angle orange, a well balanced and thoughtful post. Thank you! With both English and German family you are either better or hopelessly worse placed than most to see the woods for the trees here. The former I think! You talk about dehumanising, by both the enemy (ie the Allies?) and the regime (the Nazis), but might I suggest that all you need to do that is war itself?
Once you have a tyranny in power, bad things follow. We have seen the bravery of people in East Germany, Russia, Romania, the Balkans, Libya, Egypt, Bahrain and Syria that is needed as a consequence. Many say that the first population to be occupied by the Nazis were the Germans themselves. Christabel Bielenberg, an Englishwoman married to a German diplomat, memorably described in the World at War series having to ask a Jewish couple that she illegally sheltered for two nights to leave for fear of endangering her own family. "I suddenly realised", she said, once she discovered that they had been arrested and transported "that Hitler had made me into a murderer". A harsh self verdict, but a hint of the conflicting emotions present when living under such a regime. Her obituary is here:
Christabel Bielenberg - Telegraph
If Europe, including the Germans themselves, was to be free of this tyranny then the Allies had to be victorious. The only weapon available to the UK to take the fight to the enemy was Bomber Command. The only way it could prevail was by night bombing, for daylight bombing was soon found to be suicidal. The only targets that could be consistently hit at night by main force's young and mainly inexperienced crews were German cities, and even then they were often missed or the wrong ones bombed. That was the awful reality of war, to prevail you have to do terrible things, but you must prevail or suffer the tyranny yourself. That is what I mean by total war. God forbid we ever have to fight it again!