From Mr. Irving's column, which said:¿What do you think?
it's difficult to tell from his description what a "missing person notification" is without seeing some of them. It might be 80,000-1000,000 individuals missing, as Mr. Irving suggests. On the other hand, it might be a collection of inquiries from A, B, C, and D, asking about E, and E asking about A, B, C, and D.eighty- to one-hundred thousand missing-person notifications are estimated to have been registered so far
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... ttr=797093German report says Dresden firebomb toll was exaggerated
A furious debate about one of the most controversial episodes of the Second World War was ignited yesterday when an official German report concluded that fewer people were killed in the Allied bombing of Dresden than many reports previously estimated.
A commission of historians confirmed earlier findings that up to 25,000 people died in the firestorm unleashed by British and US bombers on February 13-15, 1945.
The study was meant to resolve a dispute that has raged in Germany for decades, with far-right groups claiming that up to 500,000 people were killed in the attack. Critics of the raids have sought to have them classified as a war crime, arguing that they were strategically unnecessary because Germany was already on its knees, and that they targeted civilians rather than military objectives.
In recent years a consensus has emerged among most historians that between 25,000 and 40,000 were killed in the bombing of one of the most beautiful Baroque cities in Europe. However, the reaction to yesterday’s exhaustively researched figure suggested that many in Germany still believe that the death toll was significantly higher.
Within an hour of the report 150 protesters marched on Dresden town hall, while Ralf Lunau, the city’s cultural commissioner, announced that: “This has not ended the debate at all.”
During five years of research the Dresden Historians’ Commission reviewed records from city archives, cemeteries, official registries and courts and checked them against published reports and witness accounts. The figure of 25,000 matches conclusions reached by local authorities immediately after the war, in 1945 and 1946.
The report also found that the number of refugees fleeing the Eastern Front who were killed in the bombing was lower than often presumed, and dismissed speculation that many victims’ bodies were never recovered.
The inflated death toll was partly the work of the far-right historian David Irving, who in his 1963 book The Destruction of Dresden called the bombing a deliberate war crime. He based his figures on a Nazi document that reported 202,400 dead: the historian Frederick Taylor said the document had been faked by the Nazis, who had simply added a nought to each total.
The bombing, in which more than 3,900 tonnes of high explosives and incendiaries dropped by 1,300 bombers destroyed the city centre, has long been a significant factor in Anglo-German relations, as well as a stain on Bomber Command’s reputation. When the Queen visited Dresden in 1992 eggs were thrown at her and protesters demanded an apology.
In February this year, about 6,400 neo-Nazis rallied on the 65th anniversary of the raids. They aimed to stage a “funeral march”, but 12,000 counter-protesters blocked this.
The commission said its conclusions had far-reaching implications for history’s understanding of the war’s final chapter, and how Germans see their own role in the war.
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=53962Undocumented claims undercut the research purposes of this section of the forum. Consequently, it is required that proof be posted along with a claim. The main reason is that proof, evidence, facts, etc. improve the quality of discussions and information. A second reason is that inflammatory, groundless posts and threads attack, and do not promote, the scholarly purpose of this section of the forum. For more on this subject, see the announcement at http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 676#990676
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Since the purpose of this section of the forum is to exchange information and hold informed discussions about historical problems, posts which express unsolicited opinions without supporting facts and sources do not promote the purposes of the forum. Consequently, such posts are subject to deletion after a warning to the poster.
The same reasoning applies to opinion threads.
I am the administrator who approved your post.David Thompson, my post was considered approved by the administrator, are you the administrator?
Yes. It's just a conclusory and negative claim without any supporting facts or reasons to back it up.David Thompson, surely people stating on this site that the bombing of Dresden was a war crime is, to quote you, "a personal notion or opinion"? And certainly "Inflammatory"?
