Did Nazis exaggerate death toll in WWII Dresden air raid?

It wasn't to hit the "military targets" in the city. They were so insignificant they'd been left completely alone until then. It was because the German had strong anti-air defenses concentrated at the targets "we" wanted to hit. We wanted to bomb their oil since it didn't work well to bomb anything else. But if we just bombed those they could put all their defenses around them. So we decided to hit population centers. If they tried to protect everything then we could get their oil easily. And if they didn't, at least we could show them how powerless they were by killing lots of people. Excuses -- proof that bombing could make firestorms was important. And the Germans had declared total war. Why did the Germans publish the death estimates? Did they want the Americans to feel guilty? Surely it hurt German morale. I don't understand why a nation at war would publish truthful or inflated numbers like that. Nations at war don't tell the truth on purpose.

It wasn't to hit the "military targets" in the city. They were so insignificant they'd been left completely alone until then. It was because the German had strong anti-air defenses concentrated at the targets "we" wanted to hit. We wanted to bomb their oil since it didn't work well to bomb anything else. But if we just bombed those they could put all their defenses around them. So we decided to hit population centers. If they tried to protect everything then we could get their oil easily. And if they didn't, at least we could show them how powerless they were by killing lots of people. Excuses -- proof that bombing could make firestorms was important. And the Germans had declared total war. Why did the Germans publish the death estimates? Did they want the Americans to feel guilty? Surely it hurt German morale. I don't understand why a nation at war would publish truthful or inflated numbers like that. Nations at war don't tell the truth on purpose.

Someone who wanted to estimate the numbers might do it statistically. Start with a census of the Dresden residents and pick a few thousand scattered over the city. Then search the records looking for survivors. The fraction that are never heard from again give a high estimate of the fraction who died at Dresden. Try to check whether each of them was actually at Dresden that day, of course. There is the problem that a lot of people were in Dresden who were not documented to be there. The famous German bureaucracy was not actually that efficient. So maybe it isn't a high estimate, but it's a start. Looking at gravestones and cemetery records is not serious. The larger the sample, the more accurate the results but it gets expensive. This approach worked for Jenin. Palestinians claimed it was a massacre, but it turned out that every single Pal who was documented to be in Jenin was still documented to be alive after the fighting! So in reality nobody died. :/ (I exaggerate slightly.)

Have you read "Other Losses" about the million German soldiers starved to death by Eisenhower in concentation camps at the end of WWII?

As Stalin said one death is a tragedy, 10,000 dead is a statistic. It is irelevant at this late date to quable over a number of deaths over 50 years ago. Russia had over 20,000,000 killed in the second world war, if to-day the statistics will show that only 18,000,000 died will it make any diffrence. War should be abolished but as long as humans enhabit this planet there will always be wars somewhere. The only thing is that with millions of lives lost and destroyed by war, 100 year into the future these wars and their consequences become irrelevent and all those lost and suffering lives could have been avoided.

isnt this eerily similar to the inflated numbers hamas gave to the anti israeli press people, goldstone, hrw, hrc, and navi pillay? less than 300 so called civilians died in cast lead...more than 800 were hamas fighters. unlike dresden, israel warned gazans ahead of time...much like the US is now doing in pakistan, waziristan etc...only israel is held to an unfair standard...go figure... it's so funny that people would fall over themselves to believe scum like hamas...

The 1300 US and British bombers that firebombed Dresden were given no specific targets; their orders were to just dump the 700,000 bombs onto this city of 650,000 plus uncounted refugees, which the bombers did over 14 hours. The temperature in the center of Dreden is reported to have reached 1600 Celsius. Now, I defy anyone to come up with an accurate death toll when at that heat bodies simply liquify. There were bonfires of bodies for days afterwards in Dresden. Add to this horror the machine gun attacks of US Mustang fighter planes that aimed at the fleeing refugees. The world wouldn't see such devastation until the USA started firebombing over 50 cities in Japan.

http://wp.me/pDB7k-jS#by-aug-48 Dubious numbers happening all over the place...

This article has nothing to do with the British trying to cover up their alleged war crimes. The dominant narrative on the Allied bombing of Dresden (which, amazingly, was created by Goebbels himself!!) has been fairly consistent since the end of WWII: hundreds of thousands died, and for no reason, because Dresden lacked legitimate targets. But, it turns out that this story was false on both counts. Not nearly so many people died, and perhaps even more surprising, Dresden did indeed have legitimate military targets. The New Yorker recently published an excellent article on this: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/02/01/100201fa_fact_packer

"the english should own up to their murders and war crimes." Indeed. And then force them to help create ...er..lemme see...I got it..Geneva Conventions. Make them acknowledge that the acquisition of territory by war is illegal. Instituting some form of human rights convention demanding RoR. Ban unilateral annexation. Illegal settlements. Colonization. "they also committed war crimes against us in Israel by preventing natives from returning to our Land until 1948" A) WW11 in Palestine was there? B) Israel didn't exist until 1948. C) I thought that under the Mandate they occupied as trustees, ensuring the natives they wouldn't be flooded with non-natives. "I know history is written by the strong western powers, but there should be a limit to historians manipulating the "facts"" Indeed. And manipulation by non-historians. Say, you're not a historian are you?

I can say only 5,700,000 people died in the Holocaust. You can say 'over 7,000,000.' Neither number meaningfully affects the criminality of the act. Both are perfectly defensible. Yet simply by picking one or the other, one is implicitly aligning oneself with a whole range of other positions. Similarly with Dresden.

Come in Haaretz, what is this? "Did Nazis exaggerate death toll in WWII Dresden air raid?" Question mark? This has long been an established fact, the question was only by how much. "unlike the previous estimation of up to half a million casualties, news agencies reported." This makes it sound like there was one previous number and not many different estimates, all except a few mostly by US/British revisionists "historians" ( David Irving springs to mind) in the range of 20.000-40.000. This commission was meant to put the final nail into the mythic Neonazi numbers, not unearth anything that hasn't been know for decades.

25,000 or 250,000? It takes only one death to make a mother heart broken.

isnt this eerily similar to the inflated numbers hamas gave to the anti israeli press people, goldstone, hrw, hrc, and navi pillay? less than 300 so called civilians died in cast lead...more than 800 were hamas fighters. unlike dresden, israel warned gazans ahead of time...much like the US is now doing in pakistan, waziristan etc...only israel is held to an unfair standard...go figure... it's so funny that people would fall over themselves to believe scum like hamas...

hITLER SENT OVER TO LONDON ROCKETS. IF THEY LANDED ON HOSPITALS, PRIVATE HOMES TOUGH. When you start wars dont cry about punishment.

Some times numbers reveal what perception can't. Other time numbers are manipulated to change perception. It is curious that the most savage bombing campaign in history, the one waged against North Korea during the Korean war is largely unknown. While because of a single work of art, the Bombing of Guernica is well known today. Even there the casualties are subject to wild exaggeration by the Basque government at 4-5 times what is now considered valid.

"add to that the destruction of houses and the lack of strategic goal." - directrob The attacks on Dresden, with one exception, took place in the last four months of the war. During that period the targeting was shifted to locations which would be in the Russian zone of occupation.

"Another attempt by English to avoid war crimes" - Amos ALL sides in WWII eventually gave up on trying to hit specific targets in their strategic bombing campaign. The technically the strategic bombing campaign, especially the British after 1940 and Americans against Japan were 'War Crimes'. Exactly the same sort of war crimes as a recent little war in the Mideast engaged in. Massive assaults upon civilian infrastructure with collateral destruction of civilians instead of targeting military positions and industry. "I know history is written by the strong western powers, but there should be a limit to historians manipulating the "facts". - Amos The 'fact' is that there is no evidence for the wild numbers used for propaganda by many on both the right and left concerning the attacks on Dresden. The number of dead was probably closer to the 20,204 listed by city authorities at the time than even the top number now suggested of 40,000. The most common number now indulged is 25,000.

The ever expanding estimates of casualties in the Dresden attack started growing in the 1950s. As Dresden became a 'symbol' of the strategic bombing of Germany the numbers kept creeping upward with each breathless writer eager to have and even more 'shocking' number than the last. By the late 1950s numbers had grown by an order of magnitude to 250,000 and by the late 1960s in conjunction with the publication of Vonegut's book, the number 500,000 became popular. The Nazis did release a propaganda increasing the estimate of the dead to 200,000. The wild exaggerations that followed during the Cold War over casualties in Dresden and the number of expected casualties expected in an invasion of Japan were pathological attempts to either justify or condemn depending upon position. A good examination of the joint strategic bombing campaign was published by the USAF Air University Press and is free at http://www.au.af.mil/au/aul/aupress/Books/Davis_B99/Davis_B99.pdf

Ironic, isn't it? Someone should pass a law to stop this line of questioning.

I don't know any serious post war sources that claim half a million casualties. It is common to estimate a minimum of 18.000 and a max. of 25.000 - so whats the fuzz about? Flattening a complete town is a cruel thing even though it was full of f*cking Nazis. I know a short novel from a jewish girl who was living in Dresden hidden in a basement and who suffered bad fear that night.

"Preventing natives from returning to their land"... Native is someone who was born there, isn't it? So actually it was YOU who prevented natives from returning to their land... and not until 1948, but AFTER 1948...

The British did not prevent natives from returning to our land; they prevented Europeans from immigrating.

If tha Nazis added a '0' to the numbers, could the Armenians have added a '0' to make their genocide to 1 million ..... or the Native American Indians to make it to 50 million ....or the Palestinian in Jenin or Gaza or Sabra and Shatilla!

25000 killed is a lot, whatever way you look at it, add to that the destruction of houses and the lack of strategic goal. In current times this would be called a war crime.

When will people stop doing this? Why are we of all people using the word only when we often hear so-called historians say the holocaust wasn't so bad because maybe "only" 3 million were killed instead of 6? Will the perpetrators, whoever they are, look prettier? Will the bereaved look happier? Truth is, Dresden was bombed flat and Nazis and non-Nazis lost their lives there. That's war. One would think people had learned enough from that one to try to avoid them, not fiddle with the figures to make them somehow acceptable. The real question for countries disposed to worrying about it is whether bombing Dresden at that stage was necessary.

the english should own up to their murders and war crimes. they also committed war crimes against us in Israel by preventing natives from returning to our Land until 1948. I know history is written by the strong western powers, but there should be a limit to historians manipulating the "facts".