Basil Fawlty was right – the Germans started it

We might apologise to the Indians, to the Africans we transported, to all the races we subjugated – but not the Germans

Last week a taxi driver – let's call him Fred – told me this story. During the last war Fred was a boy growing up in the Islington area of north London. When there had been an air-raid – and after the emergency services had done their job amidst the rubble of bombed houses and factories – he and his mates used to go hunting for treasure. What remained of the kitchens was usually the best place, Fred explained, because working-class families used that room for almost all family life, and they would keep the rent money there, in a pot or in a saucepan.

Anyway, one night the bombs fell in Cottingham Road (now called Sussex Way), and the next day Fred and his friends went down to the site to see what they could find. The boys dug in the area where they thought the kitchen must have been, but it was pretty well wrecked. And then one of the older lads called the others over to look at something that he was holding. It was a large toe. Conscientiously the boys trooped down to the police station and placed the toe in front of the duty officer, who – according to Fred – took custody of it, solemnly promising to return it to its owner.

I was quite shocked by what Fred said. It was not part of my image of war-time London that gangs of boys used to go around robbing those who'd been bombed-out or killed. It seemed extraordinary enough that they would think it all right to do such a thing, let alone that no-one else had stopped them. But it was quite clear from Fred's tale that this was an oft-repeated adventure for many Cockney kids.

OK. What might one learn or re-learn from this revelation? That Londoners were not the selfless heroes of myth? That war and the Blitz bred callousness even in the gentle Anglo-Saxon? That this year's repeated images of the Queen Mum with East End Home Front heroines were essentially propaganda bromides, albeit acting for the forces of light and democracy?

You'd think we'd be past all that by now. But the power of our desire to shape the past never seems to go away. You only have to contemplate tonight's film in which Mo Mowlam will extol the unique virtues of Churchill, so that we can vote not to expel him from the Big History House. Great? I'll tell you what's great. The amount of money that the BBC has expended on this strange process of "deciding" who the greatest Briton was. Princess Diana greater than Sylvia Pankhurst? Do me a lemon, as they used to say in Cottenham Road.

So, almost inevitably, this is the week in which a German newspaper dares to suggest that Winston Churchill was a bastard for allowing the wartime saturation bombing of German cities. And also the week in which someone has criticised the use of Henry V's famous speech (donated by W Shakespeare, who is 3 per cent greater than Winston at the moment) as a morale-raiser for our troops, on the basis that Hal was also something of a war criminal.

Unsurprisingly the former charge caused a stir. It was levelled by the German tabloid Das Bild and based on a new book by the German historian Jorg Friedrich. This book, The Fire: Germany Under Bombardment 1940-45 is apparently a polemicised account of how hundreds of thousands of German citizens died in allied bombing raids. The Daily Telegraph headlined its report of the charges "Germans call Churchill a war criminal", as though most members of the German nation had been involved.

But while I had learnt something from Fred's story, I felt only irritation with the attack on Churchill. Not because there cannot be a genuine debate about the morality of the saturation bombing of civilian areas (and, indeed, we have been having just such a debate in this country), but because it all feels beside the point. Churchill, the leader of a country that was locked in a battle for national survival – and this was a battle that he had not started – did what he thought was necessary in order to win that battle.

That Germans suffered during the war is not a surprise, and it's right that the scale of that suffering should now be measured and reported – whether it be recalling the depradations of the victorious Red Army, the displacement of millions of German citizens, or the deaths of so many civilians in air-raids. But it was inevitable that this would happen. Inevitable because, at the end of 1932, before Hitler came to power, 1.4 million Germans were members of the Nazi Party. Inevitable because, in July 1932, 37 per cent of the German people voted for Hitler. Inevitable because, in the wake of the seizure of power, large sections of the German intelligentsia and educated middle classes fêted the new regime.

The armed forces of Germany, under their Nazi leaders, invaded practically everywhere from Norway to Greece, and bombed cities from Glasgow to Belgrade. On 18 February 1943, after the surrender of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, Josef Goebbels addressed a huge crowd of functionaries at the Berlin Sportspalast. "The time has come," he told them, "to remove the gloves and use our fists." (The propaganda ministry scribe reports that, at this point, "a cry of elemental agreement rises. Chants from the galleries and seats testify to the full approval of the crowd.") "Wollt ihr," Goebbels demanded of them, "den totalen Krieg?" "Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war that is more total and more radical than anything that we can even imagine today?" They did. Outside the hall, reported the secret police, ordinary Germans regarded the speech with contempt. Too late. Too late.

Das Bild and Jorg Friedrich argue that the bombing of German cities was partly wrong because it was counter-productive. But in Goebbels's speech he doesn't mention air-raids once. He talks about the Jews a lot, and Bolshevism and even a recent by-election for the House of Commons where a leftist got a big vote – but not bombing. I don't think that he felt that it worked for him. The unpalatable truth is that it almost certainly did sap civilian morale. Later on in 1945, says Friedrich, with the war effectively won, there was no need for the large-scale bombing that killed so many. Perhaps. But with the words of Goebbels ringing in our ears too, we had no pity. Not until later.

Basil Fawlty was right. The thing you cannot get over is that they started it, and so we have nothing to apologise to the Germans for. We might apologise to the Indians, to the Africans we transported, to the races that we subjugated in the name of Empire, but not the Germans. Even so, they and we can and should be friends.

There is an unsettling thought, however, that this week's images and arguments combine to produce. The problem for a firebombed Dresdenite at the end of the Second World War could be traced back to decisions that he or she and his or her fellow citizens made during the Thirties. If only they had stopped and asked where all this was heading. It is interesting that we should now be spending so much time, energy, money and PR effort on asking rather fatuous questions about our glorious past, while only a fraction of that goes on examining the great questions of our present and future. Never mind whether John Lennon is greater than Cromwell, what about Iraq?

David.Aaronovitch@btinternet.com