They doubted, too, the Allied strategy of bombing the Germans into submission. In June 1944, Neumann wrote a paper criticising the bombing of German cities, not because it was inhumane, but because it was counterproductive. ‘Manifold as the effects of the air raids on the German population may be, they have one common characteristic’, he wrote, ‘they tend to absorb all political issues into personal issues, on the national as well as the individual level.’ This was, effectively, a Marxist analysis of the utility of bombing: Neumann was arguing that bombed-out German civilians would put their immediate survival above their class interests or the imperative to topple Nazism. Bombing German cities risked extending the Third Reich’s lifespan rather than killing it off. Only many decades later with books such as Jörg Friedrich’s The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940–45 and W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction, that broke the near silence about how 635,000 Germans, mostly civilians, died and 7.5 million were made homeless when British and US bombs were dropped on 131 cities and towns, might one realise the prescience of Neumann’s argument – how, in the rubble of Hamburg or Dresden, it was scarcely possible to think about organising resistance to Nazism.
