In March 1942 Churchill’s War Cabinet adopted the ‘Lindemann plan’, whereby civilian targeting became official. The Jewish German émigré Professor Frederick Lindemann, Churchill's friend and scientific advisor, had by then become Lord Cherwell. He submitted a plan to the War Cabinet urging that German working-class houses be targeted in preference to military objectives.
Working-class homes were preferred to upper class because they were closer together, and so a greater kill ratio could be anticipated. Middle-class homes had too much space around them, he explained. Lindemann was never prosecuted for this ghastly new war crime, by which all German non-combatants could be randomly incinerated from the air. The War Cabinet kept this horrific plan of mass murder a top state secret, no inkling of which was ever intended to be made public.
The Lindemann plan swung into action on 28th March 1942 when 234 aircraft of Bomber Command attacked the old port of Lubeck. It had no military or industrial importance but was chosen because, as Air Marshall ‘bomber’ Harris remarked, the city was ‘built more like a firelighter than a human habitation.’ Its old medieval houses and narrow streets and its cathedral were erased, by ‘a first class success’ of the RAF. On 30 May 1942 a thousand aircraft dropped high explosive and incendiaries on the medieval town of Cologne, burning it from end to end. The devastation was total.
Bear in mind that the eighty million people of Germany were attacked by the British and French empires, with nearly a billion people in them, because Germany’s nationalist, socialist revolution imperiled, first, the British continental power-sharing arrangement with France, drafted after four hundred years of war between those two powers, and second, because the German Reich’s radically successful economic policies posed a mortal threat to the international capitalism that had quietly taken over human affairs during the previous half century. (Today we call it globalism and, unchecked, it threatens the survival on earth of life itself.)
Britain declared war on Germany after Chamberlain sabotaged Polish-German border negotiations, removing Polish incentives to accept the generous solution Germany offered to resolve their dispute. Fed lies by German expatriate aristocrats, British leaders believed a timely war declaration would cause the immediate collapse of Hitler’s government, or failing that, that the war would be a repeat of the Great War in which the Royal Navy would starve into submission a nation that experience showed British arms could not defeat on the battlefield.
In 1919 French leader Clemenceau lamented that “there are twenty million Germans too many.” By 1956, when the WWII killing finally ended, 21 million Germans, more than one quarter of the entire ethnic group, had been slaughtered. Compare this to the Thirty Years’ War, in which France and her allies succeeded in dismembering Germany and killing every other German.
