Sixty years ago, Soviet and German troops were fighting their final bitter battle over Berlin, the capital of the Third Reich. Adolf Hitler sat in his underground bunker, ordering his generals to move non-existent armies around in a desperate attempt to prevent the Red Army from taking Berlin.

All in vain: On May 8, Germany unconditionally surrendered.

Although only the oldest Germans can still remember anything from those days, the 60th anniversary of this final battle gets considerable public attention here. The battle for Berlin involved constant air raids by U.S. and British bombers, shelling by Soviet guns and finally a couple of weeks of street-by-street fighting.

Unlike the great battles of the past, when huge armies met in open fields, city battles like Berlin and Stalingrad took place in the midst of civilian life. The distinction between battle front and home front disappeared. Whole populations of the aged, women and children were caught in the line of fire.

World War II created an unprecedented number of civilian casualties of all kinds. Some civilians became special targets, such as Jews and Gypsies, whom the Nazis tried to wipe out. Millions of Polish and Russian civilians were killed by the Nazis in order to eliminate potential opposition to their military occupation. Many other millions were killed by both sides through the new concept of total war, in the bombing of London, Dresden and Hiroshima, and the three-year siege of Leningrad. It is possible that more women and children died during World War II than soldiers.

In the U.S., we barely can understand the enormity of these civilian deaths and their long-lasting impact. The wars of the 20th century were fought in other parts of the world. Except for Pearl Harbor, our territory has been spared the industrial destruction of modern warfare. When we see the enormous impact on American society of the 3,000 deaths at the World Trade Center, we can begin to imagine the effects of the fire-bombing of Dresden, which cost at least 10 times as many on one night, while Hiroshima had 20 times as many deaths.

I stress civilian deaths, because it seems that over the long run they make more of an impact on a society. While such deaths are often ignored or downplayed in discussions of war, their memory lingers, perhaps because these deaths of innocents seem out of place, even in war. Soldiers anticipate death, but we expect civilians to be protected as much as possible. Hence the bombing of cities in World War II continues to be a controversial moral question for the Allied side, unlike any similar decision to attack the enemy’s soldiers.

Similarly, the numbers we most often hear in connection with the war in Iraq concern American soldiers killed, now more than 1,500. I suggest that many years from now a much more important number will be the number of Iraqi civilian casualties, estimated to be perhaps as many as 50,000 to 100,000. That is one or two out of every 500 people in Iraq. Long after American society has absorbed and accepted the loss of our soldiers, the pain of these enormous civilian losses will remain in Iraq, as well as the resulting resentment against the United States.

These memories will complicate the creation of a functioning democracy, will poison relations between the U.S. and whatever Iraqi government exists, will create potential terrorists who only hate the West.

I make no moral comparisons between the acts of terrorists who deliberately target civilians and military operations where civilian deaths are unintended “collateral damage.”

I don’t know that any moral judgments make it easier for a society to deal with massive civilian death. The pain of families is hardly lessened by knowing that their loved ones were accidental victims. When the numbers of accidental deaths reach into the tens of thousands, one must ask whether it is meaningful to speak of accident.

If we claim to be a society that values life, we must also value the lives of others, others whom we do not know, who may live in countries whose governments we dislike. Even if we can justify all this killing to ourselves as a military necessity, we should remember the lesson of Berlin: two generations from now, Iraqis will still think of their civilian dead, and they will remember us.

Steve Hochstadt lives in Lewiston and teaches history at Bates College. He is temporarily teaching in Germany and can be reached at [email protected].