronted with the need to acknowledge the responsibility for Hitler's Third Reich. While this confrontation provoked some discussions on the validity of German nationalism and led to a more critical view of German history, German historians also defended national German traditions and German identity.