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George Bell rose above national interests

09 February 2023

Martin Warner reflects on his predecessor’s Lords speech opposing blanket bombing of German cities

Alamy

George Bell in 1954

George Bell in 1954

ON 9 FEBRUARY, 1944, the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, spoke in the House of Lords against the policy of blanket bombing towns and cities in Germany as a means of bringing the Second World War to an end.

The extraordinary courage of his speech was recognised by many at the time. But it also brought him ridicule from the cartoonists, and disfavour from those in charge of military operations and ecclesiastical appointments. Before this speech, it had been thought that Bell would move from Chichester to higher office. That did not happen.

Bell had tabled a question asking His Majesty’s Government for “a statement as to their policy regarding the bombing of towns in enemy countries, with special reference to the effect of such bombing on civilians as well as objects of non-military and non-Industrial significance in the area attacked”.

Bell began his speech by stating his credentials as a well-known opponent, from 1933 onwards, of Hitler and the Nazis. His view was informed by close ecumenical friendship with Christians in Germany. Bell went on to acknowledge the destruction by the Luftwaffe of “Belgrade, Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Portsmouth, Coventry, Canterbury, and many other places of military, industrial, and cultural importance. Hitler is a barbarian. There is no decent person on the Allied side who is likely to suggest that we should make him our pattern or attempt to be competitors in that market.”

But it was precisely in the policy of bombing targets that included areas of major cultural importance and dense civilian population that Bell saw the Allies following Hitler’s barbarian strategy. Bell gave examples of the destruction of Hamburg and Berlin, with terrible loss of human life, together with loss of a cultural and intellectual inheritance that belonged to more than just the people of Germany. He warned that a similar fate could befall the city of Rome.

Bell’s close connection with Germany gave him a sense that it was possible to draw a distinction between the German people and the Nazi regime that held them in thrall. He believed that Germans could recover their senses and be drawn back into the habits of the free world. “I do not believe that His Majesty’s Government desire the annihilation of Germany,” he declared: “they have accepted the distinction between Germany and the Hitlerite State.”

Hansard records that this observation drew verbal rebuke from a number of the noble Lords in the chamber.

Bell’s anxiety was stirred by the demonisation of a whole people. He believed that German people could aspire to something far better that the war crimes of the Nazi regime, and he had found an example of this in his friend and theological ally Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Bell’s belief that the German people had not completely lost their sense of moral goodness prompted him to speak of “Anti-Nazis who long for help to overthrow Hitler [and] are driven to despair”. This was a reference to the Christian leaders of the resistance, whom he knew. And his point was given a degree of affirmation later in 1944, when disaffection with Hitler’s regime resulted in an assassination attempt by officers of the military high command in July that year.

Hitler survived, largely uninjured, but Bonhoeffer was a victim of the vicious revenge that followed. He had already been arrested, in April 1943, and he was executed in Flossenburg concentration camp on 9 April 1945, but not before delivering a final message to Bell, communicated by Captain Payne Best, a British prisoner in the camp. Bonhoeffer said: “Tell him that for me this is the end but also the beginning — with him I believe in the principle of our universal Christian brotherhood which rises above all national interests.”


BELL spoke in the Lords as a bishop who embodied the Christian ideal that rises above national interests because it is grounded in the sacramental reality of baptism into Jesus Christ, and draws its life from him.

Bell drew denunciation from the noble Lords who could see no good or potential for reform and new life in the German people. These were peers who did not have Bell’s benefit of experiencing the bonds of faith, hope, and charity that define the life of the universal — katholische — Church.

Bell concluded his speech in the Lords with these words: “The Allies stand for something greater than power. The chief name inscribed on our banner is ‘Law’. It is of supreme importance that we who, with our Allies, are the liberators of Europe should so use power that it is always under the control of law. It is because the bombing of enemy towns — this area bombing — raises this issue of power unlimited and exclusive that such immense importance is bound to attach to the policy and action of His Majesty’s Government.”

Earlier in his speech, Bell had noted that the Allies had set themselves against the destructive law that declares “Might is right.” And, although he does not state the identity of the law that was emblazoned on the banner under which British troops linked arms to resist the threat of Nazi power, what was clearly in his mind was a law, derived from faith, that promoted justice, truth, and mercy.

In the five years before his speech in 1944, Bell had befriended Gerhard Leibholz, whose wife, Sabine, was Bonhoeffer’s twin sister. In 1930, at the age of 28, Leibholz had been appointed Professor of Public Law at Göttingen University. Though he was Lutheran, Leibholz was also Jewish, and so was “purged” from the law faculty in 1935. He eventually came to England, and, through Bell’s connections, gave a series of lectures in 1932, at Christ Church, Oxford, on the subject “Christianity, Politics and Power”.

Leibholz’s exploration of the Church’s proper interest in politics was founded on an appreciation of natural law, contrasted by the totalitarian regimes (Russia, Germany, and Italy) that were besieging Europe with “a revolutionary process of general secularism”. Leibholz wrote: “At the end of this development stands the man who deifies himself, no longer the servant of God, but the lord of the world, the self-appointed judge in the last resort over good and bad.”

One commentator on Bell’s life observes that it was “not an eminent British churchman, politician or scholar, but a barely known refugee lawyer, exiled from the very state with which his own country was at war” who filled Bell’s vision with a wider and richer understanding of society and its purposes.


ONE can see in this friendship some of the influences that shaped Bell’s speech in the Lords. The very act of making that speech was prompted by an instinct that it is proper for a bishop to draw the nation’s attention to the nature of the law as we know it and to the moral groove that it makes in our national life.

The inheritance of that moral groove was noted by the late Pope Benedict XVI, when he addressed both Houses of Parliament in a speech in Westminster Hall in September 2010.

Touching on concerns that Leibholz had also outlined, Pope Benedict spoke about the relationship between natural law and the exercise of civil, secularised authority: “Each generation, as it seeks to advance the common good, must ask anew: what are the requirements that governments may reasonably impose upon citizens, and how far do they extend? By appeal to what authority can moral dilemmas be resolved? These questions take us directly to the ethical foundations of civil discourse.

“If the moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus, then the fragility of the process becomes all too evident — herein lies the real challenge for democracy.”

The moral groove of our inheritance does go deep, and should elicit our attention in the forthcoming Coronation, which has traditionally put into the Sovereign’s right hand the sceptre surmounted by the cross, with these words: “Receive the royal sceptre, the ensign of kingly power and justice.”

Bell asserted that the rule of law was emblazoned on the banner beneath which the forces of the Crown were engaged in 1944. The symbol of the sceptre entrusted to the Sovereign in the Coronation is the acknowledgement of a higher authority and law, to which all are accountable.

This is the authority of Jesus Christ, the Son whom God the Father has anointed and enthroned in judgement (Hebrews 1.9), and it is to this source of authority that the state prayers of the 1662 Prayer Book bear witness. So, in the order for holy communion, we ask Almighty God “to rule the heart of thy chosen servant, Charles, that he (knowing whose minister he is) may above all things seek thy honour and glory”.

The direct outcome of Bell’s speech is difficult to assess. But, as we survey the international situation of our own time, the importance of the recognition in law of war crimes and crimes against humanity is consistent with the concerns that Bell was voicing in 1944, when he noted that “What we do in war . . . affects the whole character of peace, which covers a much longer period.”

Dr Martin Warner is the Bishop of Chichester.

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