Until recently, I believed that the bombing of Dresden in 1945, with the firestorm caused by the deliberate use of incendiary bombs, had resulted in approximately 200,000 deaths. This led me to think that this bombing had been as horrific as the later American bombings of Japanese cities.
In the American bombings, even more aircraft with incendiary bombs were deployed than had been the case in Dresden. The attacks on Tokyo alone claimed around 100,000 lives. (The atomic bombings, of course, were even more horrific.)
What I just wrote should have given me a hint, but I had never consciously compared the two in this way. 200,000 deaths in Dresden, a relatively small city with primarily stone buildings. Compared to about 100,000 deaths in Tōkyō, a larger capital city with many still wooden buildings, attacked with a larger number of bombers. Just putting these numbers side by side should make you wonder about why there where so many deaths in Dresden.
Well, it turns out that the death toll in Dresden was not 200,000 but rather between 20,000 and 25,000. Still more horrific than Rotterdam (just to name another example) but comparable to the number of casualties in London, and incomparable to the death tolls in Japan.
I already found it curious that this incorrect number was so etched into my mind. What I found shocking was that the figure of 200,000 was originally spread by... Joseph Goebbels, who hoped to gain some sort of propagandistic or political advantage from it. Additionally, other “facts” have proven to originate from Goebbels and are false, such as the claims that Dresden had no military function or that it was filled with refugees.
Not facts, but Nazi propaganda, in other words. But now a new number is circulating online for the Dresden death toll: 300,000 deaths! Where does this figure come from? Neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. And then certain left-wing moralists go on to spread this figure even further.
The video “What People Get Wrong about the Bombing of Dresden” brought this to my attention. If the Wikipedia links and the word of a “history dude” aren't enough, read the research report from a group of historians who investigated this.
Friday 3 May 2019