BRITAIN deliberately bombed German civilians during the war, setting ablaze cities, schools and churches, according to a new book that shatters a 50-year taboo in Germany “Terrible crimes were committed, yet no one could talk about them,” the historian Jörg Friedrich, author of Der Brand (The Fire), says. “How could we raise these issues when weighed against the German-inflicted horrors of the concentration camps? How could we point a finger at the British and Americans who were feeding us and teaching us democracy?” The book, serialised in the mass circulation Bild newspaper and promoted with television interviews, has now broken that silence.

His arguments are familiar to British historians, who have long considered the case for and against Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris. But the German debate has concentrated almost exclusively so far on the bombing of Dresden — a largely non-military city famed for its architecture that was laid waste in February 1945 at a time when the war was almost over. Dr Friedrich says that Dresden was not an isolated misjudgment but the last act in a devastating, largely unchronicled, war against German civilians.

Dr Friedrich, who has published several books on Nazi aggression, trawled through the archives of 70 cities to piece together the misery inflicted by the Allied bombing campaign. More than one million tonnes of explosives were dropped on 1,000 German towns and villages during the war; 635,000 people died, most burnt to death or suffocated by toxic fumes.

He interviewed survivors who had had to collect the bodies that had shrunk in the flames. “The carbonated corpses shrivelled to around 50 centimetres,” said Heinrich Bierg, from Wuppertal, who was 16 at the end of the war. “We had to store them in zinc baths or washing tubs. Three fitted in a tub, seven or eight in a bath.”

The sheer accumulation of detail has shocked Germans. Trude Walther, a 20-year-old student, wept into her coffee as she read the paper outside a Berlin bakery yesterday. “I never knew,” she said.

The stories come after recent disclosures of the vast number of rapes of German women by Soviet Army soldiers, and a new novel by Günter Grass about the bombing of the German refugee ship Wilhelm Güstoff towards the end of the War.

Germans, who have been told by Gerhard Schröder, the Chancellor, that they are again a “normal country” unshackled by the past, increasingly see themselves as victims of war. Previously, only right-wing fringe publications shunned by ordinary people dared to make such a claim. Citizens directly affected rarely talked about the subject.

School history lessons barely mentioned the Allied bombing campaign and, as the late W.G. Sebald, the German scholar, noted in a first attempt to break the silence, no German novels on the subject were published. Professor Sebald’s research threw light on some of the horrors, such as women carrying their dead babies in suitcases for months after a bombing attack.

Novels about the tragedies are emerging only now. This week sees the publication of Dieter Forte’s Silence or Speech, in which his own memories of the Düsseldorf bombing are expressed. “The water used by the fire services was boiling from the heat of the firestorm,” Forte recalls, “so when they tried to douse the flames in the bunkers they boiled those sheltering there. When they realised what was happening, the firemen decided to let the bunkers burn. For a child who believed in the fire service, that was the worst thing — seeing them stand by and do nothing.”

Yet the documentary research by Dr Friedrich is having the most impact. The British and Americans, he says, chose the historic hearts of 161 cities such as Cologne, Nuremberg and Hanover as targets, knowing that the timber frames would burn quickly. They could not bomb military or industrial sites precisely enough without being shot down.

“Quickly it became clear to the strategists of the anti-Hitler alliance that the Second World War could not be won by exclusively military targeting,” Dr Friedrich said. “That is why Churchill ordered the carpet-bombing of German towns.”

• Nazi doctors tested a cocaine-based drug that they hoped would improve the performance of their war-weary army, a German magazine reported. Focus said that a researcher, Wolf Kemper, had discovered that Hitler was trying to develop the drug in 1944. The pills were given to inmates at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, who marched 55 miles carrying 20kg packs. Germany lost the War before the pill could be mass produced.

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• A doctor, a daughter and a man called Johnny
• Mona Lisa's smile may belie ill health
• ‘Parasite economy’ lies behind Greek tragedy