grgr (23): frederick lindemann had an idea ...

[Lorentzen / Nicklaus]

 "... somewhere in the devastation of hamburg, breathing the ash-dust ..." 

                                                  (p. 520)


 the "operation gomorrha" (25/7-3/8/43), one of the first british-american 
 aerial co-destructions, killed more than 30 000 people in hamburg. the mixing  
 of incendiary bombs & high explosive bombs hindered the fire-brigades from  
 doing their job and so whole districts got completely destroyed. through area  
 conflagrations & fire hurricanes ... 

 untill spring 1945 the number of aerial warfare victims in hamburg increased to 
 55 000 ... in kiel one of my father's aunts, who didn't manage to get in time 
 into the luftschutzkeller, died with others in another bombennacht ...

 the family of my mother - she's dead for some years now - lived in dresden. my 
 grandfather was a certified public accountant who worked with some    
 "kriegswichtige betriebe" (- about "war-important companies"), which produced  
 weapons. & so he got the much desired "unabkömmlich" (- "in reserved   
 occupation") stamp in his passport, meaning he did not have to go to the war   
 himself. becoming guilty without seeing dead bodies ...

 with two small children, house and garden (- & probably also some rest of  
 belief into führer & vergeltungswaffen) my grandparents missed the right moment 
 to pack their things, & so they were still around when the terror began:  
 between 13/2 and 15/2/45 another collaboration of the usaaf & the raf killed
 35 000 people ... my mother's family escaped on an overcrowded train ... 
 fighting allied airplanes around ... fire everywhere, wounded people 
 falling in large numbers of the train ... my grandparents once told me about 
 it. also that my mother, then hardly older than a year, didn't pee or shit at 
 all untill the family reached kiel on 17/2/45. her personal (- & more than 
 personal) point of maximal contraction ... in my second year of life i  
 experienced some strange accidents & diseases, bringing me to the edge more  
 than once ... maybe not really strange ...    

                                               kai frederik lorentzen
 
 ps: "american fighter planes came in under the smoke to see if anything was 
 moving. they saw billy and the rest moving down there. the planes sprayed them 
 with machine-gun bullets, but the bullets missed. then they saw some other 
 people moving down by the riverside and they shot at them. they hit some of 
 them. so it goes.
  the idea was to hasten the end of war." (kurt vonnegut: slaughterhouse 5)     

 pps: the b 17 e "fortress 2" & the b 24 d "liberator" were produced by 
 - boeing.