The Bombing of Dresden Was as Bad as the Holocaust

The Dresden bombing took place on the nights of 13 to 15 February 1945, when British Bomber Command and the United States Army Air Forces conducted four raids on the city. Approximately 25,000 people were killed, almost all civilians; large parts of the historic city centre were destroyed. The raid is one of the most controversial Allied operations of the war; it has been criticised by military historians, by post-war moral philosophers, and by the participants themselves on grounds of military necessity and proportionality. None of this controversy supports the equivalence the deniers want. The number of dead at Dresden is not 250,000; that figure is a sustained denier inflation traceable to the David Irving 1963 book The Destruction of Dresden, which Irving himself partially withdrew in subsequent editions. The actual death toll, established by the Dresden Historical Commission in 2010 after exhaustive examination of the city archives, is approximately 25,000.

The Dresden Historical Commission

The Dresden Historical Commission (Dresdner Historikerkommission) was established by the city of Dresden in 2004 to definitively settle the question of the death toll. It was chaired by the historian Rolf-Dieter Müller of the Military History Research Office of the Bundeswehr, and included historians, archaeologists, demographers and city archivists from Germany, Austria and the United States. The commission worked for six years, examining the city’s death registries (which had been preserved across the bombing, the Soviet occupation and the GDR period), the cremation records, the missing-persons reports, the contemporary city administration documents, the Volkssturm and Wehrmacht records of soldiers killed in the city, and the post-war demographic surveys. It published its final report in March 2010 (Abschlussbericht der Historikerkommission).

The commission’s finding was that the Dresden death toll was approximately 25,000, with an upper-bound estimate (allowing for unrecorded refugees and uncertain identifications) of approximately 30,000. The figure represents one of the highest death tolls of any single Allied air operation against a German city, comparable to the Hamburg firestorm of July 1943 (approximately 35,000 killed). The figure does not approach the 100,000 to 250,000 range routinely cited by deniers and revisionists. The commission’s report is publicly available; the methodology has been independently reviewed and accepted by the standard historical literature.

The Irving inflation

The 250,000 figure originated in David Irving’s The Destruction of Dresden (1963), in which Irving cited German wartime documents allegedly showing approximately 200,000 to 250,000 dead. The documents Irving cited were exposed as fabrications even at the time of his book’s publication. The principal document, the so-called Tagesbefehl 47 of the Dresden police, was a forgery introduced into the German archive after the war, probably by neo-Nazi sources, with figures wildly inflated from the genuine police records. Irving, when challenged, partially withdrew the figures in the second edition of his book (1966) and substantially abandoned the high figure in his 1995 revised edition. The Irving inflation has nonetheless persisted in denier circles and has been weaponised against the Holocaust through the equivalence argument.

The military context of Dresden

The bombing of Dresden was a military operation in February 1945 against a city that, although not heavily industrial, was a significant transport node for the Eastern Front (the Reichsbahn marshalling yards in Dresden were among the largest in eastern Germany), housed approximately 100 small-to-medium war industries, and was the headquarters of Wehrmacht Military District IV. The Soviet command had requested Allied bombing of German rail and communications nodes in support of the Vistula-Oder offensive that was driving toward Berlin. The decision to bomb Dresden was taken by Bomber Command and the US 8th Air Force in this context. The choice of incendiary bombing producing a firestorm has been criticised on military and moral grounds by, among others, Michael Bess, Frederick Taylor, Richard Overy and the Dresden commission itself; the criticism is that the operation was disproportionate to the military gain and was conducted with insufficient regard for civilian casualties.

The criticism does not produce an equivalence with the Holocaust. The Allies bombed a city in a war they were attempting to end as quickly as possible. The civilians killed were the unintended (or, on a more critical reading, the foreseen-but-not-intended) consequence of an attack on a military and transport target. The bombing was not a programme to kill Dresdeners as a category; it was a single operation against a single city. After the operation, the Allies did not resume the bombing the next night, did not repeat it on other German cities to similar effect (Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, the cities of the Ruhr were bombed but not at Dresden’s intensity), and did not extend the firestorm method into a systematic killing of the German civilian population. The total Allied bombing dead in Germany across the entire war is estimated at approximately 410,000 to 600,000 civilians, in a campaign of approximately 1.4 million tons of bombs over six years. The Holocaust killed approximately 6 million Jews in a programme conducted explicitly to eliminate them as a population.

The category difference

The category difference between an air-war operation against a city and a programme of systematic killing is the difference between collateral civilian death in armed conflict and racial extermination as a state programme. Both produce dead civilians; both raise moral and legal questions; both have been the subject of post-war argument and litigation. They are not the same kind of operation. The Allied bombing was conducted by uniformed military personnel against fortified or strategic targets in armed conflict with another state; it produced civilian casualties in a manner regulated, however imperfectly, by the laws of armed conflict, and was the subject of international legal restraint then and since. The Holocaust was conducted by uniformed personnel against unarmed civilians selected by racial category, in territories of which the Germans were the occupying power, in a programme designed to eliminate the targets as a population, with no military function and no military justification. The two are different in kind, not only in degree.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful in two ways. First, it inflates the Dresden death toll by an order of magnitude beyond the historical record, on the basis of figures that have been forensically demolished. Second, it embeds a false equivalence between Allied air war operations and the Holocaust, treating both as if they were the same kind of moral phenomenon. The framing serves the denier purpose of cancelling out the moral discredit of the Holocaust by suggesting an equivalent Allied wrong. The framing does not survive contact with the actual death tolls, the actual military contexts, the actual policy intent, or the actual legal frameworks involved. Recognising the moral problems in the Allied bombing campaign (which serious historians and ethicists have done at length) does not require accepting the equivalence the deniers want.

What was the actual Dresden death toll, established by which historical commission? Where did the inflated figure originate? What is the difference between collateral civilian death in armed conflict and a racial-extermination programme?

See also

• David Irving
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Deborah Lipstadt
• The Irving versus Lipstadt Libel Trial

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Sources

• Dresdner Historikerkommission, Abschlussbericht der Historikerkommission zu den Luftangriffen auf Dresden zwischen dem 13. und 15. Februar 1945, City of Dresden, March 2010
• Frederick Taylor, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, HarperCollins, 2004
• Marshall De Bruhl, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden, Random House, 2006
• Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing 1914 to 1945, Princeton University Press, 2002
• Richard Overy, The Bombing War: Europe 1939 to 1945, Allen Lane, 2013
• Mr Justice Charles Gray, judgment in David Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, Royal Courts of Justice, 11 April 2000, on the Irving fabrication of the Dresden figures
• Richard J. Evans, Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, Basic Books, 2001, with the Dresden chapter
• David Irving, The Destruction of Dresden, William Kimber, 1963 (the source of the inflated figures, partially withdrawn in subsequent editions)
• Götz Bergander, Dresden im Luftkrieg: Vorgeschichte, Zerstörung, Folgen, Böhlau, 1977 (revised editions to 1998), the standard German scholarly treatment
• A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan, Walker, 2006, on the moral questions
• Lothar Kettenacker (ed.), Ein Volk von Opfern? Die neue Debatte um den Bombenkrieg 1940 bis 1945, Rowohlt, 2003
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Holocaust Denial: Key Dates”, with the Dresden equivalence argument addressed, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org