Isn't that what is known as revisionism? What is better courage and honesty than to constantly revise historical facts in the light of new evidences? Unlike, leftist historians, Allied apologists, self-proclaimed Nazi hunters who had the static mentality ofBut even if that were Irving's view in 1995 it took him over thirty years, in the face of an enormous quantity of contrary evidence, to come off his initially incredibly inflated figures.
"6 million is and shall always be the figure! Anything less than that is nothing more than, holocaust denial Nazi apologia and falsification of history. Even if it is 5,999,999"
Just an example..
Anyhow, i have download David Irving newest Destruction at Dresden (2005) and compare his notes and references with his 1995 Apocalypse 1945 edition.
Voigt disbanded the dead persons department of Dresden’s Missing Persons Bureau on June 11, 1945. True to their insistence that the Allied air forces were not an effective weapon of war the Soviet authorities refused to accept his estimate of the death roll—he put it at 135000—and, according to him,‘simply struck off the first digit’ to arrive at their figure of thirty-five thousand dead.
Page 242
Irving took the estimate from Hans Voight and this prove that he took several sources instead of one
The post-war communist mayor of Dresden, Walter Weidauer, adopted the lower figure in his own otherwise authoritative book on the raids.32 In the manner at which the communists were adept, he polemicized against Hanns Voigt, who was by then living as a teacher in western Germany. Voigt bitterly rued the day he was drawn into the controversy.33 Weidauer’s figure was adopted by the west German government too, in place of the 60,000 estimated by its own Federal Statistical Office, and
they have used it consistently after reunification in 1990.34
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Again this shows Irving took the figure from West German government and this proves Irving did not simply make up or inflated figures as those claimed by Allied apologists
Immediately after the raids there was the usual tendency—encouraged on this occasion, we suspect, by Dr Goebbels—to exaggerate the number of casualties. While official sources in Berlin put the death roll in Dresden between 180,000 and 200,000, and propaganda ministry officials spoke of a figure between two and three hundred thousand, a few days later the figure was more modestly estimated by the authority responsible for relief measures in blitzed cities as ‘between 120,000 and 150,000 people lost.’35 This figure, reached only very shortly after the raids, was close to the assessment by Hanns Voigt of the dead person’s section, perhaps the Dresden official best placed to know.
The first edition of this work published in 1963 accepted Voigt’s estimate of 135,000 dead as ‘the best estimate’, with the limits sets by the Berlin authority as the degree of doubt in the figure.
Page 243
Again, Irving took Voight's figure of the Dresden victims
The subsequent discovery of the Dresden police chief ’s report, with its substantially lower figures, must inevitably cast doubt on these estimates: in April 1966, three years after THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN was published, the director of the Dresden city archives wrote to me from other Soviet zone of Germany to reveal that the ‘original order’ of Lieutenant-Colonel Wolfgang Thierig, who was in 1945 the police commandant of Dresden, had turned up; and that this eleven-page document mentioned an interim death roll of 28,000 identified victims. The Thierig report was relatively early however—though dated March 15 it reported only the state of affairs up to eight a.m. on March 10, 1945).36
It is an important document nonetheless. Headed “Höherer S.S. und Polizeiführer in the Gau Halle-Merseburg and Gau Saxony and Wehrmacht District IV, and subheaded “Commander of the Regular Police” (Ordnungspolizei), this is the only known final report on the four air raids on Dresden on February 13, 14, and 15.
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It shows Irving intellectual honesty by stating in his book that there are several sources that gave a lower figure of Dresden's victims
That this east German document was authentic was confirmed beyond doubt by the virtually simultaneous discovery in the West German government archives, among twenty-five thousand newlyaccessioned files of the Reich ministry of finance, of the ‘Situation Reports on Air Raids on Reich Territory’ dated between February 23 and April 10 1945.37 Situation Report No 1404, dated March 22 1945, contained as a supplement the police report already quoted, repeating precisely the same data
including the then (March 10) current death roll of 18,375, the estimated final total of twenty-five thousand, and reference to the thirty-five thousand persons still missing.38 Despite the reproaches of the publisher of THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN, William Kimber, the author felt bound to publish in The Times an immediate letter drawing attention to these new documents, notwithstanding that the figures they contained were at variance with those in his book.
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So how many did die in Dresden? The key element is probably, over and above the identified death roll, the large number of missing people which even the Dresden police chief put at thirty-five thousand.The police president of Darmstadt, in his report on the raids of September 1944, stressed that in catastrophes of this scale very often whole families were wiped out, leaving nobody to report anybody as missing; the same would go for the refugees. It is unlikely that given the magnitude of the Dresden catastrophe the police authorities could have conducted a realistic estimate in the short space between the raids and the reporting date, March 10, when much of the city was still under rubble and ruins that have, indeed, not been excavated to this day. Sixty thousand or more; perhaps a hundred thousand—certainly the largest single air raid massacre of the War in Europe.
Page 244-245
The final figure given by Irving in this newest edition (2005) of Apocalypse 1945: Destruction of Dresden is actually a correlation between the figures of the West German government and Voight's estimate.
Readers must be cautioned in reading several accounts of Allied apologia concerning the inhumane devastation unleashed on Dresden by the Anglo-American air force. Those Allied apologists only look at one dogmatic perspective which is the number of victims can only be counted through number of dead bodies recovered, registered inhabitants of Dresden and official Allied "commissions", "official studies" while discounting the fact that there are several factors that lead to the complications of counting the exact of number of victims. Namely
a) Incinerated bodies that there are nothing more than ashes, or liquidified particles
b)The number of victims who died AFTERMATH the bombing at Dresden from the result of wound complications, trauma, lack of medical resources or even suicide
c) Number of forced labour, refugees, soldiers there were at the Dresden and were not listed as the inhabitants of Dresden
d) Bodyparts such as heads, hands or legs that was recovered. It must be remembered, if those Allied apologists forgets, that a human body consisted of a head, 2 hands and 2 legs (unless there were Extraterrestrial beings at Dresden at that time), which sometimes only a certain body part that was recovered and might not be counted as a victim.
e) The number of the casualties sustained by the search and rescue forces during the initial part of recovery
