I think the message was sent, if you do to us, we’ll do unto you.
And there was a lot of motivation to make sure Germany was utterly destroyed to avoid a recurrence of the ‘stabbed in the back’ nonsense that brought Hitler to power in the first place.
The core structure was pretty simple. RAF command felt they could demoralize the German people and get them to force surrender. Kind of a tall ask in a dictatorship. And it never really manifested, if anything it increased civilian backing, an attack like that made it easier to see the Allies as the bad guys, somebody that needed to be fought against. Keep in mind too German civilians didn’t really know how their side was fighting the war, again life in a dictatorship. They didn’t know the bombing resembled what had been done in London and Coventry. Of course all RAF command had to do was look at their civilian reaction to see how the plan really wasn’t going to work. England sure didn’t surrender after those bombings. It was a brutal attack that didn’t achieve the goal, and upper command decided not to do that again.