Dresden: Prayers for the Living and the Dead

Mass Murder in Dresden 

Prayers for the Living and the Dead

February 13 and 14, 2023: we call to mind the unquenchable fire unleashed on a German city. 

We supplicate for the victims of ego. 

And the pity of it is, our prayers are made ever new, because war is a perpetual racket. 

By Michael Hoffman

[Five Days of our Dresden Mass Murder Commemoration are online in installments: Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four, Day Five]

The bombing began seventy-eight years ago Feb. 13 and 14th, Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday,1945. From the point of view of the homicidal maniacs in London and Washington Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras"), was an auspicious day for killing German mothers and children—they would be traveling to and from the carnival festivities prior to the start of Lent on that doomed day in Saxony. 

In this column we reserve February 13 and 14, 2023 as a time for grieving and contemplation, rather than scientific, historiographical or statistical argument and analysis. We undertook the latter work in the preceding five days.

Now we pray for the living and the dead (as a Catholic I pray for the dead, as some Anglicans do. I am not a theologian and do not wish to entertain a debate on the matter).

In the 1980s German television filmed a documentary series. In English the title would be something like “No Roof Over the Reich” (my German is awful and I won’t hazard a translation). Back then, survivors of the Dresden holocaust, obviously still devastated people even forty years later, testified in that documentary to the horror they had lived. There was a group session in one film segment and one lady survivor, God bless her heart, lit into Churchill’s prestige with great passion, crying out that he had remorselessly ordered the bombing of hospitals, schools, homes and churches. “No Roof Over the Reich” should be made available for streaming and on DVD, and translated into other languages besides German. It contains genuine  testimony of Allied war crimes from anguished, shattered survivors, without any temporizing or weasel words.

In the 1990s, the families of this writer and a revisionist colleague met in Dresden, New York on February 14. We observed silence, lit candles and meditated. Months later in that very same hamlet on the shores of Seneca Lake, I encountered three young tourists from Dresden, Germany.  I apologized to them for America’s part in the bombing. They seemed startled and were nearly speechless.

Today and tomorrow are not days for many words. Silent contemplation. Consideration of what type of world we inhabit, where some victims have far more rights and incomparably more remembrance and commemoration than others. 

What are the “lessons of the Holocaust”? 

What are the lessons of Dresden? 

One lesson would seem to be the ravages wrought by the egos of the victors, confident in their own righteous and unlimited wrath.  

For this writer, some insight into the infinitude of that ego is found in the volumes that have devoured my days and nights:  I have spent hundreds of hours reading and studying, more perhaps than I should, the two-tiered human / less-than-human teaching of the Babylonian Talmud, which drifted into the echelon of the Church of Rome through the mandate Medici Pope Leo X gave to the master printer Daniel Bomberg in Venice (despite his name, Bomberg was a gentile), to create the finest Talmud edition ever published. From there, the two-tiered human / less-than-human mental fog materialized as “Catholic” Hermeticism and Kabbalism, then Rosicrucianism, and “Protestant” Freemasonry. The two tier system is not confined to one wing of Christendom, nor is it proprietary to the Left or the Right. It is a universal solvent for the destruction of the soul. 

Obstreperous, fiercely independent George Orwell ripped its habiliments to shreds in his fable, Animal Farm. Members of Abraham Lincoln’s inner circle (including Thurlow Weed and William Seward, among others), battled it. Later John F. Kennedy confronted the same dragon, the secret society dichotomy of insiders who are human, and outsiders who are said to be less so. At the command of official history we are misled into believing that the doctrine’s nearly exclusive exponents were the diabolic Hitler and his criminal Nazis. 

How then do we explain the Cambridge Apostles, Britain’s elite secret society? Their members included Gerald Balfour (brother of Arthur Balfour, architect of the Zionist usurpation in Palestine), Victor Rothschild, John Maynard Keynes, sexual predator Lytton Strachey, and Stalin’s traitors inside the British government (Guy Burgess, Sir Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross, and Guy Liddell). All had been “Apostles,” i.e. initiated and indoctrinated ruling class luminaries. These “enlightened” products of the crème de la crème of society, were taught the Talmudic duality that there are two classes of beings on earth, the humans and those who only resemble them. 

The Left would have us believe that this occult conceit is limited to the fever swamp of the Klan and the neo-Nazis. They assume that we too are non-entities, without knowledge of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin, without awareness of the Cambridge Apostles, whose self-exaltation was reflected in this eternal Talmudic dualism: in the Cambridge dichotomy, all who were not apostles were “phenomena.” In other words, insiders like the Cambridge Apostles were the reality. The rest of us "outsiders" are mere phantoms. (In Freemasonry non-initiates are deprecated as "cowans"). 

The spirit that coalesced in Babylon is yet older — older than the pyramids where it first found systematized theological foundation in the state religion of the dog-headed deity of the Pharaohs, and of Hermes Trismegistus and goddess Isis, who made their infernal way to the papal apartments in the Renaissance, where they were secretly venerated by turncoat pontiffs and prelates five hundred years before the Pachamama idols fulfilled the same function under Pope Francis.

The tale of the serpent is a long peregrination across the sands of time, from primeval Memphis to Dresden by way of London and New York. Out of that cauldron emanated the fire that roasted the Saxons alive, done in by the dragons of the Anglo-Saxons, a fratricidal, Mephistophelian irony.  

Over the past five days we have endeavored to recall the reality of the Dresden apocalypse through the words of David Irving, John Wear and in the mournful music of Rudolf Mauersberger, which will be played today in Dresden and to which we have harkened as we wrote these words.

In attempting to marshal facts and evidence, analysis and arguments to testify to the fact that, without detracting from the horrendous crimes the Nazis perpetrated against Judaic civilians, Dresden was also a diabolic war crime, we have no way of knowing whether we have failed or succeeded, persuaded or merely antagonized.

1952: Dresden city center still in ruins seven years after the inferno

Where, then, does that leave us over these next two days, as we call to mind the unquenchable fire of hell unleashed on a helpless German city, wherein the dragons flew unopposed, and seared with equal glee the blond braids from the heads of the German carnival children, and the gray hairs on the heads of their grandmothers?

How many will read our five day commemorative, compared with the audience Prof. Lipstadt, Steven Spielberg, the New York Times and the cable television networks command? Their omission of Dresden from the roll of sanctified victims leaves no trail. Invisibility by its nature goes undetected. 

Dresden was no holocaust, they say; it is undeserving of the distinction; to state otherwise is “mythology.”

Over the past five days we have made a factual case. But that is not where we permit the matter to rest today.

Ultimately, the matter does not rest in “the facts,” as important as they surely are. Here we claim the sanction of the survivors of the Nazi Judeocide, who have often rejected what they consider the limitations of revisionist reason. 

If we cut through the diversionary rhetoric, in the view of the Establishment, Dresden doesn’t rate as a war crime because the people of that city "got what they deserved." If we peer through the circumlocutions and moral embroidery, it comes down to their belief that the Allies engaged in the justifiable homicide of "criminal" women, children and elderly, and collective guilt. 

The people of Dresden were not guilty, of course. But historians Richard Evans, Sinclair McKay, Deborah Lipstadt and the legion of academics who take their cues from them, suggest and hint that they were guilty, and they premise their prosecutorial case on legal reasoning. Circumstantial evidence, they proclaim, points to the women, children and elderly males of Dresden being Nazis, or Nazi helpers, or Nazi sympathizers, or their sadly corrupted offspring. But the fact is they were innocent human beings, like innocent Dmitry in The Brothers Karamazov, who looked guilty in the cold glare of courtroom logic. 

So it comes down to who you believe.

Only those who have the intuition of the heart, not the arguments marshaled by those who have the eye and ear of Allied prosecutors and their publishing monopolies, know the truth. We intuit that upwards of 125,000 of German civilians, and refugees fleeing Stalinist Russia, were burned alive in Dresden. The Dresdeners have been convicted falsely. 

The super-structure of our adversary’s rationality isn’t sufficient for discerning the truth of Dresden. 

If it takes a leap of faith to believe that somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred twenty-five thousand innocent human beings suffered mass slaughter in Dresden, then that is what we invoke.

Prayer

This day in February 2023 I see, I feel, I absorb, I take into my innermost being, the fire that does not die.

The fire that traveled from Dresden to Gaza to Beirut and Baghdad, killing the Arab mothers and fathers and progeny, is unquenchable.

Wherever hatred is kindled, wherever the other person is demonized and degraded, there will be found the innocent burning.

We pray for Dresden, for Hiroshima and Nagaski. We remember Beirut in the summer of 1982, when the unopposed Israeli air force, modeling itself after the RAF, bombed hospitals, schools and apartment blocks.

The Cryptocracy is all too ready to bomb us whenever we get out of line. They bombed their own people in Waco, Oklahoma City and on 9/11, and they would do it again, to achieve their esoteric objectives.

We pray for the dead of Auschwitz, yes, and of Dresden, because we subscribe to one humanity, in which we all share. This is of Christ.

We supplicate for the victims of ego. And the pity of it is, our prayers are made ever new because war is a perpetual racket; the most profitable there is, after compound interest.

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord Jesus, and may the perpetual light shine upon them. Amen.

Michael Hoffman is a historian residing in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

Copyright©2020-2023 by www.RevisionistHistory.org

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Dresden Holocaust Remembrance Day 5: Burned to Ashes on Ash Wednesday

SOLEMN DRESDEN REMEMBRANCE

This is a series of reports by Michael Hoffman, to be issued one per day from February 8 through February 13

78th ANNIVERSARY OF THE MASS MURDER OF 125,000 GERMAN MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN, FEBRUARY 13 AND 14, 1945

DAY FIVE: FEBRUARY 14, 2023

(Click for: Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four, and Prayers for the Living and the Dead)

Dresden, capital of Saxony, before the Allied incineration

The People Who Were Burned to Ashes on Ash Wednesday

By Michael Hoffman

It was Shrove Tuesday, 1945 in the magnificent German art city of Dresden, which was packed with helpless Christian refugees fleeing the Red Army of the Stalinist USSR. Dresden’s native Lutheran and Catholic children, dressed in their festive Saxon folk costumes, were aboard a train taking them home after Mardi Gras parties at different points in the far-flung city. Still merry from the night’s festivities, they cavorted on the train prior to Ash Wednesday, which in 1945 fell on February 14, and the solemnities that would be observed even in wartime, in memory of the passion and death of Jesus. In the sky, Allied fighter planes caught sight of the civilian train and machine-gunned  the children inside, whose blood was soon pouring out of the wreckage.

This U.S.-British carnage registers almost not at all in the American mind. The mass murder in Dresden, lasting two days and killing at least 100,000 people, like the atomic holocaust in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, usually merits not much more than a few sentences or a single paragraph in the back pages of metropolitan newspapers, unlike "Holocaust Remembrance Day,” in April, which is observed with countless civic, educational and media events from the Vatican to the White House. Barely remembered are the German and Japanese victims of Allied war crimes.

In the spring of 1945, after prosecuting the mass murder in Dresden and every major German city, and with the end of the Second World War in sight in Europe, Winston Churchill began to consider his reputation in the post-war period, when the total 500,000 German innocents he ordered burned to death could come back to haunt him and indelibly stain his image. 

RAF Marshall Arthur Harris and historian David Irving, March 23, 1962

To distract from his own overwhelming culpability, on March 28, 1945 Churchill issued a scapegoating memo blaming the mass incineration on his own men of Bomber Command, and by implication, upon its commander, Arthur Harris, whose force would be denied a post-war campaign medal, and Harris a peerage. Harris and Bomber Command had been following Winston Churchill’s explicit orders, yet Churchill attempted to shift responsibility onto the corps of courageous airmen who had suffered among the highest casualties of any branch of the British military in the fight against Hitler.

Furthermore, Churchill, like many other unconscionable liars, propagated the lie that Germany was the first to saturate civilians with terror-bombs—at Guernica in Spain, on behalf of Franco’s forces, and in Rotterdam, during the war with Holland. 

In both cases Churchill stated that thousands had been killed. Even one death is regrettable of course, but less than 100 people were killed in Guernica and less than a thousand in Rotterdam, when the Luftwafe accidentally struck a margarine factory and the flammable liquid burned houses nearby. 

Churchill had declared that “thousands” died in Guernica, and that 30,000 perished in Rotterdam, which is more than what Deborah Lipstadt generally says died in the two-day inferno in Dresden (the absurdly low figure of 25,000 is now the officially fixed count to which the “news media” conform without deviation).

The Germans had pledged not to be the first to bomb civilian centers in Britain. Churchill had hoped they would carpet bomb London to give him the excuse to silence the large peace movement in England which was dogging him in 1940, at a time when the Germans had not dropped a single bomb on London, almost a year after Britain had declared war on Germany. 

The British Prime Minister obtained his pretext toward the end of August, 1940, when a lone, wayward German bomber “lost its way flying up the Thames” river. It had orders to attack an oil refinery, but instead dropped its bombs on London’s East End. No one was killed thankfully, but Churchill was elated. 

He had the excuse he needed to massively retaliate against Berlin, knowing Hitler would idiotically respond in kind, and that the British peace movement would vanish in the smoke and flames of the “Battle of Britain” and the “Blitz.” Winston was a clever Machiavellian who outfoxed Hitler and anticipated his Neanderthal, Pavlovian responses.

In retaliation for that lone Luftwaffe aircraft's non-lethal bombs in London, Churchill ordered a hundred bombers to attack Berlin. Royal Air Force (RAF) commanders warned him that the Luftwaffe would do the same to London.

At this juncture we pause to contemplate the bloody treason that was at the heart of Churchill’s shriveled soul: he wanted as many of his own English civilians in London to die as possible, so that he could point to their deaths as the justification for a total war against Germany, and this diabolic individual succeeded in his objective.

To this day the war crime the leaders of Britain and the United States perpetrated in Dresden is justified on the basis of the tired fable that “Germany did it first to Rotterdam and Guernica,” and “Look at the terror the Germans visited upon London.”

 Nothing that occurred in Guernica, Rotterdam, or for that matter London, begins to even approach the scale which the firebombs of the air forces of Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt inflicted on Dresden and numerous other German civilian cities.

On September 4, 1940 Hitler gave a speech in which he stated that if the “mad drunkard” Churchill continued to attack Berlin, the Germans were not going to stand by and take it. 

It was Neanderthal thinking on Hitler's part: you club me over the head and I will club you. The Nazi criminal was almost always successfully played by the masonic criminals at the heart of Britain’s ruling class. 

No matter what Churchill ordered, a wise German leader would have confined his air campaign to British military sites (Hitler's Luftwaffe never bothered to attack the aircraft factories that built Britain’s Lancaster bombers).

On September 6, the English people heard the ominous drone of a fleet of Luftwaffe planes flying up the Thames. Some 3,000 Londoners subsequently died. Now Churchill had what he wanted. 

You won’t find these facts in the multi-volume history Mr. Churchill wrote, or in the pages of the celebrated volumes of the conformist historians. To advance knowledge one ought to read and hear the dissident revisionists, particularly the demonized David Irving, who personally interviewed many of the key principals of the Second World War in the Atlantic theatre, and authored one of the first studies of the Dresden firebombing, The Destruction of Dresden.

Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, has taken it upon herself to deny the casualty figure of 125,000 for Dresden, but God help any one of us who would have the temerity to apply the word “holocaust” to the mass murder by fire in Dresden. 

We challenge any reader to collect the legacy media’s descriptions of the bombing of Dresden from the 1990s onward and count how many of those reports truthfully term it a holocaust. We reckon next to zero. The fear is palpable. 

The extent to which we are imprisoned in an Orwellian dystopia of our own making is revealed when we consider the fact that it is generally regarded as highly insensitive or indeed “anti-Semitic” to apply the word "holocaust" to the German cities that were incinerated, or to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though those war crimes were holocausts by dictionary definition: “Destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, especially caused by fire. Origin: Greek holokauston, from holos ‘whole’ and kaustos ‘burned.”

A half-million German civilians and three-quarters of a million Japanese civilians (including the victims of the March, 1945 fire-bombing of Toyko), were indeed burned to death. 

Churchill and his top military circle set afire the medieval cities of their German cousins, who only two generations before had comprised the royal blood within the House of the German-speaking Queen Victoria.

A thousand years of national and religious wars in Europe had not managed to wreak the destruction which Churchill and the American President Roosevelt directed against the cultural treasure houses of western civilization, in cities like Dresden. They tossed a match into Dresden as casually as a drooling meth addict would torch an apartment building for revenge on the landlord who had evicted him.

Yet “conservative Christian” American university professors and administrators in institutions of higher learning such as Michigan’s esteemed “conservative” Hillsdale College, which is the recipient of large donations from “Conservatives” seeking to preserve western civilization, have hallowed Churchill into a paragon of decency, valor and western leadership. The canonization of this mass murdering vandal is such a defect of vision as to be fatal spiritually, culturally and politically on a national scale.

If the powers that be decided, for example, that Russia in 2023needed to be fire-bombed, given sufficient pretext our “Conservatives” would do it all over again in the name of “civilization.” The blood of the innocent in Moscow and St. Petersburg would signify no more to the “Conservative" crusaders than the charred bodies of the civilians in the apocalyptic wreckage of Dresden.

American civilization in 2023 is not worthy of the name. We have the illusion of a civilization, which we cherish for our own aggrandizement and nostalgia. 

Michael Hoffman is a professional historian, the editor of the periodical Revisionist History® and the author of nine books. 

Copyright©2018-2023 by RevisionistHistory.org

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Dresden Holocaust Remembrance Day 4: How Many Died in Dresden?

FIVE DAYS OF SOLEMN DRESDEN HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE

DAY FOUR

This is a series of reports by Michael Hoffman, to be issued one per day from February 8 through February 13, 2020. Updated in 2023.

78TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE MASS MURDER OF 125,000 GERMAN MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN, FEBRUARY 13 AND 14, 1945

DAY FOUR: FEBRUARY 11, 2023

(Click for: Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Five, and Prayers for the Living and the Dead)

How Many Really Were Killed in Dresden?

The ruins of the city of Dresden after the Allied mass murder

Historian John Wear demonstrates the discrepancies at work among those who deny the extent of the holocaust perpetrated in Dresden, as ordered by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.

We are here (below) reprinting Wear’s investigation of those who put forth the lowest imaginable casualty figures and thereby whitewash and minimize the Allied crimes against humanity in Dresden. 

We have disagreed with some of Mr. Wear’s other studies of the history of the Second World War, but we acknowledge that most of what he has written of late which we have perused, is well researched and argued. This is no less true in the case at hand, where he examines the claims of those who deny the extent of the holocaust in Dresden.

Mr. Wear’s essay was originally published in Inconvenient History. We are reprinting it in here as part of our serialized 78th Dresden Anniversary commemoration.

How Many Germans Died under RAF Bombs at Dresden in 1945? 

By John Wear

 Introduction    

    

The bombing of Dresden remains one of the deadliest and morally most-problematic raids of World War II. Three factors make the bombing of Dresden unique: 1. a huge firestorm developed that engulfed much of the city; 2. the firestorm engulfed a population swollen by refugees; and 3. defenses and shelters even for the original Dresden population were minimal. [1] The result was a high death toll and the destruction of one of Europe’s most beautiful and cultural cities.       

Many conflicting estimates have been made concerning the number of deaths during the raids of Dresden on February 13-14, 1945.  Historian Richard J. Evans estimates that approximately 25,000 people died during these bombings.[2] Frederick Taylor estimates that from 25,000 to 40,000 people died as a result of the Dresden bombings.[3]  A distinguished commission of German historians titled “Dresden Commission of Historians for the Ascertainment of the Number of Victims of the Air Raids on the City of Dresden on 13/14 February 1945” estimates the likely death toll in Dresden at around 18,000 and definitely not more than 25,000. [4] This later estimate is considered authoritative by many sources.    

   

While exact figures of deaths in the Dresden bombings can never be obtained, some Revisionist historians estimate a death toll at Dresden as high as 250,000 people.  Most establishment historians state that a death toll at Dresden of 250,000 is an absolute impossibility. For example, Richard Evans states: 

“Even allowing for the unique circumstances of Dresden, a figure of 250,000 dead would have meant that 20% to 30% of the population was killed, a figure so grossly out of proportion to other comparable attacks as to have raised the eyebrows of anyone familiar with the statistics of bombing raids…even if the population had been inflated by an influx of refugees fleeing the advance of the Red Army.” [5] 

Population of Dresden  

     

Historians generally agree that a large number of German refugees were in Dresden during the night of February 13-14, 1945. However, the estimate of refugees in Dresden that night varies widely. This is a major reason for the discrepancies in the death toll estimates in the Dresden bombings. 

Marshall De Bruhl states in his book Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden: 

“Nearly every apartment and house [in Dresden] was crammed with relatives or friends from the east; many other residents had been ordered to take in strangers. There were makeshift campsites everywhere. Some 200,000 Silesians and East Prussians were living in tents or shacks in the Grosser Garten. The city’s population was more than double its prewar size. Some estimates have put the number as high as 1.4 million.       

“Unlike other major German cities, Dresden had an exceptionally low population density, due to the large proportion of single houses surrounded by gardens. Even the built-up areas did not have the congestion of Berlin and Munich. However, in February 1945, the open spaces, gardens, and parks were filled with people.  The Reich provided rail transport from the east for hundreds of thousands of the fleeing easterners, but the last train out of the city had run on February 12. Transport further west was scheduled to resume in a few days; until then, the refugees were stranded in the Saxon capital.” [6]    

   

David Irving states in The Destruction of Dresden:       

“Silesians represented probably 80% of the displaced people crowding into Dresden on the night of the triple blow; the city which in peacetime had a population of 630,000 citizens was by the eve of the air attack so crowded with Silesians, East Prussians and Pomeranians from the Eastern Front, with Berliners and Rhinelanders from the west, with Allied and Russian prisoners of war, with evacuated children’s settlement, with forced laborers of many nationalities, that the increased population was now between 1,200,000 and 1,400,000 citizens, of whom, not surprisingly, several hundred thousand had no proper home and of whom none could seek the protection of an air-raid shelter.” [7]     

  

A woman living on the outskirts of Dresden at the time of the bombings stated: “At the time my mother and I had train-station duty here in the city. The refugees! They all came from everywhere! The city was stuffed full!”[8]  

    

 Frederick Taylor states in his book Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 that Dresden had been accepting refugees from the devastated cities of the Ruhr, and from Hamburg and Berlin, ever since the British bombing campaign began in earnest. By late 1943 Dresden was already overstretched and finding it hard to accept more outsiders. By the winter of 1944-1945, hundreds of thousands of German refugees were traveling from the east in an attempt to escape the Russian army. [9]     

  

The German government regarded the acceptance of Germans from the east as an essential duty. Der Freiheitskampf, the official German organ for Saxony, urged citizens to offer temporary accommodation:  

“There is still room everywhere. No family should remain without guests! Whether or not your habits of life are compatible, whether the coziness of your domestic situation is disturbed, none of these things should matter! At our doors stand people who for the moment have no home—not even to mention the loss of their possessions.” [10]      

 However, Taylor states that it was general policy in Dresden to have refugees on their way to the west to continue onwards within 24 hours. Fleeing the Russians was not a valid justification for seeking and maintaining residence in Dresden. Taylor states that the best estimate by Götz Bergander, who spent time on fire-watching duties and on refugee-relief work in Dresden, was that approximately 200,000 nonresidents were in Dresden on the night of February 13-14, 1945. Many of these refugees would have been living in quarters away from the targeted center of Dresden. [11]      

The Dresden historian Friedrich Reichert estimates that only 567,000 residents and 100,000 refugees were in Dresden on the night of the bombings. Reichert quotes witnesses who state that no refugees were billeted in Dresden houses and that no billeting took place in Dresden’s parks or squares. Thus, Reichert estimates that the number of people in Dresden on the night of the bombings was not much greater than the official figure of Dresden’s population before the war. [12]    

   

Reichert’s estimate of Dresden’s population during the bombings is almost certainly too low. As a RAF memo analyzed it before the attack: “Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester is also [by] far the largest unbombed built-up area the enemy has got. In the midst of winter with refugees pouring westwards and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium, not only to give shelter to workers, refugees and troops alike, but also to house the administrative services displaced from other areas…” [13]       

Alexander McKee states in regard to Dresden: “Every household had its large quota of refugees, and many more had arrived in Dresden that day, so that the pavements were blocked by them, as they struggled onwards or simply sat exhausted on their suitcases and rucksacks. For these reasons, no one has been able to put a positive figure to the numbers of the dead, and no doubt no one ever will.” [14]      

The report prepared by the USAF Historical Division Research Studies Institute Air University states that “there may probably have been about 1,000,000 people in Dresden on the night of the 13/14 February RAF attack.” [15] I think the one million population figure cited in this report constitutes a realistic and conservative minimum estimate of Dresden’s population during the Allied bombings of February 13-14, 1945.  

Did Only 25,000 People Die?        

If the 25,000 death-toll estimate in Dresden is accurate, we are left with the odd result that Allied air power, employed for textbook purposes to its full measure and with no restrictions, over an especially vulnerable large city near the end of the war, when Allied air superiority was absolute and German defenses nearly nonexistent, was less effective than Allied air power had been in previous more-difficult operations such as Hamburg or Berlin. I think the extensive ruins left in Dresden suggest a degree of complete destruction not seen before in Germany.       

The Dresden bombings created a massive firestorm of epic proportions, and were in no way a failed mission with only a fraction of the intended results. The fires from the first raid alone had been visible more than 100 miles from Dresden.[16] The Dresden raid was the perfect execution of the Bomber Command theory of the double blow: two waves of bombers, three hours apart, followed the next day by a massive daylight raid by more bombers and escort fighters. Only a handful of raids ever actually conformed to this double-strike theory, and those that did were cataclysmic.[17]    

       

 Dresden also lacked an effective network of air-raid shelters to protect its inhabitants. Hitler had ordered that over 3,000 air-raid bunkers be built in 80 German towns and cities. However, not one was built in Dresden because the city was not regarded as being in danger of air attack. Instead, the civil air defense in Dresden devoted most of its efforts to creating tunnels between the cellars of the housing blocks so that people could escape from one building to another. These tunnels exacerbated the effects of the Dresden firestorm by channeling smoke and fumes from one basement to the next and sucking out the oxygen from a network of interconnected cellars. [18]       

The vast majority of the population of Dresden did not have access to proper air-raid shelters. When the British RAF attacked Dresden that night, all the residents and refugees in Dresden could do was take refuge in their cellars. These cellars proved to be death traps in many cases. People who managed to escape from their cellars were often sucked into the firestorm as they struggled to flee the city. [19]       

Dresden was all but defenseless against air attack, and the people on the ground in Dresden suffered the consequences. The bombers in the Dresden raids were able to conduct their attacks relatively free from fear of harassment by German defenses. The master bombers ordered the bombers to descend to lower altitudes, and the crews felt confident in doing so and in maintaining a steady altitude and heading during the bombing runs. This ensured that the Dresden raids were particularly concentrated and thus particularly effective. [20] The RAF conducted a technically perfect fire-raising attack on Dresden. [21]       

 The British were fully aware that mass death and destruction could result from the bombing of Germany’s cities. The Directorate of Bombing Operations predicted the following consequences from Operation Thunderclap: “If we assume that the daytime population of the area attacked is 300,000, we may expect 220,000 casualties. Fifty per cent of these or 110,000 may expect to be killed. It is suggested that such an attack resulting in so many deaths, the great proportion of which will be key personnel, cannot help but have a shattering effect on political and civilian morale all over Germany.” [22]  

     

The destruction of Dresden was so complete that major companies were reporting fewer than 50% of their workforce present two weeks after the raids.[23] 

By the end of February 1945, only 369,000 inhabitants remained in the city. Dresden was subject to further American attacks by 406 B-17s on March 2 and 580 B-17s on April 17, leaving an additional 453 dead. [24] 

Comparison to Pforzheim Bombing  

     

A raid that closely resembles that on Dresden was carried out 10 days later on February 23, 1945 at Pforzheim. Since neither Dresden nor Pforzheim had suffered much damage earlier in the war, the flammability of both cities had been preserved.[25] A perfect firestorm was created in both of these defenseless cities. These cities also lacked sufficient air-raid shelters for their citizens.  

     

The area of destruction at Pforzheim comprised approximately 83% of the city, and 20,277 out of 65,000 people died according to official estimates. [26]  Sönke Neitzel also estimates that approximately 20,000 out of a total population of 65,000 died in the raid at Pforzheim. [27] This means that over 30% of the residents of Pforzheim died in one bombing attack. 

      

The question is: If more than 30% of the residents of Pforzheim died in one bombing attack, why would only approximately 2.5% of Dresdeners die in similar raids 10 days earlier? The second wave of bombers in the Dresden raid appeared over Dresden at the very time that the maximum number of fire brigades and rescue teams were in the streets of the burning city. This second wave of bombers compounded the earlier destruction many times, and by design killed the firemen and rescue workers so that the destruction in Dresden could rage on unchecked.[28] The raid on Pforzheim, by contrast, consisted of only one bombing attack. Also, Pforzheim was a much smaller target, so that it would have been easier for the people on the ground to escape from the blaze.  

The only reason why the death-rate percentage would be higher at Pforzheim versus Dresden is that a higher percentage of Pforzheim was destroyed in the bombings. Alan Russell estimates that 83% of Pforzheim’s city center was destroyed versus only 59% of Dresden’s. [29] This would, however, account for only a portion of the percentage difference in the death tolls. Based on the death toll in the Pforzheim raid, it is reasonable to assume that a minimum of 20% of Dresdeners died in the British and American attacks on the city. The 2.5% death rate figure of Dresdeners estimated by establishment historians is an unrealistically low figure.  

If a 20% death rate figure times an estimated population in Dresden of 1 million is used, the death-toll figure in Dresden would be 200,000. If a 25% death-rate figure times an estimated population of 1.2 million is used, the death toll figure in Dresden would be 300,000. Thus, death-toll estimates in Dresden of 250,000 people are quite plausible when compared to the Pforzheim bombing.

How Were the Dead Disposed Of?        

Historian Richard Evans asks: “And how was it imaginable that 200,000 bodies could have been recovered from out of the ruins in less than a month? It would have required a veritable army of people to undertake such work, and hundreds of sorely needed vehicles to transport the bodies. The effort actually undertaken to recover bodies was considerable, but there was no evidence that it reached the levels required to remove this number.” [30]  

     

Richard Evans does not recognize that the incineration of corpses on the Dresden market square, the Altmarkt, was not the only means of disposing of bodies at Dresden. A British sergeant reported on the disposal of bodies at Dresden:       

“They had to pitchfork shriveled bodies onto trucks and wagons and cart them to shallow graves on the outskirts of the city. But after two weeks of work the job became too much to cope with and they found other means to gather up the dead. They burned bodies in a great heap in the center of the city, but the most effective way, for sanitary reasons, was to take flamethrowers and burn the dead as they lay in the ruins. They would just turn the flamethrowers into the houses, burn the dead and then close off the entire area. The whole city is flattened. They were unable to clean up the dead lying beside roads for several weeks. [31]  

    

Historians also differ on whether or not large numbers of bodies in Dresden were so incinerated in the bombing that they could no longer be recognized as bodies. Frederick Taylor mentions Walter Weidauer, the high burgomaster of Dresden in the postwar period, as stating: 

“[T]here is no substance to the reports that tens of thousands of victims were so thoroughly incinerated that no individual traces could be found. Not all were identified, but—especially as most victims died of asphyxiation or physical injuries—the overwhelming majority of individuals’ bodies could at least be distinguished as such.” [32]  

     

Other historians cite evidence that bodies were incinerated beyond recognition. Alexander McKee quotes Hildegarde Prasse on what she saw at the Altmarkt after the Dresden bombings:  

“What I saw at the Altmarkt was cruel. I could not believe my eyes. A few of the men who had been left over [from the Front] were busy shoveling corpse after corpse on top of the other. Some were completely carbonized and buried in this pyre, but nevertheless they were all burnt here because of the danger of an epidemic. In any case, what was left of them was hardly recognizable. They were buried later in a mass grave on the Dresdner Heide.” [33]  

     

Marshall De Bruhl cites a report found in an urn by a gravedigger in 1975 written on March 12, 1945, by a young soldier identified only as Gottfried. This report states: “I saw the most painful scene ever….Several persons were near the entrance, others at the flight of steps and many others further back in the cellar. The shapes suggested human corpses. The body structure was recognizable and the shape of the skulls, but they had no clothes. Eyes and hair carbonized but not shrunk. When touched, they disintegrated into ashes, totally, no skeleton or separate bones. 

“I recognized a male corpse as that of my father. His arm had been jammed between two stones, where shreds of his grey suit remained. What sat not far from him was no doubt mother. The slim build and shape of the head left no doubt. I found a tin and put their ashes in it. Never had I been so sad, so alone and full of despair. Carrying my treasure and crying I left the gruesome scene. I was trembling all over and my heart threatened to burst. My helpers stood there, mute under the impact.” [34]  

The incineration of large numbers of people in Dresden is also indicated by estimates of the extreme temperature reached in Dresden during the firestorm. While no survivor has ever reported the actual temperature reached during the Dresden firestorm, many historians estimate that temperatures reached 1,500° Centigrade (2,732° Fahrenheit). [35] Since temperatures in a cremation chamber normally reach only 1,400 degrees to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit [36], large numbers of people in Dresden would have been incinerated from the extreme heat generated in the firestorm.  

Historians also differ on whether or not bodies are still being recovered in Dresden. For example, Frederick Taylor states: “Since 1989—even with the extensive excavation and rebuilding that followed the fall of communism in Dresden—no bodies have been recovered at all, even though careful archaeological investigations have accompanied the redevelopment.” [37]    

  

 Marshall De Bruhl does not agree with Taylor’s statement. De Bruhl notes that numerous other skeletons of victims were discovered in the ruins of Dresden as rubble was removed or foundations for new buildings were dug. De Bruhl states:       

“One particularly poignant discovery was made when the ruins adjacent to the Altmarkt were being excavated in the 1990s. The workmen found the skeletons of a dozen young women who had been recruited from the countryside to come into Dresden and help run the trams during the war. They had taken shelter from the rain of bombs in an ancient vaulted subbasement, where their remains lay undisturbed for almost 50 years.” [38] 

Conclusion    

   

The destruction from the Dresden bombings was so massive that exact figures of deaths will never be obtainable. However, the statement from the Dresden Commission of Historians that “definitely no more than 25,000” died in the Dresden bombings is probably inaccurate. An objective analysis of the evidence indicates that almost certainly far more than 25,000 people died from the bombings of Dresden. Based on a comparison to the Pforzheim bombing and the other similar bombing attacks, a death toll in Dresden of 250,000 people is easily possible. 

End Notes

    

[1] McKee, Alexander, Dresden 1945: The Devil’s Tinderbox, New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984, p. 275. 

[2] Evans, Richard J., Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. 177.

 [3] Taylor, Frederick, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, New York: HarperCollins, 2004, p. 354. 

[4]http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/death-toll-debate-how-many-died-in-the-bombing-of-dresden-a-581992.html. 

[

5] Evans, Richard J., Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. 158. 

[6] DeBruhl, Marshall, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden, New York: Random House, Inc., 2006, p. 200. 

[7] Irving, David, The Destruction of Dresden, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964, p. 98. 

[8] Ten Dyke, Elizabeth A., Dresden: Paradoxes of Memory in History, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 82. 

[9] Taylor, Frederick, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, New York: HarperCollins, 2004, pp. 134, 227-228.

[10] Ibid., p. 227. 

11] Ibid., pp. 229, 232. 

[12] Evans, Richard J., Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. 174. 

[13] Taylor, Frederick, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, New York: HarperCollins, 2004, pp. 3, 406. See also River, Charles Editors, The Firebombing of Dresden: The History and Legacy of the Allies’ Most Controversial Attack on Germany, Introduction, p. 2. 

[14] McKee, Alexander, Dresden 1945: The Devil’s Tinderbox, New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984, p. 177. 

[15 http://glossaryhesperado.blogspot.com/2008/04/facts-about-dresden-bombings.html. 

[16] Cox, Sebastian, “The Dresden Raids: Why and How,” in Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy A., (eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, pp. 44, 46. 

[17] DeBruhl, Marshall, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden, New York: Random House, Inc., 2006, pp. 204-205. 

[18] Neitzel, Sönke, “The City under Attack,” in Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy A., (eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, pp. 68-69. 

19] Ibid., pp. 69, 72, 76. 

[20] Cox, Sebastian, “The Dresden Raids: Why and How,” in Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy A., (eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, pp. 52-53. 

[21] Davis, Richard G., Carl A. Spaatz and the Air War in Europe, Washington, D.C.: Center for Air Force History, 1993, p. 557. 

[22] Hastings, Max, Bomber Command, New York: The Dial Press, 1979, pp. 347-348.  

[23] Cox, Sebastian, “The Dresden Raids: Why and How,” in Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy A., (eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, p. 57. 

[24] Overy, Richard, The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War over Europe, 1940-1945, New York: Viking Penguin, 2014, p. 314. 

[25] Friedrich, Jörg, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, New York, Columbia University Press, 2006, p. 94.  

[26] Ibid., p. 91.  See also DeBruhl, Marshall, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden, New York: Random House, Inc., 2006, p. 255. 

[27] Neitzel, Sönke, “The City under Attack,” in Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy A., (eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, p. 77. 

[28] DeBruhl, Marshall, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden, New York: Random House, Inc., 2006, p. 210. See also McKee, Alexander, Dresden 1945: The Devil’s Tinderbox, New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984, p. 112 

[29] Russell, Alan, “Why Dresden Matters,” in Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy A., (eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, p. 162. 

[30] Evans, Richard J., Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. 158. 

[31] Regan, Dan, Stars and Stripes London edition, Saturday, May 5, 1945, Vol. 5, No. 156. 

[32] Taylor, Frederick, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, New York: HarperCollins, 2004, p. 448. 

[33] McKee, Alexander, Dresden 1945: The Devil’s Tinderbox, New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984, p. 248. 

[34] DeBruhl, Marshall, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden, New York: Random House, Inc., 2006, pp. 253-254. 

[35] Alexander McKee cites estimates of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (McKee, Alexander, Dresden 1945: The Devil’s Tinderbox, New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984, p. 176). 

[36] http://nfda.org/planning-a-funeral/cremation/160.html#hot. 

[37] Taylor, Frederick, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, New York: HarperCollins, 2004, p. 448. 

[38] DeBruhl, Marshall, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden, New York: Random House, Inc., 2006, p. 254. 

John Wear’s study was originally published in the online magazine, Inconvenient History, vol. 11, no. 1 (2019).

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