Queen to apologize for WW2 bombing?

Not bloody likely, but this is in today's Guardian:

Germany's biggest selling tabloid, Bild, yesterday called on the Queen to apologise for Britain's wartime destruction of German cities, ahead of her state visit to Germany today.

This is Bild, mind you -- no "serious" newspaper has backed this. Nonetheless, the influence of popular tabloids is not to be ignored.

In a provocative double-page spread, the newspaper urged the Queen to utter a "few suitable words of regret" during her three-day trip for the thousands of German civilians killed during British air raids.

On the other hand, the British tabloids are pretty quick to "remember ze var"; I'm sure they are having a field day with this.

The tabloid's campaign has attracted no support from Germany's centre-left government but comes at a tricky moment in Anglo-German relations - and when the idea that Germans were also victims of the second world war is for the first time being more broadly debated.

See previous posts here and here.

Yesterday Bild, which sells nearly 4m copies a day, ran an essay by the revisionist German historian Jörg Friedrich in which he attacked Britain's destruction of Dresden as "senseless". The "massacre" of 50,000 German civilians during the devastating allied raids contributed nothing to the allies' victory over Hitler shortly afterwards, he wrote.

The paper ran photographs of German corpses laid out on Dresden streets and asked the question: "What have the British got against Germans?"

Posted by David on November 2, 2004 12:38 PM