For five years during the Second World War, the Allies launched a trial and error bombing campaign against Germany's historical city landscape. Peaking in the war's final three months, it was the first air attack of its kind. Civilian dwellings were struck by-in today's terms-"weapons of mass destruction," with a total of 600,000 casualties, including 70,000 children.
In The Fire, historian Jörg Friedrich explores this crucial chapter in military and world history. Combining meticulous research with striking illustrations, Friedrich presents a vivid account of the saturation bombing, rendering in acute detail the annihilation of cities such as Dresden, the jewel of Germany's rich art and architectural heritage. He incorporates the personal stories and firsthand testimony of German civilians into his narrative, creating a macabre portrait of unimaginable suffering, horror, and grief, and he draws on official military documents to unravel the reasoning behind the strikes.
Evolving military technologies made the extermination of whole cities possible, but owing, perhaps, to the Allied victory and what W. G. Sebald noted as "a pre-conscious self-censorship, a way of obscuring a world that could no longer be presented in comprehensible terms," the wisdom of this strategy has never been questioned. The Fire is a rare account of the air raids as they were experienced by the civilians who were their targets.
Jörg Friedrich was born in Tyrolia in 1944 and grew up in the Ruhr District (Essen). A broadcaster in Berlin, Friedrich became a historian after he reported on the Majdanek Trial during the 1970s. His first comprehensive history of the prosecution of Nazi criminals in Germany, The Cold Amnesty (1984), was a bestseller in the Federal Republic. In 1993 he published a monograph on the forgotten Nuremberg Trial of the German High Command titled The Law of War: The German Army in Russia, which earned him a honorary doctorate from the University of Amsterdam. The idea for The Fire came to Friedrich accidentally one night in February 2002, and since its publication, the book has been translated into ten languages, sparking debate worldwide. Jörg Friedrich was born in Essen, Germany, in 1944 and spent most of his career writing about Nazi atrocities before orienting his research toward an analysis of Allied military tactics. He lives in Berlin.
Jörg Friedrich unravels the history behind: The Flying Fortress The Master Bomber The creep-back effect The German-British radar war The Kammhuber Line The art of jamming The "Wild Boar" and the "Tame Boar" Winston Churchill and the never-fought campaign of 1919 Operation Millennium: the Thousand-Bomber Raid on Cologne The ruins of Remscheid The conscience of the physicists The Dambusters Raid and the modern-day Flood The Arnhem operation and the demise of Emmerich and Kleve The massacre of Swinemünde Lübeck and Thomas Mann's message Anklam's columns of smoke Wismar; the red-hot bricks Danzig and the war against the roots Hamburg, or the interruption of the world The cathedral in Minden where Henry the Lion wed Bielefeld and the Bethel asylum Duisburg; the earthquake bomb The luck of Koblenz The "flaming brands" of Worms Augsburg and the fire in the frost Heilbronn and the inverse terror Identification squads The largest book-burning of all time.
