Jürgen Bock is a very nice man. (I hope he is still with us, but I have not seen him for years). He was the engineer for BFBS, when they were based in Köln in the eighties. The operation was closed some years ago and moved up to Detmold. Jürgen also produced the weekly folk programme. He recorded a session of mine once here and I was also up in Senden, near Münster, when he recorded a set by Eddie Walker, the excellent guitarist singer from Middlesborough (I think!)
I have often seen pictures of what happened to this lovely city during the war. It was the nearest city to Allied lines for most of the war, so it was a natural target. Indeed, the Südstadt, or at least parts of it, were still in ruins in the early eighties.
In the sixties so many of my generation were sick of hearing all about the war. I am still finding out things, which I never knew. They are those "small" stories, which concerned few families, but which were shattering and life changing experiences for the families concerned. As time goes on, you realise that no one - even those involved - know all of what happened. You just do not live enough times. The scale of the tragedy is too much for any one person to comprehend.
In 1941, Peter Moorhouse (then ten) watched from Torpoint as Plymouth burned. His parents were somewhere in the middle of it. In 1944 Rolf Peters fled the annhilation of Kleve on the sixteenth of October. (He was twelve). The grandchildren of those men are safely asleep next door as I write.
We can learn from our history.