Great Britain and the Destiny of Immanuel Kant‘s Hometown
By Gerfried Horst
Part I. The History of Königsberg 1255 – 1945
Kant and Königsberg are inseparable, as explained by J H W Stuckenberg in his biography The Life of Immanuel Kant (London 1882):
To understand Kant, therefore. one must know something of the history of his hometown Königsberg, from the beginning until the end. At the beginning, East Prussia with its capital Königsberg was a theocratic state, dominated by the Teutonic Order. The Teutonic Order ruled East Prussia for 300 years, from 1225 until 1525.
Thereafter followed the first Protestant state in the world, the Duchy and as of 1701 the Kingdom of Prussia, which lasted for about 300 years as well until the beginning of the 19th century. Its spiritual power was the Protestantism of Martin Luther who translated the Holy Bible into German so that all Germans could understand God’s word directly without being under the orders of a priest.
The three Prussian Kings, Friedrich I, Friedrich Wilhelm I and Friedrich II, “the Great”, fostered pietistic principles – to be polite, undemanding, dutiful, honest, frugal, hardworking and respectful of your betters, which became the Prussian virtues – in the army and the society. Friedrich the Great added thereto the principles of the Enlightenment and allowed Kant to work out and propagate his philosophy.
The Prussian kings ruled over the Electorate of Brandenburg with its capital Berlin and the Kingdom of Prussia, the capital of which was Königsberg. Kant was proud to live in Königsberg, the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia. Here you can see what Königsberg looked like in the 18th century during Kant’s lifetime.
The Prussian virtues were also Kant’s virtues. Kant’s ideas shaped the cultured classes in Königsberg in a way that went beyond religious boundaries. Everyone in Königsberg, irrespective of their confession, agreed with his teachings. His ideas created a cohesion which protected ethnic minorities.
The British philosopher Bryan Magee wrote about the philosophy of Immanuel Kant:
The English writer Max Egremont has summarised the atmosphere that characterized Königsberg and East Prussia for centuries:
Now please have a look at some photos of old Königsberg prior to its destruction.
Part II. The Destruction of Königsberg in August 1944
Let’s now come to the destruction of Königsberg by RAF Bomber Command in the Second World War.
An important eyewitness for that tragedy was Michael Wieck, the son of a German-Jewish mother who in 1944 was 16 years old. He had to wear the yellow star and to do forced labour in a factory rather than going to school. I had read his book about his childhood under Hitler and Stalin and wrote him a letter. We got to know each other and became friends. When I started my book project, he warned me:
Against that background, is it possible for me as a German to criticise the Western Allies, particularly the British government, for their bombing campaign against German cities? Did Great Britain not have to defend itself against the Nazi aggression? But why were Königsberg, and indeed so many other German cities, so heavily bombed? Was it to save the Jews and other people from persecution by the Nazis? Was it to destroy the Nazi military machine? But why, then, were so many medieval old towns destroyed? Why were so many civilians killed, so many cultural treasures lost?
The general and widely believed opinion is that the German Luftwaffe began the bombing of civilian targets by attacking Guernica, Warsaw, Rotterdam, London and Coventry. The British and later the Americans, it is claimed, simply responded in kind and only towards the end of the war – for example with the destruction of Dresden – the bombing exceeded acceptable limits.
Reality was different.
Please let me sum up my opinion in a few theses only:
The Royal Air Force as a separate military unit besides the Army and the Navy was founded on 1 April 1918, seven months before the end of the Great War. One reason for that might have been that during the prolonged static warfare of the First World War, many thousands of British young men died. Sir Hugh Trenchard, the founder of the Royal Air Force (RAF), came to the conviction that in a future war a strategic air force would minimize British military casualties. In his opinion it would be better to destroy the enemy’s vital centres, attack the enemy’s civilian population and in so doing break their morale so that they would force their own government to make peace.
As noted in the minutes of a conference held at the Air Ministry on 19 July 1923, there was a difference between the strategy of the Royal Air Force and the policies of the Army and the Navy. Sir Hugh Trenchard said:
The historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote:
The Area Bombing Directive (14 February 1942) was a directive from the wartime British Government’s Air Ministry to the Royal Air Force, which ordered RAF Bomber Command:
Also in February 1942, Arthur Harris was made commander in chief of the RAF Bomber Command. Only four weeks later, in the night of 28 March 1942, the city of Lübeck was the first German city to be attacked by RAF Bomber Command. The attack created a firestorm that caused severe damage to the historic centre, with bombs destroying three of the main churches and large parts of the built-up area.
The historian Richard Overy stated (Quote):
From 1942 until 1945, a total of 131 German towns and cities were bombed according to that method. Königsberg was one of them.
To reach Königsberg 1,900 miles away from the South of England, the British bombers had to fly over neutral Sweden in violation of its neutrality.
There were Swedish newspaper reports detailing the horrible noise that so many four-engine heavy bombers made.
In the official British history, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany 1939-1945 it is written:
In this operation considerable difficulties were encountered. The target lay at very long range and, therefore, called for a particularly high standard of navigation. …
Moreover, large amounts of cloud at the target complicated the visual marking and, in fact, delayed the attack for twenty minutes. Eventually, however, all these difficulties were overcome, and a brilliant attack was carried out.
From the despatched force of 189 Lancasters, it is certain that not more than 175 attacked the target. Yet this relatively small number of bombers wrought tremendous havoc in Königsberg. Forty-one per cent of all the buildings and twenty per cent of the industrial buildings in the town were seen to be seriously damaged. On the basis of photographic reconnaissance, it appeared that 134,000 people had been made homeless and that another 61,000 had had their homes damaged. Results of this kind against so distant a target would hardly have been achieved a year earlier by 1,000 bombers. Such was the developing power of area attack produced by greater marking and bombing accuracy. earlier by 1,000 bombers. Such was the developing power of area attack produced by greater marking and bombing accuracy.
This report was published in 1961. It does not say how many people died (about 6.000). The nightly mass murder of so many Königsbergers (mostly women and children and old people, since the men had to fight in the army) still in 1961 is called “a brilliant attack”.
The eye-witness Michael Wieck wrote about the bombing attack on Königsberg on 29 August 1944:
He described the attack on August 29 as follows (Quote):
Neither Königsberg’s seaport nor the railway stations nor military barracks nor industrial facilities were bombed, but only the old town, the cathedral and other churches, the university buildings and the residential areas.
Please have a look at the result of the bombing:
Part III. An Evaluation of RAF Bomber Command’s Area Bombings.
In the last months of the war the bombing raids seemed to be governed by the principle that a German town or city was to be destroyed because it had not yet been destroyed. By the beginning of 1944 at the latest, the RAF and the US Air Force had complete air supremacy over Germany. They could destroy whatever they wanted to.
The German historian Golo Mann – the son of Thomas Mann and his Jewish wife Katja – wrote:
Still the aim of the bombing campaign, to destroy the morale of the Germans, was not obtained. In his book Among the Dead Cities: Is the Targeting of Civilians in War Ever Justified? published in 2006, A. C. Grayling summed up the impact of the British carpet bombing on the morale of the German population:
Why did despite that the bombing go on? What was the reason why the heaviest raids took place shortly before the end of the war?
Webster and Frankland, the authors of the official British history The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany 1939-1945 gave the following answer on that question:
It is ironic that Webster and Frankland called the onslaught on the German towns and cities the ‘crowning of an edifice whose foundations had … been laid in the past …’, considering that Bomber Command RAF destroyed millions of edifices in Germany the foundations of which had been laid in the past, many in the Middle Ages.
British propaganda during the Second World War was intent on keeping quiet about or distorting the truth about the bombing raids on German cities. Martin Middlebrook wrote:
Please have a look at the pictures of four Pioneers of Peace: Immanuel Kant, Julius Rupp, Hannah Arendt and Vera Brittain. All four have explained what needs to be done to create the conditions for perpetual peace.
Part IV. The Road to Peace
The first condition is Truth. Truth can be told. Kant wrote:
The Königsberg thinker, theologian and politician, Julius Rupp, grandfather of the artist Käthe Kollwitz, tried to put into practice Kant’s philosophy in Kant’s and his hometown Königsberg. What Kant called a duty, i. e. to tell the truth, his disciple called a power. He wrote:
Throughout the War, Vera Brittain told the truth about what RAF Bomber Command did. In 1944 she wrote:
Her prophesy has not yet come true, but there are others who believe that it should.
In 2006, A. C. Grayling wrote:
Like in Great Britain, also in Germany it is difficult to criticize the strategic air offensive against Germany in WWII. A.C. Grayling gave a reason why the Germans were unable to mentally face the destruction of their cities:
Hannah Arendt (who was a Jewish Königsberger like Michael Wieck) gave advice on how the Germans could face both what was done in their name and what was done to them:
In 2014 the local council of the central borough of Hamburg decided to name an embankment after the British pacifist writer Vera Brittain. Her daughter, Baroness Shirley Williams, attended the ceremony to inaugurate the new name. Two years later, in 2016, in a similar way a Vera-Brittain-Ufer in the very centre of Berlin was established, and Shirley Williams came with her entire family to inaugurate it.
However, in Great Britain even today there is no hint in any museum or elsewhere of the systematic attacks on German civilians in their homes, no hint that these attacks constituted crimes under international humanitarian law for the protection of civilians.
Rather than that, outside St Clement Danes Church, the central church of the Royal Air Force at the eastern end of the Strand in London, a statue of Sir Arthur Harris was put up:
Petitions in protest sent to the British Ambassador in Germany by the mayors of several German cities that had been bombed (Cologne, Pforzheim, Dresden, Hamburg, Hildesheim, Magdeburg, Mainz und Würzburg) were ignored.
Often when Sir Arthur Harris is being mentioned, you will find the allegation that his nickname was “Bomber Harris”. I found a document contradicting that allegation. In a Letter to the Editor of the Guardian Weekly the former bomber pilot J. L. Cox wrote after Sir Arthur Harris died on 5 April 1984:
Therefore, from now on, when mentioning Sir Arthur Harris, please call him in the same way as all crew members of Bomber Command referred to him:
“Butcher Harris.”
Furthermore, I propose to honour Vera Brittain by naming a street after her or erecting a statue of her in London. An appropriate place for her statue, in my opinion, could be next to the statue of Butcher Harris.
In conclusion, Kant’s “philosophical project” Toward perpetual Peace is not an unrealistic dream that can never become reality. To create an order of perpetual peace is not an empty idea, but a prime necessity for living on this earth, a task that we can and should fulfil. Kant wrote:
In the lecture he gave on 22 April 2013 at Immanuel Kant’s 289th birthday in Kaliningrad/Königsberg, the English writer Max Egremont said:
Reconciliation and hope are the message of Kant and Königsberg.
