THE ABANDONMENT OF THE CODE OF CIVILIZED WARFARE
From William Gayley Simpson’s “Which Way Western Man?”
Appendix 6
For centuries Europeans (including the British) had lived under the code of “civilized warfare,” by which non-combatants were excluded from the scope of hostilities. The Lindemann Plan proposed that this code be abandoned. It urged that military targets were too difficult to hit, and that with effort concentrated on the production of airplanes specially designed for the purpose, “50 percent of all the houses in the cities and towns of Germany with over 50,000 inhabitants would be destroyed.” The Lindemann Plan was adopted, and terror bombing given top priority. The culmination came in 1945, after the war was virtually over, in the attack of several thousand planes on the beautiful and unarmed city of Dresden, overcrowded with hordes of frantic refugees fleeing before the advance of the Russian army. It is estimated that in one night anywhere from 135,000 to 250,000 people, mostly women and children, died. “It was the greatest single massacre in all European history.”
This decision of the British War Cabinet and the bombing that followed “was kept a closely guarded secret from the British public for nearly twenty years.” But eventually, even while being publicly denied, it was officially admitted by Mr. J. M. Spaight, Principal Assistant Secretary of the Air Ministry, and by Air Marshall Sir Arthur Harris, who had been the chief in command. In 1961, the facts, both about the decision and about the bombing, were laid before the world by Sir Charles Snow, a high-placed physicist, in his Godkin Lecture at Harvard in 1960, and published in 1961 with the title of Science and Government by the Harvard University Press in the U.S. and by the Oxford University Press in England. And no denials were forthcoming from any quarter whatever, though when it came to the matter of Dresden, Sir Arthur did apparently feel the need to shift some of the responsibility onto the shoulders of others, and replied: “I will only say that the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself.” Who the “much more important people” were he refrained from disclosing.
It is important to add that Mr. Spaight of the Air Ministry, declared that Hitler had been genuinely anxious to reach an agreement with Britain “confining the action of aircraft to the battle zones,” that Hitler undertook the bombing of the British civilian population reluctantly and not until more than three months after the Royal Air Force had commenced the bombing of the German civilian population. And he expressed the opinion that, after it had started, Hitler would at any time have been willing to stop the slaughter. “Hitler assuredly did not want the mutual bombing to go on.”
Who were the men responsible for this ghastly crime against humanity? Sir Arthur Spaight refrained from naming them, but it is high time the question be pressed.
Preeminently they must have been Churchill and Lindemann—above all, it would seem, Lindemann, since it was in his mind that the Plan had its origin, and since Snow reveals that he had a great hold on Churchill, was his very close and inseparable friend; and also that he “was making all the major scientific decisions on the English side of the war,” and had “power greater than that exercised by any scientist in history.”
This, of course, makes it important to know whether or not Lindemann was a Jew. The English people at once assumed that he was. So much so, apparently, that Lord Birkenhead hastily threw together a biography of Lindemann to prove that he was not.
But Snow admits that he may have been Jewish, and casually slips in quite an array of facts that make it difficult to draw any other conclusion. He was positively “not even English by birth,” was a “Central European,” came from Berlin but spoke German only as well as he did English (perhaps much as Kissinger does now), and though he was rich and like many another of the Rothschild species got himself elevated to the rank of a Peer of the Realm, displayed an attitude toward money quite alien to that of the real English aristocracy. It is to be noted, too, that he deserted Germany for England in 1933, the very year that Hitler came to power, and the year also that world Jewry declared war on Hitler and launched both a world-wide economic boycott and a world-wide holy crusade to bring him down. Before leaving, he rounded up some half-dozen of the best Jewish scientists in Germany and took them with him to England, where, in a revitalized Clarendon Laboratory, their genius could work most effectively for the destruction of the most dangerous enemy that Jewry had known in a thousand years. Certainly, I have never known of anyone with the name Lindemann who was not Jewish. And quiet reflection on the meaning of the information supplied by Sir Charles Snow has left me feeling pretty certain that Lindemann was not only a Jew, but an exceptionally vengeful and ferocious one. (See Snow—Science and Government, pp. 10-14, 21-2, 64; and Appendix to Science and Government, 1962, pp. 15, 33.)
