Obama to Germany: We’re Sorry for World War II

I hope this isn’t as bad as it looks. I really hope that.

And I understand that we’ve always allowed the Japanese to sugar-coat their own history, and pretend that the rape of Nanking (for instance) never happened.

But the solution to that is to encourage honest scholarship among the Japanese. And any nation must be honest with itself about which tactics in any war were truly effective, which might have represented excess, and which might have merely stiffened the enemy’s resolve. Certainly, the bombing of Dresden isn’t anything to brag about: it wants sober contemplation.

But for an American President to go to Dresden and deliver a speech there as a prelude to a commemoration of D-Day borders on the obscene: It looks appears to be red meat thrown out to German revisionists. John Rosenthal, writing at Pajamas Media:

That Obama would be planning a trip to Germany in connection with ceremonies marking the anniversary of the Normandy invasion is already rather odd. Following the turning point represented by the Battle of Stalingrad, the invasion was, after all, the crucial event that all but guaranteed Germany’s defeat in the Second World War.

But when one considers just where exactly in Germany Obama is headed, then the significance of the visit becomes more clear. There is some talk of Obama visiting the Buchenwald concentration camp outside Weimar, in whose liberation Obama’s great uncle Charlie Payne is famously supposed to have taken part. But the Buchenwald visit appears not to be the main event and indeed it can be presumed to have been included in discussions as something of an alibi.

The latest German reports suggest Obama’s principal German destination will be Dresden. According to an article in the local paper Die Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, representatives of the German and American governments met in Dresden last Wednesday to discuss preparations for the visit. An American security detail is reported to have already scoped out sites in the city: presumably for a public speech.

The symbolic significance of a visit to Dresden by the American president — especially one undertaken in connection with a D-Day commemoration in France — may be missed by some Americans, but it is absolutely unmistakable for the German public. For Germans, Dresden is the symbol bar none of German suffering at the hands of the Allies. The city was heavily bombed by British and American air forces in February 1945, toward the end of the war. According to the most recent estimates of professional historians, anywhere from 18,000 to at most 25,000 persons died in the attacks. These numbers come from a historical commission established by the city of Dresden itself. But far higher numbers — ranging into the hundreds of thousands — have long circulated in Germany and beyond. The bombing of Dresden is commonly described as a “war crime” in German discussions.

Alleged crimes committed by the Allies against Germans and Germany have indeed become a sort of German literary obsession in recent years, with numerous books being devoted to the subject. The taste of the German public for the theme was made particularly clear by the enormous success of author Jörg Friedrich’s 2002 volume The Fire [Der Brand], which is about the Allied bombardment of Germany. The book’s success was so great that Friedrich and his publisher quickly followed up with a picture book on the same topic titled Scenes of the Fire: How the Bombing Looked.

There is nothing wrong with tackling the subject of Dresden. Many have done so, including Kurt Vonnegut. And I’m not obsessed with the Holocaust: I’ve owned a Volkswagen, and may own another someday. I use Krups coffeemakers. The war is over, and good riddance.

But for an American president to plan a trip to Dresden in this particular way, and at this particular time—and against the backdrop of his apologies to tyrants, his bow to a Saudi prince, and the frightening spread of anti-Semitism in Europe—is troubling in the extreme.

It is hard not to imagine that there will be some kind of implied sub rosa apology to Germany for our part in the liberation of Europe from the Nazis.

I hope I’m wrong; I really do. But the potential here for providing some kind of tacit endorsement to German revisionists is high. The idea of any American President doing that makes me sick to my stomach, and very, very angry on behalf of those who sacrificed their lives, limbs, and psyches to win that epic struggle.

More from the PJM article:

It is virtually unthinkable that Obama could give a speech in Dresden and not allude to the bombing of the city. Most of the city’s historical monuments — which Obama’s advance team were apparently inspecting — were severely damaged or destroyed in the bombing and had to be rebuilt. Moreover, for Obama to visit both Dresden and Buchenwald would suggest precisely the sort of outrageous parallels that have become commonplace in Germany at least since the publication of Friedrich’s The Fire.

(As so happens, although tens of thousands of persons died there, Buchenwald was not one of the camps specifically devoted to the extermination of Jews. But far be it from Obama to know that. When, during the election campaign, he first referred to his Uncle Charlie’s WWII exploits, he said that his uncle had helped to liberate “Auschwitz.” Moreover, Charlie Payne did not really participate in the liberation of Buchenwald either, but rather in that of Ohrdruf: a lesser-known, affiliated camp some sixty kilometers away.)

As discussed in my earlier PJM report here, the principal sponsor of Obama’s literary career has been Germany’s Bertelsmann Corporation, which offered him a reported $2 million advance when he was still largely unknown. Obama’s 2004-2008 tax returns list over $6 million in income from the Bertelsmann subsidiary Random House (and over $2 million in what appears to be indirect income from Random House). This would not be worth mentioning here, were it not the case that the “in-house” historian of Bertelsmann and the Mohn family, which controls the corporation, is none other than Dirk Bavendamm. As likewise discussed in my earlier report, Bavendamm is an openly revisionist historian of the Second World War who, among other things, describes WWII as “Roosevelt’s war.”

As bizarre as it may seem, President Obama’s impending trip to Dresden suggests that German revisionists have a friend in the White House.

It looks like a sly wink to the Holocaust-denial crowd, and if that is the intent is more than disgusting.

h/t: Atlas Shrugs; Pam has a nice pictorial up featuring arch apologies as captions for pictures of the European cemeteries inhabited by obscene numbers of American dead.

Via Radio Patriot, who also refers us to Dave’s reprint of “In Flanders Field,” in honor of Memorial Day.

Light a candle this weekend for the brave men and women of all races, creeds, and sexual orientations who have died over the years for this beautiful, terrible thing we call liberty—that notion that was once so abstract, but had the odd side effect of allowing the wealthiest, most innovative society the world has ever seen to emerge, and allows millions of poor people now to live better than royalty did in ages past.

And light a candle for Europe, freedom’s birthplace. Pray that it doesn’t also become its graveyard.