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The resistance movements, however, received spectacular encouragement from the Allied strategic bombings of Germany. The British, still furious about the Luftwaffe's indiscriminate attacks on London and such targets as Coventry and Liverpool in the war's early days, launched gigantic carpet bombings of the Third Reich's industrial and urban centers. In May 1942 the R.A.F. sent the first 1,000-bomber mission over Germany, pulverizing 300 acres of central Cologne. The head of the bomber command, Air Marshal Arthur ("Bomber") Harris, told his men that if their mission succeeded, "the most shattering and devastating blow will have been delivered against the very vitals of the enemy." The R.A.F. lost only 40 of the 1,096 planes involved.
Beginning on July 24, 1943, Hamburg was savaged six times in 10 days. Fire storms created by British incendiary bombs raised flames whirling at 100 to 150 m.p.h., with temperatures of 1000 degreesC at their cores. Eight hundred thousand people were left homeless, and some 50,000 were killed. Cities throughout Germany, including Berlin, were similarly razed. The mass bombings would alternate between British night attacks and American daytime raids, coming almost daily by the war's end.
Death came in many guises in the war. Soldiers were slaughtered at the battlefront. Guerrillas perished in ambushes. Civilians were killed by bullets, bombs and artillery shells, disease and, as in Leningrad, starvation. But Europe was afflicted with an even greater evil. Hitler and his toadies, obsessed with purity and genealogies and with nurturing a superior race, set out to realize their nightmare vision with murderous efficiency.
On Jan. 20, 1942, at 56-58 Am Grossen Wannsee in suburban Berlin, 15 top government officials, including five representatives of the SS, met to discuss the "final solution" to the Jewish problem. The meeting had originally been set for Dec. 9, 1941, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor prompted its postponement. The main work of the Wannsee conference lasted no more than 90 minutes and covered little new ground; the outlines of the policy had been discussed among high officials since before the war began. Rather, the meeting had been convened to give official status to the final solution, to ensure that the bureaucracy recognized its importance and that government officials provided what was needed -- railcars, camp guards, chemicals, arrangements for disposing of Jewish property.