A NEW study claims no more than 25,000 people were killed in the massive Allied bombing of Dresden in the Second World War – far fewer than many scholars have believed.
Four years of research being carried out by a team of historians and academics has cast doubt on previous claims that up to 135,000 may have lost their lives in the eastern German city over two days in 1945.
The bombing of Dresden became arugably
the most controversial operation carried out by British and US forces during the Second World War as it involved creating firestorms by dropping incendiary bombs.
Controversy has raged for decades over how many people died in the waves of attacks by the Allied bombers.
A recent book by British historian Frederick Taylor, published in 2005, claimed as many as 40,000 lost their lives. But the new commission – which involves dozens of university professors, archivists and military historians – has managed to confirm there were just 18,000 deaths. They have also discovered that police and city officials at the time believed that there were only 25,000 victims.
The medieval city of Dresden, was 85 per cent destroyed by two waves of British bombers on 13 February 1945. US planes blasted the city the next day.
The official death toll has most recently been put at about 35,000, but many scholars believe the actual number was higher as bodies – civilians mostly, fleeing the advancing Red Army in the east – were reduced to ashes in the firestorm.
The Allies hoped the bombing would hurt the Nazis where they would feel it most, and help force their capitulation.
Recently, neo-Nazis in Germany have talked of between 500,000 and a million victims of Dresden, calling the raid a "bombing Holocaust" and comparing it to Hitler's murder of six million Jews.
However, a statement issued by the research team yesterday said: "The commission, in this preliminary report, believes there were a maximum of 25,000 people who died during the February aerial attack."
The team of experts has pored through file stretching for more than 2,600ft in the Dresden state archives and interviewed dozens of witnesses. The commission has also studied aerial attacks, rescue operations, firefighting, and archaeological evidence.
Despite the chaos during the devastation of the bombing, they said they found records of recovery and burial of the dead to be "remarkably orderly".
Dresden's mayor Helma Orosz said: "Through this work of the commission the victims get a face and a name. Behind every single victim is suffering and we should remember this."
The full article contains 436 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
