"Немецкие историки говорят, что нацисты преувеличили число жертв в Дрездене"

Выкладываю статью из свежайшего выпуска журнала "Вторая Мировая война".

German Historians Say Nazis Exaggerated Dresden Death Toll.

by Justin Ewers

It is a name that continues to evoke images of fire and death. Along with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dresden has become one of the preeminent symbols of the worst horrors of World War II. The ferocious Allied firebombing raid beginning the night of February 13, 1945, by an aerial armada of more than 1,000 bombers, obliterated 13 square miles of a city packed with refugees from elsewhere in devastated Germany. In the days after the raid, Nazi propagandists put the death toll at over 200,000. In the decades that followed, some estimates pushed that number as high as 500,000.

Among historians, though, there has long been a high degree of uncertainty about the scope of the devastation. Some experts who spent the postwar years citing Dresden's death toll as in the hundreds of thousands, including the British historian David Irving, were later discredited as Holocaust deniers or Nazi sympathizers. (Irving, for one, served 13 months in an Austrian jail in 2005-2006 for denying the Holocaust.) While few doubted that the original Nazi estimates were exaggerated, discussion about what really happened in the city in February 1945 tended to devolve into angry exchanges over whether the bombing constituted a war crime.

This spring, an official report requested by the Dresden City Council may finally help quell some of the fury. Based on five years of research in the city's archives, the report, by a group of widely respected historians known as the Dresden Historians' Commission, confirms what many scholars have been arguing for years: The bombing of Dresden, though horrible, was not much different in scale than dozens of other World War II bombing raids carried out by both sides. And the death toll was far less than commonly thought: likely no higher than 25,000 people.

Since 2005, some of Germany's most distinguished scholars, including Horst Boog, the country's leading authority on the air war in Europe, have been digging through a range of archival sources, from cemetery records to the files of registrar offices and local courts, in a painstaking effort to reconstruct the recovery effort after the bombing.

Balancing these archival records with hundreds of eyewitness accounts, the commission created a list of 25,000 potential victims, both identified and unidentified. It dismissed outright any figure higher than that, rejecting as "untrue" the claims that hundreds of thousands of bodies were obliterated in the attack and never recovered. Indeed, after conducting an exhaustive street-by-street archaeological investigation of the city center, as well as a spatial analysis of the post-raid recovery effort, the commission says there is "no evidence" that the chaos following the attack made an accurate estimate of the death toll impossible.

"It is true that the responsible authorities were required to improvise in many cases, given the extent of the catastrophe and the pressures of time," the report's authors write. "But the commission is nevertheless convinced that at least the number of persons killed were recorded in an essentially orderly manner."

Interestingly, the commission notes that a death toll of 25,000 is roughly the same as the official number released by authorities in 1945 and 1946, after the Nazis were gone. Some historians, including Frederick Taylor, in his book Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, have recently argued that the Nazis simply added a zero to their own casualty lists for propaganda purposes.

As definitive as the commission's conclusions may seem, there are some in Dresden who refuse to accept that the report signals the end of the city's special status as a unique victim of the war. Shortly after the report's release in March, 150 demonstrators descended on Dresden's town hall in protest. "This [report] has not ended the debate at all" the city's cultural commissioner, Ralf Lunau, told the London Times. Even if Dresden wasn't the "Holocaust of bombs" some have made it out to be, he insists, the report's finding that "only" 25,000 people were killed does little to remove the moral stain still lingering over the raid.

So the political fires in Dresden will likely continue to burn, but perhaps not quite as hotly as they used to.

 

немецкие историки почти каждый год героически снижают число жертв. Настоящие учёные!

25 тыс стоит и на сайте города последние несколько лет

напоминает уменьшение жертв в Чехословакии, где пользуются вообще замечательным приёмом - начали считать только тех кого кто то видел лично. ну а количество свидетелей уменьшается ежегодно. Таким образом уменьшили количество погибших более чем в 10 раз уже

 

Британцы сами указывали "сотня тысяч". Теперь вдруг съехали до 25000.

Разница в том, что "сотня тысяч" писалась во время войны, когда надо было делить ордена, медали и "это я выиграл войну". 25000 появились в наше время, ввиду разговоров о возможном признании удара по Дрездену военным преступлением.

Сайт истории RAF рассказывает:
No one has ever been able to discover how many people died but it is accepted that the number was greater than the 40,000 who died in the Hamburg firestorm and the Dresden figure may have exceeded 50,000.

http://www.raf.mod.uk/bombercommand/dresden.html

 

Вообщем германская нация(если она еще существует на фоне турков и прочих) занимается постоянным самобичеванием.. Скоро вообще бомбардировки в Дрездене не будет.. Сделают Мифом.