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24 August 1940, about eleven at night, when a handful of German bombers dropped a handful of bombs on the east end of London.
Today the casual reader might ask why bombing London should be comment worthy. After all, that is what the Germans did with panache through much of the war. But Hitler had always, prior to this attack, claimed that he would not bomb London without provocation. In fact, Hitler had a superficially civilised attitude to the bombing of civilian targets (with the important rider that they belonged to the short list of countries that he believed were ‘civilised’). He, later, in the war was to rave about the ‘barbaric’ allied bombing of German cities: in his political testament, written on the day before his death, he even talked (with a straight face) of the ‘hundreds of thousands of women and children… burned and bombed to death in their cities’.
Hitler admired Britain, he even had something of an inferiority complex in relation to that country, and did not want to escalate the war with the British Empire in 1940.
So why did Hitler order the Luftwaffe to bomb London on the night of April 24/25 1941?
Well, the easiest answer to that question is that he did not. Instead, a trail of German bombers dropped their bombs on London getting the wrong target in the dark.