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by Erik Kirschbaum

BERLIN, (Reuters) It was long considered impolite, unwise and even dangerously nationalistic for Germans to question whether Allied bombings in World War Two were necessary, legitimate or simply a war crime.

Most had tacitly accepted the victors' version of history that the firebombs which killed 635,000 civilians and destroyed 130 cities hastened the demise of Nazi Germany, weakened its war-time industry and shortened the war.

But the taboo has been shattered and the topic burst into the nation's consciousness with a new book - "The Fire - Germany and the Bombardment 1940-1945" by historian Joerg Friedrich, which condemns the attacks as war crimes and indirectly suggests that they may be comparable to the Holocaust.

The book, climbing the German bestseller lists with more than 120,000 copies sold, claims the British-led attacks on German cities were a morally dubious and militarily questionable campaign to turn the population against Adolf Hitler.

And with German opposition to a looming war in Iraq now putting strains on NATO and Europe's relations with the United States, the chilling account of the deaths of up to 40,000 civilians in a single February 1945 raid on Dresden has added further momentum to the country's growing peace movement. It has also sparked a lively debate among historians in Germany and Britain, where many criticise Friedrich for what they call a lopsided narrative that fails to reflect the fact that Nazi Germany was first to launch air strikes on civilians in Warsaw, Rotterdam, Belgrade, London and Coventry.

Many other historians and newspapers, such as the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, have nevertheless praised the book as pioneering for shedding new light on a long overlooked subject. Even Klaus Naumann, commander of Germany's armed forces in the 1990s and retired head of NATO's military planning committee, recently joined the debate by saying the attacks on the civilian targets could not be justified.

"The bombardment of German towns and cities that went on for five years during World War Two has no parallel in history," Friedrich writes.

"More than 1,000 cities and villages were bombed. Nearly a million tonnes of explosives were dropped on 30 million civilians - mostly women, children and the elderly."

Friedrich stops short of labelling Winston Churchill, Britain's war time prime minister, a "war criminal" but uses emotionally loaded words to describe the bombing, which began in 1940 as a retaliation against German attacks on London. He says the attacks were supported by scientific research to develop the most destructive fire storms to kill the greatest number of civilians.

Friedrich calls the attacks, which also cost 55,000 Allied pilots and crew members their lives, a "mass extermination" and refers to the cellars where cowering civilians were "gassed" to death as "crematoriums". Such language has drawn sharp criticism for the apparently intended comparison with the Holocaust. Friedrich's main accusation is that the most destructive Allied attacks came in 1945 at a point when the war was already all but decided.

He points out that half of the 635,000 civilians who died were killed in raids in the final nine months. He also notes that industrial output in Germany peaked in mid-1944, suggesting the attacks barely dented the country's war production.

"The question of whether Churchill was a war criminal can never be answered because one never puts the victor on trial," said Friedrich, 59.

He has said in newspaper interviews that he hopes the book might help Britain to take a more critical look at its wartime history.

"Do you want to live in a nation which has to hide its own past because it cannot look into the face of its past? You have to look into the face of the past. Then you can ask if it was a heroic one, or tragic or perhaps criminal, or if it included the necessary evils in a tragic time. Excerpts of the book were reprinted in Bild, the country's best-selling daily, and a series on it appeared in the leading Der Spiegel news magazine.

Its publication comes just months after Nobel prize winning author Guenter Grass wrote a hugely popular book about the "Wilhelm Gustloff", a boat on which 9,000 German civilians were killed when it was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine in 1945.

But Friedrich's book has also drawn criticism from British newspapers and historians as well as their counterparts in Germany who attack it as a revisionist work that may pander to neo-Nazis in Germany. Critics also say the Berlin historian plays down the fact that Germany started the war that cost some 60 million lives, its aircraft targeted civilians first and Germany later launched deadly V1 and V2 rocket strikes on civilians in London.

Several have also criticised Friedrich for attempting to portray Germans as victims of their own war. "Friedrich's words come dangerously close to an attempt to negate German crimes...Moreover, he makes it seem as if the bombings occurred in a historical vacuum," wrote Germany's Sonntagszeitung weekly. In contrast to modern high-tech bombs now designed to avoid civilian casualties euphemistically known as "collateral damage", Friedrich says the World War Two raids that sometimes included up to several thousand Allied aircraft were designed to kill civilians intentionally.

Even though industrial, transport and military targets were also attacked, the Allies made no secret of their bid to level the country and demoralise the population. The saturation bombing caused fire storms that gutted cities such as Hamburg, Dresden, Cologne, Essen, Freiburg, Dortmund. The attacks left large parts of Berlin and Munich in ruins, and killed 80,000 children among the civilians who perished.

It also destroyed 3.5 million homes and left 7.5 million Germans homeless. German bombs killed about 50,000 in Britain.

Comparing the fire storms to the atomic bombs the United States later dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Friedrich describes how the fires caused pavements to melt, rivers to boil, and intense updrafts sucked people back into the flames.

He writes how civilians in bomb shelters suffocated, burned to death or were trampled to death by panic-stricken crowds.

In the city of Pforzheim, one February 1945 raid killed 20,000 of its 65,000 residents.

"It was the most horrific weapon ever directed at human beings," Friedrich said..

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