King Charles will this week become the first British monarch to lay a wreath to the German victims of allied air raids in the second world war.
The move is a departure from his mother’s handling of the historically sensitive subject on previous royal visits to the country.
At the end of his first state visit as monarch, Charles III is scheduled on Friday to visit Hamburg’s St Nikolai memorial, a 12th-century church severely damaged during Operation Gomorrah in July 1943 and since preserved in its ruined state to commemorate its victims.
Originally designed by the English architect George Gilbert Scott, the church was used as a landmark by bomber pilots during the eight-day campaign in which approximately 34,000 to 40,000 Hamburg residents lost their lives.
The ceremony, which will include a reading of the Coventry litany of reconciliation that was written in response to the destruction of the British medieval cathedral by German bombs, will mark the upcoming 80th anniversary of the allied air raids on Hamburg.
Charles’s visit to the memorial is in contrast to the approach taken by his mother. During a visit to the eastern German city of Dresden in 1992, the carriage of Queen Elizabeth II drove a lap of honour around the ruins of the Frauenkirche church – to whose reconstruction cost the British palace contributed – but she did not lay a wreath as some in the city had expected.
While the lack of such a gesture hardly amounted to a scandal, it garnered the monarch a frosty reception in Dresden, where she was greeted on the old market square with some boos and two eggs that did not hit their target.
“The Queen wanted to light a candle for peace and reconciliation, but the unforgiving people on Dresden’s old market square, where they burned thousands of corpses after the firebombing of February 1945, wanted to her to say sorry,” the Guardian reported at the time. “She stayed silent throughout her 80-minute visit.”
At subsequent commemorative events linked to the war, such as the Queen’s wreath-laying at Berlin’s Neue Wache in 2015 or Charles’s speech to the Bundestag in 2020, British royals have habitually commemorated “all victims” of the war.
By contrast, the St Nikolai memorial serves specifically to reflect the northern German city’s devastation at the hands of the Royal Air Force and US Army Air Forces, though a museum in the former church’s basement also addresses the Nazi terror that precipitated the bombings and how the destruction was used to justify deportations and persecutions.
While the royal palace and the British embassy have not highlighted the significance of the St Nikolai visit, the German tabloid Bild wrote on Wednesday that “King Charles will write history”. It said: “It will be a silent gesture, a brief bow, a silent prayer. But it will say more than any speech.”
On his trip, which also includes an address to the German parliament in Berlin and flower-laying at a Kindertransport memorial in Hamburg, Charles can expect a broadly positive reception, with German media interpreting the visit as part of an effort to patch up relations frayed by Britain’s exit from the EU.
