Talk:Bombing of Dresden/Archive 18

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A brand new form of revisionism?

My previous comments have been censured from this discussion page as if this was the article itself and not a discussion. A really strange mix of arguments have been provided me, with everything from a claim that the quotes I had were copyrighted (something I not only find extremely doubtful would even be possible to do or claim any veracity for, but the claim is not even substantiated. Furthermore, trying to disqualify _all_ the evidence as neo-nazi, simply because a site of "ill reputation" quotes them do not make the data or quotes untrue. Most of the quotes and data from the site of ill repute" are by the way substantiated by data on the Norwegian wikipedia site on the same topic, the Dresden bombing, and most of my information was from that wiki page and sources from other sites. Please refrain from censuring debate in the future. You can remove anything you want from the main article, but do not pretend that "new" or controversial information should not be debated in a free and open society. If freedom of speech means anything and is there for a real reason, then it is to protect _unpopular_ views, not popular views. This is a place for _discussion_ not the rehashing of platitudes. Please _seriously_ reconsider the way you confront dissent and treat discussion. If my data was so erroneous the way to meet it would be to discuss and explain with real documentation _why_ the data is wrong, and not some arbitrary reference to "revisionism" or neo-nazi smears. Nunamiut (talk) 22:12, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

When a major revision of an important historic event such as the Dresden Bombings takes place, is it really enough to quote a couple of articles from the guardian and say the Dresden city council are in some way the final arbitrators of world history in the face of 65 years of discussions by historians? I find this new trend in wikipedia disconcerting to say the least. This does not look good at all. I think this finally shows the real and serious weakness of wikipedia. This topic needs serious historians, serious academics and rational debate. Not off hand complete deletion of all dissent coupled with some quick comment that amounts to dismissal on the basis of nazi-smear. I find this development _extremely_ worry-some. Nunamiut (talk) 22:12, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

I find it alarming that someone removes information from this talk page with the edit note "remove copyvio/holocaust denial bullshit". Perhaps this editor can elaborator on what was copyvio and what was bullshit and maybe what was WP:IDONTLIKEIT? Bjmullan (talk) 23:50, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

• Nunamiut, I refer you to WP:NOTFORUM. Although this page is titled "discussion", that discussion should be limited to matters directly related to developing the article. Where comments are off-topic or an editor seems to be trying to debate the actual subject of the article itself, anyone can remove those comments. From WP:TALK, Talk pages are for discussing the article, not for general conversation about the article's subject (much less other subjects). Keep discussions focused on how to improve the article. Irrelevant discussions are subject to removal. It's true that on many article talk pages discussion sometimes strays beyond what's acceptable from a strict interpretation of WP:TALK, but normally this isn't a problem. However on certain articles it can be - namely those articles that tend to attract the conspiracy theorists, WP:POV-pushers, cranks and others, who despite the complete lack of actual reliably sourced information nevertheless want to include their favourite theory in the article.

  I assume you were the IP editor who posted the content I removed. As I said on your talk page, the reasons were (i) because it was a direct copy/paste of material from other websites, and therefore likely to be a copyright violation (WP:COPYVIO applies across all Wikipedia spaces); and (ii) because the sites it was hosted on - Stormfront, Ernst Zundel's etc to name but two - disqualify it as a reliable source anyway. If you want to make specific content suggestions for improving the article you'll need to provide a reliable source from a reputable historian (ie not Irving or the other members of the Institute for Historical Review) that backs up your suggestions. It's not good enough to reproduce content from known hate-speech sites and then suggest that other editors do the research to verify it (see WP:BURDEN). You are welcome to contribute here, but because this is unfortunately one of those article that attracts people who just want to debate the subject, you need be careful to stay within the bounds of WP:TALK. EyeSerene^talk 18:34, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

You can safely assume that it was I who posted it, since I said so in my reply. I agree with you on the burden of proof point, but I find it hard to accept that you can automatically assume that copyright exists or that it is at all legal to enforce such a copyright for relatively small and limited passages. My post was not at all completely from Stormfront, in fact not from Stormfront at all, but if you feel that's the only credible source for the points, then fine, I have the burden of proof to find out where their information stem from if or wether or not they are in fact the original "producers" /originators of the historical data. But my second main point here would be that my post consisted of equal parts from over five different sources as well as much my own commentary which makes the unreliable source claim only refer to about one sixth of my post. Hardly a case for censoring my complete course. You could have just pointed out to me that some sections you googled seemed to originate / get most hits with unreliable sources. Although neo-nazi sites getting the most hits for utilizing the themes most popular in their circles does not necessarily make all they quote "their property" or solely their "story" or version of events. Beware how you use google. Ernst Zundel was charged and sentenced for holding _opinions_ on the Holocaust and stating them out publicly and publishing it in written form, not for being inaccurate in any or all of his his historical accounts or usage of historic data, likewise his sources too do not automatically become fallacious just because several governments do not like his opinions. That is an invalid form of argument. But I'm not here to defend Zundel or his sources, I'm here to create a more meaningful way of agreeing upon how we arrive at historic accuracy and find out where we all can go wrong if we assume to much and stick too tightly to our guns and preconceived notions as well as conditioned fall back positions. Nunamiut (talk) 08:37, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Then I think you may be on the wrong site. Wikipedia is all about reflecting "preconceived notions" - we are constrained by core site policies like WP:V and WP:RS to follow mainstream thought on a subject, giving perhaps a passing mention of WP:FRINGE viewpoints that can be verifiably sourced to minority but nevertheless reputable sources (see WP:UNDUE), and no attention to minority viewpoints that can't. It's not our job to arrive at historical accuracy, that's the job of the historians whose views we merely reflect. Note that WP:V states "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth; that is, whether readers can check that material in Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether editors think it is true." The best place to propose a change in fundamental site policy would be the village pump. EyeSerene^talk 09:58, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

I would have thought it was apparent enough that I was referring to undocumented forms of preconceived notions, but as to wether I'm on the wrong site or not, you're probably right. I probably am, as it would be hard for most to see that for any reasonable adult with any degree of intellectual honesty, it would be worthwhile trying to make very reluctant people accept the difference between accounts of actual and verifiable historical events, as opposed to using some user/admin based uneducated vote procedure on which guardian articles on any group of historians suffices to indicate that one could suddenly off hand just dismiss all the work of, and the rest of the worlds academic community of historians' consensus, even without bothering to check if the recent addition to world academia is accepted. Notwithstanding that common consensus for 60 years has been that around 100.000-200.000 people died in the Bombings of Dresden and that the actual fringe view and new research in this case would in fact be the obscure collection of historians gathered by some rather impermanent city council in Dresden. I've been following Wikipedia for ten years and contributing since around the very beginning so feel free to continue referring to original research policies, fringe view, city pump and all the rest. But frankly, it's a bit old to hide behind and probably just a tedious waste of your time to be writing really. But as a last point before I give up here as well: "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth; I agree, therefore I'm just a tad curious and really wonder in some, albeit slight, amazement at how one accepts and so quickly felt one had "verified" the actual resulting historical consensus of this little over a year old study (october 2008 one promised to publish the results the following year 2009 according to source article from Die Welt Online) from this group of historians, up against more than 60 years of consensus and witness testimony from noted people such as Kurt Vonnegut, and documentation from our own Jens Bjørneboe, (not one known for inaccuracies) and countless others. One would think that was what would sound a bit more "fringe" than what must still be the common consensus to say the least, and would have thought it conformed better to wikipedia policy to wait until one had some more substantial consensus developed as through some actual evidence of other peer reviewed sources that accepted the Dresden council groups version, before one used a couple of links to their conclusions filtered through a guardian journalist or some German language link. Oh, well. Just for the record. And posterity. Nunamiut (talk) 11:03, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Putting it even more simply: Isn't a very recent claim by a very limited group of people, that dropping close to one million bombs (850.000 bombs by most officially accepted accounts as well as the official ones themselves) over a densely populated civilian area such as a relatively large european city only hitting approximately 25.000 people still the _real_ "fringe view" here? I've yet to find _any_ other source or historian that supports or even _can_ support the claims the group commissioned by the Dresden councils have made. Is the burden of finding such to _support_ the _new claim _really_ my obligation? And for such a support to be academically honest to any degree One would think that such supporters also would have to have studied their claims or conduct some reasonable verification of their claims and publish their conclusions as one does with, say for example when other historians make claims or statements.Nunamiut (talk) 03:17, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

This is maybe wandering off topic again, but as it concerns the sources themselves rather than debating the subject I'll bite. The Dresden police report produced immediately after the bombing (the genuine TB47, not the doctored version) put the casuslties at 20,204 expected to rise to around 25,000, and the number cremated at 6,865. Therefore there's nothing recent at all about these numbers - in fact, they predate the higher figures. They have been confirmed again and again over the years, according to Richard J. Evans most notably by Götz Bergander (Dresden im Luftkrieg) after more than ten years of research. The Dresden council investigation you keep referring to is nothing new, it's only one more piece in a long chain stretching right back to February 1945. I appreciate that you may be coming to this subject for the first time so you may be unaware that the negationist so-called "evidence" has been thoroughly examined and debunked by many respected academics over the years (probably most recently by Evans in the Irving/Lipstadt trial). Academic consensus does not only not support the high figures, it gives no credence to them at all. You write "common consensus for 60 years has been that around 100.000-200.000 people died in the Bombings of Dresden" and "I've yet to find _any_ other source or historian that supports or even _can_ support the claims the group commissioned by the Dresden councils have made." With the greatest of respect, your first statement is simply untrue and for the second, you can't have looked very hard. Apart from those in the article itself, Evans would make a good starting point for your education - see [1]. I don't intend to endlessly keep repeating the same points though. If you have a specific improvement you'd like to suggest along with a reliable source to support it, please feel free to do so. If not you'd be best taking your views to a proper chat forum where no doubt you'll find plenty of willing debaters. EyeSerene^talk 12:23, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Hm, you may be right of course. I just though of one of the most obvious explanations (one which I should of course have thought of immediately) : Perhaps I should consider the possibility that most of the bombers just hit the same targets / buildings and locations on the ground over and over again. That is a possibility I have overlooked admittedly. I just don't understand how such a large population along with a large amount of refugees fleeing from German territories in today's Poland because of the advancing soviets, could manage to avoid and hide so effectively from such a unbelievable carnage. Where Nazi propaganda ends and Allied propaganda begins is hard to tell, but it's rather obvious who controlled the available documentation and dissemination of information _after the war, so I think there might still be room for analysis here. It would be interesting to say the least to know the age composition of this group of historians at any rate. But okay, uncle. Even though not all your assertions here are 100% accurate to put it mildly. We have several historians in Norway who still say the casualties may have numbered in the 100.000 range and most all of our pre 1990's/2000's encyclopaedia have always stated that the number of dead was likely to be around the 100.000 number, so your data might not have been as unopposed as you might think. I dont know if you understand German or are able to read it at all but if you are I suggest you take a look at all the sources for the previous numbers the German page gives. It certainly does not suggest or underpin anything of the kind you're claiming in your above statement concerning the lack of other opinions on the subject of the number of casualties. That should be reasonably clear to almost anyone, if you adhere to any credible version of intellectual honesty that is. Nunamiut (talk) 17:03, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

At 5:55 p.m. on March 24, 1945 the Dresden Polizeipräsident reported in code to SS Oberführer Dr. Dietrichs: "Re: Missing Persons Situation in Dresden Air Raid Defence region. The Lord Mayor of Dresden City has established (a) a Central Bureau for Missing Persons and nine Missing Persons registries; (b) eighty- to one-hundred thousand missing-person notifications are estimated to have been registered so far; (c) 9,720 missing-person notifications have been confirmed as fatalities; (d) to date, information on twenty thousand missing person cases has been given out; (e) accurate statistical data possibly only later." This message in German was decoded by the British. This was a count of missing, not bodies. The current number has fallen to confirmed deaths - ie recovered bodies. It appears that Irving and his source were not making up "history". 159.105.80.220 (talk) 18:50, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

What is the reliable secondary source that the above was published in? From the article

The number of people registered with the authorities as missing was 35,000; around 10,000 of those were later found to be alive (Evans, Richard J. The Bombing of Dresden in 1945: Falsification of statistics (par 9)).

The 20,000 reported missing is yet another one of the indicators that the number of dead (up to 25,0000) likely to be fairly accurate. See what Evans write in paragraph 10:

Evans: (vii) Further misuse of figures: refugees, burials, and excavations: paragraph 10

Given the chaotic situation of the last weeks of Hitler's Germany, with millions of refugees streaming through Europe many more might have escaped official attention. Irving himself obliquely concedes that a mass exodus took place from Dresden after the bombing raid. He quoted a Swedish newspaper of 18 February that 'Dresden had been so destroyed that the order for its final evacuation had been given.' In the same paragraph he quoted a refugee: 'None of the neighbouring towns could send help [after the attack] because all the approaches to Dresden were crowded with refugee columns, peasant carts, pushcarts and army vehicles.'206 Thus even on Irving's own evidence, the 'missing' must have included many thousands who had left the city immediately after the raids were over. This was a complicating factor that Dr. Hans Sperling of the Federal Office for Statistics had already brought to Irving's attention in 1962.207 Even if a considerable number of those registered as missing had in fact been killed in the raids, it still remains the case that they would have added no more than a few thousand to the overall death-roll, not the numbers needed by Irving to make up the shortfall between the 'Final Report' figure of 18,000 and his own estimate of 100,000 or even 250,000. As it is, it is now clear that the Dresden authorities took great pains to count all the dead, identified and unidentified.

BTW the linked page given at the top of the collapse box is well worth reading from top to bottom if you are interested in more details of how historians have settled on the figures given in this article. --PBS (talk) 23:45, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Weak, desparate arguments all. The source of the above is British wartime military decoding of German messages. The 20,000 are current estimates made by politicians under extreme duress. One of the largest civilian death tolls is becoming one of the more moderate - maybe an anti-revisionist ploy?159.105.80.220 (talk) 20:09, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Late comment: "60 years of consensus and witness testimony from noted people such as Kurt Vonnegut" is complete nonsense:

• Vonnegut never claimed to be a Historian and is not "noted" to be one; he is a novel writer who was a child in February 1945.
• He never did real historical research on the Dresden death toll.
• Instead, he relied on "Historians" like David Irving and cited his unfounded estimations in his novel, even after these numbers had been proven wrong and faked in the Irving-Lipstadt-trial by discovery of original war time documents.
• There has never been a "consensus" on Vonneguts/Irvings numbers, instead they contradicted a. other, higher estimations of other revisionists (like Hanns Voigt or Eberhard Matthes) and b. were all contradicted by original war time documents found in 1993 which already limited the maximum death toll to around 25.000 and were proven right by the Historian comission in 2005.

But it is not surprising that those who completely rely on unfounded estimations need to desperately defend them rhetorically, just when the Historian commission once and for all prooved these numbers wrong and based on Nazi propaganda and unscientific rumours only. - Wikipedia, nevertheless, can only accept documented proof and clear results of years of the most thorough research on the death toll question ever performed. The Dresden commission consists of a board of best experts on all aspects of the matter, and none of them can be dismissed as a do-politics-a-favor-historian, and they all published every step of their research in detail on the internet. Therefore it was long overdue to put some reference of the detailed results of their investigation into the article. Kopilot (talk) 22:12, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Not really touching on any of the rest of this argument, but this I couldn't pass up: Kurt Vonnegut was _not_ "a child in February 1945"; it's well-documented that he was a POW in Dresden at the time of the bombing. John Darrow (talk) 00:27, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

So what. He never counted dead bodies in Dresden then or later, he never researched that subject, the numbers he gave were taken from a revisionist and later holocaust denier. They are undeniable proven as completely false, that alone matters here. Kopilot (talk) 12:52, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

bipolar options

I take issue with the first paragraph of the article, stating that there is debate about whether the bombings were justified, or whether they constituted a war crime. That binary option is hardly all inclusive. Firstly, the issue is not whether it was justified in hindisght, but whether the Allied forces reasonably believed it to be justified at the time. Secondly, it is entirely possible for the action to have no been partcularily well justified, and yet not be a war crime: that applies to quite a lot of actions from the Second World War. Artillery barrages used on cities, destruction of infrastructure from the air, and heavy use of force where civilians might be ffected could be run through this same filter, but there is a huge gap between 'unjustified' and 'war crime', especially considering the hague laws of war in place at the time. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 152.152.95.1 (talk) 09:25, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

• Looking at the article as it is today, any mention of if the bombing was 'justified' or 'war crime' is in the second paragraph, not the first one. There is indeed notable debate by commentators, officials and historians on these issues from the bombing to today, and therefore comment on the debate belongs in an article about the bombings. Whether or not this or other actions of the Second World War qualify is not a subject that Wikipedia can judge, what we do is report what is out there. Regardless of the "truth" of the issue, there is considerable, reasoned debate among historians and writers on the issue, therefore it belongs in the article. Fanra (talk) 04:16, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Nice humanity ;)

Ahhhh... if you read such an article, what more would you want than drop a million nukes on all of humanity and be done with it? ;) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Intrr (talk • contribs) 21:59, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Neutrality issues

We have at least one section that is not neutral, and overpromotes the bombing as war crimes. --THE FOUNDERS INTENT ^PRAISE 14:41, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

• I am neutral on the issues and came here from the NPOV dispute resolution link. I realize that there are some very emotional and inflammatory topics discussed and people are going to have strong emotional reactions.

It seems to me that te section discussing the necessity of the bombing and/or military justification, including references to existing opinions that the bombing constituted a war crime, meets the Wikipedia NPOV guidelines. The one comment I would have is that there seems to be a section missing, citing opinions (other than official US military sources) that the bombings were justified. (There is some of this in the introduction which needs to be moved to the appropriate section.)

As for the section "Moral equivalence to the Holocaust", what is there seems rather interesting, but it really needs to be set into some sort of context. The argument is stated as if it were a fact, rather than attributed, so it does not meet NPOV standards for that reason alone. You can't just say something like "The bombing of Dresden has been manipulated by Holocaust Denial and pro-Nazi polemicists" unless there is overwhelming agreement about it, which seems very unlikely. It also needs to be set into a discussion of the number of deaths and the opinion needs to be at least attributed, and preferably quoted.

I would also suggest that the initial section be reduced drastically (to a single summary paragraph) and that any mention of the ethical or moral issues in the introduction be reduced to a single sentence, stating that there is a debate or wide difference of viewpoint among commentators as to whether the bombing was justified. Apollo (talk) 22:11, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

I think that the section meets the NPOV guidelines. It doesn't seem to state anything besides the opinions of certain historians. There is a broken link for the first quote, however. --Catonsunday (talk) 22:44, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia's bias continues to disgust me. No balanced article on the Dresden bombing can reasonably exclude a clearly marked heading highlighting the question of whether the bombing constituted a war crime. The heading "Legal considerations" is highly offensive and reminds me of the US term "collateral damage" to refer to civilian casualties in attacks carried out by the US military (when civilians are killed by an enemy of the US, the incident is referred to as "terrorism"). Revisionism taken to a nauseating extreme. Congratulations all you Wikipedia "editors". I vowed years ago never to donate money to Wikipedia because of its bias and to advise others against donating - that decision continues to be proven correct.

Legal considerations is a small part of a whole section that questions whether or not the bombing was justified, the subsection mentions pertinent law. Read the article from top to bottom a couple of times and then tell us what your specific concerns are. GraemeLeggett (talk) 15:43, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

"The resulting firestorm destroyed 15 square miles (39 square kilometres)"

15 miles = 24.1 km Something's not right here... --Goodbye Galaxy (talk) 18:01, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

This is area, though. 1.6 km = 1 mile, so 1 square mile is 1.6 X 1.6 square km. Seems right to me. Squiddy | (squirt ink?) 18:12, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

Ha, you're right! My bad. --Goodbye Galaxy (talk) 20:55, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

Sverre Bergh

The article stated:

The Norwegian student and XU/SIS agent Sverre Bergh was in Dresden during the bombing...

That wording reported Berghs assumed assertions as facts, so I already changed it here to:

The Norwegian student and XU/SIS agent Sverre Bergh claimed to have witnessed...

But even this claim has not been sourced so far. It contradicts informations in the article Sverre Bergh:

When he was 20 years old he went to Dresden, Germany to study at Dresden Technische Hochschule in 1940. Before leaving, he was recruited by the Norwegian intelligence group XU. ...

According to the article he later was as a spy in Peenemünde and elsewhere - but it does not mention Dresden again. The original article of Norwegian Wikipedia does not mention a later stay of Bergh in Dresden 1945 either. Nor do the three weblinks given as additional sources.

The Historian commission of Dresden invited eyewitnesses in different countries to report their impressions. It collected and evaluated hundreds of such reports from 2000 to 2005. In its final report the name Bergh does not occurr, nor any report like his quoted in reference No. 68:

The road was covered with corpses, body parts and blood. It had to be several hundred victims, only on this part of the road.

The quote does not include a claim of Bergh that he saw or believed or heard that these victims where killed by strafing. If he did not claim it and if this claim is not quoted, this reference is not an accurate source for that information. Moreover, if he did not name the day, time and place of his observations, his account would have been dismissed by the Historian commission as an unreliable source.

(Of course refugees could see victims of the bombs and be hit by parts of them themselves. But this had nothing to do with strafing.)

An internal search in his book gives no results for the word "likene" (= "corpses" in Norwegian) or "ofrene" (= "victims" in Norwegian). The one result for "blod" (blood) is not quoted; results for "Dresden" do not notably refer to strafing.

So, if the context of that quote on page 120 in his book Spy in Hitlers Reich does not support Berghs claim, I suggest to exclude the passage on Bergh for this reason. Kopilot (talk) 06:01, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

If the sources don't support the article text that seems like a sensible suggestion. Unfortunately there does seem to be a lot of misinformation about this subject floating around out there. EyeSerene^talk 16:42, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Neutrality tag

The 'war crime' section still has a neutrality tag from January 11. Is this tag still necessary? Manning (talk) 02:42, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

The complete discussion was archived see: [2]

COPY OF ARCHIVED SECTION:

We have at least one section that is not neutral, and overpromotes the bombing as war crimes. --User:The Founders Intent|THE FOUNDERS INTENT ^{User talk:The Founders Intent|PRAISE} 14:41, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

• I am neutral on the issues and came here from the NPOV dispute resolution link. I realize that there are some very emotional and inflammatory topics discussed and people are going to have strong emotional reactions.

It seems to me that the section discussing the necessity of the bombing and/or military justification, including references to existing opinions that the bombing constituted a war crime, meets the Wikipedia NPOV guidelines. The one comment I would have is that there seems to be a section missing, citing opinions (other than official US military sources) that the bombings were justified. (There is some of this in the introduction which needs to be moved to the appropriate section.)

As for the section "Moral equivalence to the Holocaust", what is there seems rather interesting, but it really needs to be set into some sort of context. The argument is stated as if it were a fact, rather than attributed, so it does not meet NPOV standards for that reason alone. You can't just say something like "The bombing of Dresden has been manipulated by Holocaust Denial and pro-Nazi polemicists" unless there is overwhelming agreement about it, which seems very unlikely. It also needs to be set into a discussion of the number of deaths and the opinion needs to be at least attributed, and preferably quoted.

I would also suggest that the initial section be reduced drastically (to a single summary paragraph) and that any mention of the ethical or moral issues in the introduction be reduced to a single sentence, stating that there is a debate or wide difference of viewpoint among commentators as to whether the bombing was justified. User:Masonbarge|Apollo (User talk:Masonbarge|talk) 22:11, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

I think that the section meets the NPOV guidelines. It doesn't seem to state anything besides the opinions of certain historians. There is a broken link for the first quote, however. --User:Catonsunday|Catonsunday (User talk:Catonsunday|talk) 22:44, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

END COPY

Not much of a discussion, two people saying the section is ok. I don't see a problem either, so I'll remove the tag. WP:TAGGING#Removing_tags : And If there is no reply within a reasonable amount of time (a few days), the tag can be removed.

DS Belgium (talk) 03:56, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Tonnage??

What do you mean by writing "Tonnage" in the table of the section U.S. Air Force Historical Division report?? I'm asking because I'm interested in transferring this table in the Greek article. Thank you!--GeoTrou (talk) 20:27, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

• The amount of bombs dropped by weight in tons. Tonnage usually refers to cargo, though its use with ship cargo can mean different things. In the case of aircraft though it has to do with the weight of the cargo, in this case the payload of bombs.--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 21:22, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Thank you Doug!--GeoTrou (talk) 21:42, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

But be carful as the tonnage varies depending on source between long (RAF) and short (USAAF) tons . Better to use tonnes -- PBS (talk) 03:38, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

Company of Heroes (video game)

The 2006 real-time strategy game Company of Heroes has "This one is fresh off the assembly line in Dresden" as one of the comments when a player selects a PaK 38 anti-tank gun crew. It's memorable in the game and alludes to the idea that Dresden was arguably a military target. I don't think it meets criteria for overall significance, though, even in an "In Popular Culture" section. Roches (talk) 16:04, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

I agree.TheKurgan (talk) 16:54, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

First paragraph, first source

The first source in this document should at the very least be wrapped up as a proper citation so that it is not just a raw URL.

• "Triple raid on Dresden Blows by Over 3,600 R.A.F. & U.S. 'Planes Ahead of the Red Army (Thursday 15 February 1945)". The [Manchester] Guardian. 14 February 2005. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |year= / |date= mismatch (help)

But that is only a minor point. It is an old contemporary newspaper article from 15 February 1945 and as such it can not include the numbers for the bombing of the 15th (which is what the headline makes clear), and so it only covers 3 of the 4 raids.

Here is the current sentence from the Wikipedia article that relies on this citatin:

In four raids, altogether 3,600 planes, of which 1,300 were heavy bombers, dropped as many as 650,000 incendiaries, together with 8,000 lb. high-explosive bombs and hundreds of 4,000-pounders, all resulting in the deaths of some 25,000 civilians.

The 1945 article says:

• "Dresden and Chemnitz" "and Magdeburg" "main targets for devastating blows by the R.A.F. on Tuesday night and the Eighth United States Air Force in daylight yesterday." -- So this article is not just about the Dresden raid.
• "Altogether over 3,600 'planes took part" -- but that is for all three towns (and include fighters --From the rest of the paper 1400 RAF +1350 Bombers +900 Mustangs =3,650)
• " Air Ministry communiqué said that the R.A.F. ... 1,400 sent out" --but that number also includes small raids on Bohlen, Magdeburg, and Nuremberg
• "Nearly 650,000 incendiaries, together with 8,000 lb. H.E. bombs and hundreds of 4,000-pounders, were dropped;" -- that is by the RAF and does not include USAAF numbers.
• "450 heavy bombers attacked Dresden and the same number were over Chemnitz" -- so before any other numbers are analysed the number of bombers in the three raids was less than 1,850 working from the numbers in that article.

Therefore the numbers copied from it in the lead are incorrect an I am going to remove them. The change was made by this edit [3] and I am going to revert it out and put the paragraph back as it was before the change was made. -- PBS (talk) 04:19, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

Falsification of evidence

This edit removed a whole section without any prior discussion on the talk page. I think without it the debate section on the debate is the "dog that didn't bark" (Arthur Conan Doyle).

I think that the deleted section is important because it was thanks to David Irving's very popular book that the Bombing of Dresden because a causes célèbres in the 1960's and 1970's. With what we know now, it is difficult to appreciate that, until his work was widely publicised to be false and that he is a charlatan, many people believed his figures. This made the bombing of Dresden the worse single aerial bombardment in history and, based on his figures, to have had a greater death total that the two atomic bombing put together. His distorted figures gave credence to the Nazi's figures, because although people were willing to dismiss those as propaganda, they were less willing to dismiss figures produced by what was popularly believed to be a genuine British historian.

It is Irving's legacy that has led to need for the "Dresden Historical Commission", without his distortions, that the figure of 25,000, which was widely known to be accurate by the end of the 1970s would have moved from the German academic historical research into popular books on the subject a quarter of a century before it did.

Without this section we have an incomplete article. I do agree with that the title "Moral equivalence to the Holocaust" (because although those are now widely seen as his motivation) is not the best so I am going to restore the section but give it a new heading "Falsification of evidence". -- PBS (talk) 05:26, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

Removed historical context

I would like to protest the removal of this section:

Historical Context

The Germans had bombed many cities and civilian targets throughout England throughout the war, in addition to many other cities throughout Europe in the opening invasions. The British Bomber Command began a policy of Area Bombing, or targeting cities to demoralize the population, disrupt the infrastructure, and as a method of taking revenge for the bombing of British cities. The Nazis were widely popular, and encountered no resistance from non Jews, non Communists, or any other Germans who were not exterminated by the Nazis. The use of incendiary bombs was also similar to the burning of Jews in concentration camp ovens, which the Germans had given their consent to.

--Anonymiss Madchen 18:53, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

None of the several contentious points was referenced. Wikipedia should reflect reliable sources. Please acquaint yourself with the requirements for inclusion. (Hohum ^@) 19:30, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

I agree, this is far too one sided and ignores the tremendous carnage caused by German forces. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Vumba (talk • contribs) 00:43, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Lipstadt vs Irving

Lipstadt acusses Irving "The forged evidence on which Irving is said to have relied is Tagesbefehl (Order of the day) No 47 ("TB47"). The majority of the Defendants' criticisms relate to or are connected with the way in which Irving dealt with this document." More in the trial report and in a few books.

And Irving says that "Cope uncritically swallows Evans' bald statement that my Dresden deaht-roll figure was based on a document [namely "Tagesbefehl No.47"] that I knew to be a forgery. There is no evidence of this in any edition of The Destruction of Dresden; in fact I gave a wide range of possible casualties, and selected as the best on the available evidence the 135,000 figure that was suggested to me by Hanns Voigt, who headed the Deathroll Division of the bureau of missing persons after the Dresden air raid and who lived in West Germany as a schoolteacher in the 1960s. When other documents became available, after my book appeared, I was the first to publish them in a letter to The Times (what other historian would act that way!) The notorious Tagesbefehl No. 47 on which Evans and the Court lingered for so long played no part whatever in my assessment of the death roll, as readers of my book know."

So now on the wiki we have only "one" version, David Irving might be a nazi, might be political incorrect and even might be a liar, or not. There's no benefit for the doubt? I tought wikipedia was about information and free speech.

See WP:Undue. Rmhermen (talk) 00:13, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

A good encyclopaedia would eschew emotional arguments

According to this article, people were wafted through the air to meet their deaths by immolation. Any qualification of this kind of act must, by all human precepts, be condemned. Please remove the sections on moral equivalence. Unless there is a Wikipedia entry on the relative value of one life to another, there is no basis for the argument of moral equivalence in any Wikipedia entry. This isn't an emotional issue; it happened, and it behooves us all to know what happened. But changing the subject by charging who deserved it most is not logic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.102.59.64 (talk) 00:55, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Could you be more specific where you think this occurs without the proper attribution? For instance, neither the word "lofted" nor "immolation" occurs in the article. And "moral equivalence" occurs only in a section named "Falsification of evidence". Rmhermen (talk) 02:11, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Wafted, not "lofted:" "and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from." I apologize if immolation is an obscure term. It means destruction by fire. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.102.59.64 (talk) 02:54, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Never said I didn't understand it. I said it isn't used in this article. And neither is "wafted". I am trying to understand what you object to in this article. Direct quotes from witnesses? We can't rewrite those. Rmhermen (talk) 03:04, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

My bad. I've got multiple computers going and must've conflated this article with something else I'm reading. Sorry, people being burnt to a crisp tend to send me into a lather. Good luck with your attributions. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.102.59.64 (talk) 04:18, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

I think that we need to remove the entire section on "Allegations that it was a war crime". This is pointless and certainly is not a neutral point of view. We should either remove it or put a section like "Why it was good." Dmcl404 (talk) 22:06, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Moved from article

...although numbers could be higher due to lack of a complete registration of refugees from the East and complete incineration of bodies in the raid.

I've moved the above sentence here because it's been added to the lede recently in a spate of edits with misleading edit summaries and I can't verify that the source supports it. I rather suspect not—it resembles one of the justifications used in certain quarters for quoting grossly inflated casualty figures—but AGF and all that :) EyeSerene^talk 17:51, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

Title

Why is this article named Bombing of Dresden in World War II. Was Dresden bombed in another war? S_peakF_ree ^(talk)_(contribs) 17:52, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes, by the Prussians in 1760.TheKurgan (talk) 18:17, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

It is part of a series of WWII articles: See Template:WWII city bombing for others. Rmhermen (talk) 17:13, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

General improvement of the article

Thank you to the entire wikipedia community for cleaning up this article. When I first started editing five years ago, it was one of my projects. The POV was so heavily slanted as "pro-bombing" at that time that it was sickening. Now, it is much more even handed. Well done, wikipedia community!"TheKurgan (talk) 18:16, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

It seems clear that the bombings did not have a strong effect on industrial production, but it is mentioned earlier that, in comparison to Coventry, the chaos of damaged communications and rail lines can can be difficult to overcome. Would someone knowledgeable on the subject speak to the actualy military effectiveness of the bombing? It's not quite clear what effect, if any, it had in this way. Were the disruptions to transportation, communications and refugee movements significant in hampering the German war effort on the eastern front? Psydev (talk) 23:41, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

War Time Responses

1. It seems to me that the following sentences do not belong to German, but British war time responses:

Taylor writes that this propaganda was effective, as it not only influenced attitudes in neutral countries at the time, but also reached the British House of Commons when Richard Stokes, a Labour Party Member of Parliament (MP), a long term opponent of area-bombing,[89] quoted information from the German Press Agency (controlled by the Propaganda Ministry). It was Stokes' questions in the House of Commons that were in large part responsible for the shift in the UK against this type of raid. Taylor suggests that, although the destruction of Dresden would have affected people's support for the Allies regardless of German propaganda, at least some of the outrage did depend on Goebbels' massaging of the casualty figures.[90]

2. If Richard Stokes is mentioned, Bishop George Bell should also be mentioned in the part about British responses. He was one very prominent opponent to that kind of raids in the House of Lords at the time and is mentioned therefore in the German Wikipedia-article about the Dresden raids.

Kopilot (talk) 20:58, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

The Post-War Debate by Richard Overy

This web page contains a link to

• Richard Overy (2006), "The Post-War Debate", in Paul Addison; Jeremy Crang (eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 (PDF), Chicago: I.R. Dee, pp. 123–142

which may be of interest as it contains a summary of the debate over the bombings and may contain some details that are not mentioned here. -- PBS (talk) 17:51, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

Lede

A military attack of "questionable value"? This is unacceptable POV and OR. I highly suggest we remove that phrase. -- FutureTrillionaire (talk) 22:36, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

I concur – your change improved NPOV.Grahamboat (talk) 17:25, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Polish pilots

I have replaced the poorly referenced sentence that "a number of Polish pilots refused..." with a recent, authoritative reference to the event. Nowhere does the historian, Halik Kochanski indicate that any Polish pilot refused to follow orders from the Polish Government although they were not happy to do so. It probably would be better placed elsewhere in the article. --Joel Mc (talk) 10:49, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

"Bomb the Red TIs"

The article says the Plate Rack force was told to bomb the glow of the red TIs. I thought the TIs were dropped in a stadium to the west of the city centre, to allow the initial bombers to attack using a "timed overshoot" technique developed by 5 Group. This allowed a fan-shaped bomb pattern to develop, as each squadron passed the TIs at a different angle, and prevented the TIs being obscured by dust and smoke. I believe the reference is in Taylor, will check.58.165.212.160 (talk) 02:04, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

Additional perspectives

I think some additional points made by made in the article, wasn't sure where they might fit in:

1. The policy of targeting densely-populated civilian areas was in fact British aerial policy in general, original attempts to destroy factories themselves had failed because the factories were difficult to identify and had often been moved underground or to the edges of forests and hidden by camouflage netting, further attempts to target the homes of upper-middle class factory managers had failed because their houses were spaced so far apart that a firestorm could not be generated, so that densely clustered housing for working-class urban Germans were the main target in most Allied air raids not just Dresden, this fact was kept buried by Air Command because of the presumed political blowback it might foment among working-class British persons.

2. Might not the destruction of Dresden been a warning to the Soviets to respect the capabilities of airpower? The Eastern Front hadn't really seen long-range heavy bombers just ground attack aircraft mainly, it could have been a way to make sure the Soviets realize they couldn't push the Allies around once the Germans had surrendered because of the numerical superiority in terms of ground troops.

3. The institutional enthusasiasm of the Allied bomber commands, especially the American; they had built a tremendous airfleet up and had essentially run out of targets in Germany, they wanted to use all this muscle and expertise they had acquired at tremendous cost, so political machinations on the parts of USAF generals led to the okaying of the mission.

I've read all of these arguments in reputable history works, but I don't have any citations and don't remember the titles/authors. Historian932 (talk) 00:12, 30 August 2012 (UTC)

The answer to 2 is that at Yalta British air staff had promised bomber support in aid of the Soviet advance but that the impression given by Stalin was that he misunderstood the scale of what Allied heavy bombing meant, and that he had dismissed the 'support' offered as insufficient and of little potency. So as the Soviet had only their own and Germany's tactical bombing experience to judge aerial bombing by, it was decided "to show the Soviets what RAF Bomber Command could do". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.7.147.13 (talk) 09:30, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Area destroyed

History within the article

• "during a firestorm that destroyed 13 square miles of the city," (4 January 2008) inserted by Slimvirgin.
• This edit (14:39, 17 January 2008) by Lightmouse change the figure from "destroying 13 square miles" to {{convert|13|sqmi|km2}}("13 square miles (34 km²)")— comment "Script assisted. Units/dates/other)"
• (22:08, 13 August 2009) by Rama changed the figure from {{convert|13|sqmi|km2}}("13 square miles (34 km²)") to {{convert|39|km2|sqmi}}("39 square kilometres (15 sq mi)") — with the comment "SI units first per WP:MoS"
• This edit (11:27, 24 September 2010) by an IP address changed the numbers from {{convert|39|km2|sqmi}}("39 square kilometres (15 sq mi)") to text of "15 square miles (39 square kilometres)" — with no edit history comment

So the current figure of "40 square kilometres (15 square miles)" is due to figure that has been altered over time. The original figure of 13 square miles comes from: Fire storm the bombing of Dresden 1945, (2006) edited by Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang. From a chapter called "The city under attack" by Sönke Neitzel page 74. The sentence says:

"In the city centre an area of thirteen square miles had been more or less completely destroyed." — however no citation is given to a primary source to back up the number.

• Taylor in Dresden Tuesday 13 February explains how the first raid fanned out from the Ostragehege sports stadium creating a triangle of devastation or as he puts it "shaped like a wedge extending just over one and a quarter miles along each edge and a little under one and three quarter miles at its widest point" (page 285). That calculates to about 80% of a square mile.
• The RAF in a paper written in 1945 (Catalogue ref: AIR 16/487) put the figure at more than 1,600 acres 2.5 square miles.
• Assuming that the other raids did about as much damage as Taylor reports that the first one did (and it has always been known that it was the first one that started the fire-storm), but with some overlap then the RAF figure of 2.5 square miles would seem to be reasonable.
• This corresponds to Bomber Harris Harris numbers in his book bomber offensive (page 261 in my paperback edition ISBN 1-84415-210-3):

The representatives of our Operational Research Section in Germany [after the war] were able to revise the measurement of the extent of devastation in German cities which we had obtained during the war from air photographs; these were taken under operational conditions and did not always give complete cover of the areas concerned. Seventy German cities were attacked by Bomber Command. Twenty-three of these had more than sixty per cent of their built up areas destroyed and 46 about half of their built-up areas destroyed. Thirty-one cities had more than five hundred acres, and many more of them vastly more than 500; thus Hamburg had 6200 acres, Berlin 6427—this includes about 1000 acres of destruction by American attacks—Dusseldorf, 2003, and Colonge 1944. Between one and two thousand acres were devastated in Dresden, Bremen, Duisburg, Essen, Frankfurt-am-Main, Hanover, Munich, Nuremberg, Mannheim-Ludwigshafen, and Stuttgart. As an indication of what this means it may be mentioned that London had about 600, Plymouth about 400, and Coventry just over 100 acres destroyed by enemy aircraft during the war.

— Bomber Harris

The figure given by Neitzel of 13 square miles is 8,320 acres . Given the acreage that Taylor gives for the first raid, and the comparison between cites given by of Bomber Harris, it is highly unlikely that the figure given by Neitzel is correct because if it were then Dresden would be to of Harris's list and it would mean that the three follow up raids on Dresden were more than ten times mas devastating than the first raid. I suggest that the figure in the lead is replaced with the RAF figure of over 1,600 acres (6.5 km²) (Catalogue ref: AIR 16/487) -- PBS (talk) 14:15, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

Railway line junction confusion

Under Military and industrial profile the article claims that Dresden was at the junction of, among others, the Hamburg-Leipzig railway line. That is nonsense, as Leipzig is roughly between Hamburg and Dresden.

I have no access to the source this claims to be from, so I cannot find out the origin of this confusion. Nor am I a regular Wikipedia contributor, so I am not entirely clear about the correct way to procede here, and will therefore not edit the article. But someone will have to fix this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.206.45.10 (talk) 18:58, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

I recently saw a map (supposedly the original bombing map used by the Allies - targets marked). None of the targets were transportation or manufacturing, appeared to be exclusively rsidential. To win a war you kill trained workers not their hammers. 159.105.80.92 (talk) 19:42, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

"To win a war you kill trained workers, not their hammers." Not soldiers, but civilians? What a cowardly way to fight wars! Are you, by chance, American? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.23.233.145 (talk) 01:33, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Charred body

The caption of one of the pictures says "A charred body of a woman in the air-raid shelter". This is not a "charred body": the hair is intact, and the clothing appears unburnt. I would suggest that she was suffocated from the lack of oxygen caused by the firestorm.

I think the caption would be better as "The body of a woman in an air-raid shelter". Baska436 (talk) 00:18, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

As no-one has commented, I have made the change. Baska436 (talk) 09:20, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

Now there is a new picture with the caption "Charred bodies of civilians". There is no sign of charring or burning - the clothing, blankets, baby's pram etc all seem intact. I am changing the caption to "Bodies of civilian casualties" Baska436 (talk) 07:44, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

Huge differencies both between sources AND very wide ranges within sources

• http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/dresden-devastated

states 35.000 - 150.000 deaths

• http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/bombing_of_dresden.htm

agrees, 35.000 - 150.000 deaths

• http://www.spiegel.de/international/world-war-ii-german-film-recalls-dresden-bombing-a-400691.html

states- initially 20.000, recent science 35.000

• http://www.pbs.org/thewar/detail_5229.htm

states "between 25,000 and 35,000 dead. However, thousands more were missing, and there were many unidentified refugees in the city. It is probable that the death total approached the 45,000 killed in the bombing of Hamburg in July-August 1943."

• http://www.rense.com/general85/ddes.htm

goes far above the figures that Gestapo gave (I remember have read that they stated 200.000), "This Allied air raid left 24,866 homes destroyed, eleven square miles of prime real estate and irreplaceable cultural treasures devastated, 35,000 recognizable corpses available to be identified, and hundreds of thousands of unrecognizable ones. How many? Nobody knows for sure. Most honest estimates range from 350,000 to 500,000 dead - many of whom were liquefied into a yellied mass that melted into the asphalt of the roads or were left in piles of ashes amid a city almost totally in ashes and ruins. One newspaper account published in a German paper, Eidgenosse, (1-3-86) lists 480,000 dead. That count looks like this:37,000 babies and toddlers 46,000 school age children 55,000 wounded and sick in the hospitals, including their doctors, nurses and other personnel 12,000 rescue personnel 330,000 dead simply described as "men and women." Just think of Hiroshima. That city's atom casualties were 71,879. During the entire war, England suffered less than 50,000 casualties from bombings."

• http://www.southalabama.edu/history/faculty/rogers/346/dresden.pdf (University of Alabama)

(PDF file, scanned, original page 414) "In terms of lives lost and damage done, the Dresden raid was less destructive than the firestorm imposed by Bomber Command on the city of Hamburg in late July 1943, or the American air attack on Tokyo of March 9-10, 1945, which would kill over 100,000 in a single night.4"

Which atleast to me suggests fewer than 100.000 deaths.

My point is that the result of this event, meassured in number of deaths, differ so much that we cannot use the death numbers of one single source, and use the figures of that source "as a fact". I think, that we must mention that even approximations differs largely both within most sources [like "between 35.000 and 150.000"] and (equaly importaint), the approximations also differ between different sources. In order to attempt to be as NPOV as we possible can be. This doesn't preclude that some sources can be concidered as more reliable than others. Old war time propaganda , from any side (western allied, nazi Germany, USSR etc) cannot be trusted. Boeing720 (talk) 13:58, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

I am rather puzzled by this section. Yes, the above links report huge differences and wide ranges. But it was because of this that the Dresdner Historikerkommission zur Ermittlung der Opferzahlen made up of respected German historians was set up. The commission was headed by one the country's most prominent military historians, Rolf-Dieter Mueller. All of the references above predate the reports of the commission. Meuller reported that the commission estimated that "a maximum of 25,000 people lost their lives in the February attacks." 2008 Daily Telegraph article Using the figures from the commission cannot be considered to be using figures from one single source as the commission certainly examined and evaluated all the available sources, coming to a conclusion of experts which is after all the way a NPOV viewpoint is established.Joel Mc (talk) 16:23, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

The highest numbers of death's are usually comes from dubious sources. But the lowest ones like RAF using the initial figures made by local police, are also very dubious, since the neither the police or other authorities had the competence to make such estimations. You reffer to one out of several investigations and commisions that has been made through the times ever since the event. I'm wondering - how can we possibly determine which source are better than other's ? The word "commission" usually means (current) political involvement. Shoul'd we also deal with the Kennedy assassination only as if the Warren commission is the absolute truth ? Now, I havn't studied the sources in detail. The one that states "up to 600.000" may very well be very dubios, I just took the sources from the top 20 google result. But "between 35.000 and 130.000" (or close to) are found in sources that appears NPOV and edjucational. And I think we should allow a few different sources (not necessarly the current ones), in order to reflect the only truth as we actually can be certain of, is that the death tolls varies between (serious) sources, as whithin them. Wee cannot put all eggs in the same basket, so to speak, and just use the comission You reffer to. But it may certainly be mentioned as source (just not alone). Cheers Boeing720 (talk) 08:03, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

Background - some changes in the beginning

By Christmas 1944 Nazi-Germany launched what would become their last ever major military offensive, in the Ardennes, Belgium. Their primary aim was to recapture the importaint harbour of Antwerpen. Initially they had a certain success, and the Americans (that held this sector) suddenly were experiencing something new. Ever since the invation (and especially after the German western front collapsed 6-7 weeks afterwards) they had been the ones that had the initiative. So the German offensive caused a lot of confusion and blood. But around two weeks later all by Germany re-captured areas were re-re-captured, so to speak. And Hitler's last major resorces went down with the offensive. And by the middle of January, theRed Army started their largest offensive during the entire war. In August 1944 the Russians had approached Warszawa , which caused a Polish uprising in their capital city. But the cynical Stalin (that very well could have let his army to take the city, insted reasoned "good - let the Nazis deal with all troublesome Poles, instead of us". And for five months the Red Army mainly rested, planned and reloaded. And when their offensive began, Hitler had burned most of his military resources in Ardenner-campaign. And now the war finally was comming to Germany. But it's incorrect to state "At the end of 1944, the German army was retreating on all fronts". By the end of 1944 , the Red Army still was waiting and in the west Nazi Germany started their last major campaign. Boeing720 (talk) 19:49, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

OK, I follow your reasoning re the German army being in retreat not in late 1944, but in early 1945. Still, I think your edits need some tidying in terms of grammar and presenting the facts in NPOV style, given the sensitivity of this topic. Alfietucker (talk) 20:26, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

I find it OR/synthesis. Juan Riley (talk) 21:50, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

I'm no expert, but I could understand why Boeing720 wanted to change what was there before. If you want to improve it, do go and find some reliable sources which give some reliable dates for the events leading up to the bombing. Alfietucker (talk) 21:56, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Were it not supposed to be a brief encyclopedic NPOV article, I would love to throw details like Stalin's monstrosity and Polish gallantry into the article. The current background seems to be brief and NPOV. Juan Riley (talk) 22:15, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Well, the current background is the result of Boeing720's changes, tidied up by me. So I'm not sure we're not talking at cross purposes, since you now say you're happy with the way it is now. :-) Alfietucker (talk) 22:25, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Pardon my lack of knowledge on the history of the editing of this article, but yes I am happy with the current background section. Thought there was an argument to expand the background to include issues that though legitimate don't belong here. My mistake and my apologies. Juan Riley (talk) 22:30, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

No problem. It was good of you to check what was happening on the talk page, and I apologise for not having confirmed that I had been to tidy up Boeing's changes made since the OP. Alfietucker (talk) 22:40, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Titling of "In popular culture" section

Can we think of a better section title here? Other than, of course, "so it goes". Juan Riley (talk) 01:08, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Far-left in Germany

The section "Far-left in Germany" either needs moving up into the justified section or it needs to be deleted under WP:UNDUE. I think that it should be deleted. -- PBS (talk) 11:18, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

I'd put it together (though trimmed down) with the Far-right, and what the middle ground of German politics thinks, as a general section on the current German position. At the moment the whole series of dogmatic-titled subsections with make the Table of Contents look rather skewed. GraemeLeggett (talk) 12:12, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Alternative theories anyone?

The US fighterplanes is supposed to have hovered above Dresden just for the sake of machinegunning the civil populace before the bombing would start. If we say this happened, is it because they would burn more easily, or shut up about something (like the fact that Nazism never was popular in Dresden), or are we just on about an altenative theory ? --Stat-ist-ikk (talk) 07:48, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Further reading

Further reading list (as of 27 august 2014)

Bergander, Götz (1977). Dresden im Luftkrieg: Vorgeschichte-Zerstörung-Folgen. Munich: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag. Hansen, Randall (2008). Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany. Doubleday. ISBN 978-0385664035. Hansen, Randall. "An Air Raid Like Any Other". Nationalpost.com. Irving, David (1963). The Destruction of Dresden. London. An eyewitness audio report about the bombing, BBC On this Day, 16 February 1945. Retrieved 10 January 2008. "Der neue Plan von Dresden mit besonderer Kennzeichnung der total zerstörten Gebiete" (The new city map of Dresden with the completely destroyed areas marked), Fotothek der SLUB-Dresden, 1947. Retrieved 10 January 2008. Summary Report (European War), U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, 30 September 1945. Retrieved 10 January 2008. "Bombing of Dresden", Spartacus Educational. Retrieved 10 January 2008. "Das Neue Dresden" (The New Dresden). Retrieved 10 January 2008. "Angela's Story: Machine-gunning civilian refugees", Timewitnesses, March 2003. Retrieved 10 January 2008. "Winston Churchill and the Bombing of Dresden", Heroes and Villains series, British National Archives. Retrieved 10 January 2008. "Dresden 13./14. Februar 1945", German website with a large photo gallery of the bombing. Retrieved 10 January 2008. Forbes, Alan. "Atrocities: Dresden", Boston Review, October/November 1995. Retrieved 10 January 2008. Furlong, Ray. "Horrific fire-bombing images published", BBC News, 22 October 2003. Retrieved 10 January 2008. Hansen, Randall. Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany. Doubleday, 2008, Amazon.ca Hansen, Randall. "An Air Raid Like Any Other." Nationalpost.com Keegan, John. "Necessary or not, Dresden remains a topic of anguish", Daily Telegraph, 31 October 2005. Retrieved 10 January 2008. Klemperer, Victor. "Surviving the Firestorm", excerpt from the diary of an eyewitness, Der Spiegel, 11 February 2005. Retrieved 10 January 2008. Metzger, Lothar. "The Fire-bombing of Dresden", an eye-witness account, Timewitnesses, May 1999. Retrieved 10 January 2008. Murray, Williamson. "The meaning of World War II" (PDF), JFQ, Summer 1995, pp. 1, 5–6. Retrieved 10 January 2008. Oestreicher, Paul. "The legacy of Dresden", The Guardian, 3 March 2004. Retrieved 10 January 2008. Rosenthal, Andreas. Modern "Goodness" – photo taken by artist Andreas Rosenthal in 2006 showing the rebuilt city in the background. Retrieved 10 January 2008. Taylor, Frederick, and Hawley, Charles, "The Logic Behind the Destruction of Dresden", Spiegel Online, 13 February 2009.

I have moved the further reading list here. I thin that over time it has become too large. I suggest that the list in article space is kept to about half a dozen books and or articles. As there are so many to choose from I suggest that the members of the list are are restricted to reliable sources. I am going to leave one source in the Further reading section so that it remains open. Others can select the best half dozen or so to add to it.-- PBS (talk) 20:23, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

I find it easier to identify the weakest members of the list (Strictly web pages should be "External links" and dead trees should be under "Further reading") Anyhow, there are some obvious issues; the Rosenthal photo link is dead, and any other dead (or out of date links) need sorting out if they are to stay. Anything in German which relies upon text to deliver content/navigation is probably not accessible for the average article reader. e.g. die Neue Dresden is a lot about the architecture before and after, and I suspect the text is where most of the content is. Irving's reputation for accuracy has taken a pasting, thought he might have been more on the level in the 1960s. (PS If these aren't actual references, we can lose the access dates). GraemeLeggett (talk) 21:24, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Irving definitely should not be there, as Evens says not one sentence that Irving has written can be trusted. In fact the top four in the above list were placed there by me during my clean-up yesterday. The four had been in the Reference section but they were not supporting as inline citations. I disagree with your statesman web pages should be in External links, because for example the difference between a news item that has a link and one that doesn't is marginal and arbitrary. I think that access dates are useful (With those it is easier to find archived url's if any exist, and also if a dead link is likely to be really dead or that the website is just down). However my initial and main point is that I don't think that there should be much more than half a dozen items in further reading as the references section contains a good overall bibliography with mention of most of the books that detail the raids with a wide POV.

In looking through the list of further reading I restored two. The late John Keegan is a very well known and influential military historian so his views are notable in this context. The BBC article makes the point that the horrific pictures were released a Nazi propaganda and likewise for their own reasons the British did not release similar photographs for the opposite propaganda motive (under the pretext of protecting relatives). One see this propaganda still being played out today with such things a s moral outrage when enemies show downed captured British aircraft crews,[4] and justifying it under GCIII.13 about "[protection against] public curiosity". -- PBS (talk) 09:12, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

I strongly disagree with this removal. You are now the judge of reliability? E.g., aint it nice that you like Keegan? Talk about OR (with a dash of POV)! However, I am going to leave it up to someone else since you apparently have a problem with me. Juan Riley (talk) 23:44, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

"not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject"

Not one of [Irving's] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about. ... if we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian. The BBC quoted Professor Evans further:- Irving, (...) had deliberately distorted and wilfully mistranslated documents, consciously used discredited testimony and falsified historical statistics. (...) Irving has fallen so far short of the standards of scholarship customary amongst historians that he does not deserve to be called a historian at all." Notes

In presenting his ruling at the David Irving vs Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt trial, Mr. Justice Gray concluded (Paragraph 13.167) that he found the following claims against Irving to be 'substantially true':

Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.

"John Keegan, an Englishman widely considered to be the pre-eminent military historian of his era and the author of more than 20 books, including the masterwork 'The Face of Battle'," Obituary in the NYT (2 August 2012). "The Face of battle" (1976) was a seminal work.[5] He has been criticised for his views on Clausewitz;s ideas, but the criticism is of the type expected in academia, he died with his reputation as a military historian intact, and no one since has suggested that he was anything but an objective historian. As to Irving's reputation the quotes above sum it up. Do you know of one reliable source that has cited any of Irving's works since he lost his libel case? -- PBS (talk) 10:14, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

"Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism."

That's just rhetorical baby-talk. You're actually trying to use one judge's opinion as absolute arbitration on whether or not a source is reliable? Laughable and indefensible. 70.105.236.121 (talk) 16:45, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

No he is not. In fact he is using one previously listed further reading (which is quite questionable) as a justification for his purging a whole list of such without addressing each in turn. Juan Riley (talk) 19:20, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Please reread the first posting I made to this section. I have picked one title and left it to other editors to select another half dozen or so from the deleted list. -- PBS (talk) 19:07, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

'... independent Historian (sic) commission'

I'd suggest either commission of historians or historians' commission for the German Historikerkommission and a lower case H. The present version sticks out as an inept translation. Things like that tend to give an article an unintended whiff of amateurishness. Any objections to changing it? Norvo (talk) 02:01, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

Official British Inquiries on necessity/justification

JuanRiley 23:10, 26 August 2014 diff "Undid revision 622637845 by PBS (talk) reverting good faith edit of PBS..the emptiness was clearly there as indicative as no RS src yet for such..talk room?"

1. I dislike you placing "reverting good faith edit of PBS" in an edit commentary as it can be read that you think I also make bad faith edits.
2. The use of empty sections is discouraged.
3. If there is no reliable source then any mention in this article is OR. I have no recollection of any such enquiry and so the WP:BURDEN is on you before you restore my edit to produced in line reliable sources that such an enquiry has been made.

I think your revert shows a profound misunderstanding of the difference between the RAF acceptance of the need for area bombing of city centres and that of Americans who liked to pretend that what they did was precision bombing, ignoring the facts of their bomb mix and their blind bombing of precision targets like railway marshalling yards in city centres using H2X. The official British view on the raid was summed up by Harris at the time "Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things."

--PBS (talk) 10:32, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

I removed the section. A single uncited sentence without context. It could be construed as POV in that it could be interpreted that the was some sort of cover-up or avoidance of the issue. There has been much coverage of the subject, there should be some source that says if there was any consideration of the subject (including area bombing as a whole rather than specifically Dresden) post-war in official circles. GraemeLeggett (talk) 12:14, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

I fear that PBS is a wee bit sensitive. Ignoring his issues, I do admit to some truth behind the old cliche that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" and thus it may well be OR to explicitly state the apparent lack of any official British inquiries. I am okay with deleting it for this reason and leave it up to a discerning reader to note the absence. Frankly, it is not clear to me which is better... ignoring complicity or whitewashing it. But that's a POV--which the deleted section was 'not' guilty of. Juan Riley (talk) 23:30, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

PBS Saying "reverting good-faith edit" is a common and friendly practice that I too adopt when I think of it, in the general case obviously there is no implication meant that your other edits are bad. Rolf H Nelson (talk) 22:42, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

I think it is a lazy practise when used indiscriminately (a breach of AGF), and that it can only be viewed as a friendly practice when reverting edits by an IP addresses or a new editor to reassure them that the reversal is because their edit is misguided and not malignant. It also serve a secondary purpose of informing an experienced editor who views the history of the page that if this IP address makes another edit to the page it should be viewed in context as it may not be simple case of vandalism etc.

If an editor is using a user name I do not recognise, to see if it is a new editor, it is necessary to look at the history of the editor's user name (therefore if I were to revert an edit you make, because you are an experienced editor, I would never start the reversal with "reverting good faith edit of Rolf h nelson:" instead I would do you the courtesy of explaining in as much details as possible in the history the reason and suggest we discuss it on the talk page). I would do this because I assume good faith among all experienced editors and so do not need to tell the world that you have a made a "good faith edit [on this occasion]". -- PBS (talk) 10:47, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

I haven't personally heard anyone complain before, but feel free to propose on WP:AGF or WP:Twinkle that there should be a guideline one way or another about this common practice. In either case, it's widespread enough that this won't be the last time you see it; it's obviously your decision whether you want to get offended by it despite the overwhelming evidence that it's not generally meant in a negative way. Rolf H Nelson (talk) 17:02, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

FYI, total RAF bomb tonnage on Germany 1939-45 was 955,044 long tons.

Total RAF bomb tonnage on Germany 1939-45 by city was:

• Berlin - 45,517
• Essen - 36,429
• Cologne - 34,711
• Duisburg - 30,025
• Hamburg - 22,580
• Dortmund - 22,242
• Stuttgart - 21,016
• Gelsenkirchen - 19,806
• Mannheim/Ludwigshaven - 18,114
• Dusseldorf - 17,701
• Kiel - 16,712
• Frankfurt - 15,696
• Hanover - 14,766
• Le Havre - 13,449 - (Occupied France)
• Nuremberg - 12,021
• Bremen - 12,831
• Bochum - 10,784
• Calais - 9,786 - (as above)
• Brest - 8,428 - (as above)
• Boulogne - 7,827 - (as above)

All figures are long tons.

from an August 1945 issue of Flight here: [6]

BTW, there was 'no official British enquiry' simply because Dresden was just another raid of the kind that RAF Bomber Command had been carrying out on other German cities for the previous three years. It was of no special interest other than being a target that had not previously been bombed by the RAF and by being at an unusually long range from the RAF airfields, hence petrol loads were large and bomb loads small, and total flying time was around nine hours, as opposed to around six hours for attacks on Berlin. The resulting devastation and extensive fires were noticed by aircrews over the target, but as far as any 'controversy' is concerned that only started to emerge after reports began coming in from neutral countries such as Sweden and Switzerland, and these were dismissed as being based on Nazi propaganda - any sympathy there may have been for the unfortunates of Dresden didn't last long as two months later Bergen-Belsen was liberated and pictures from it published all over the world. Then in the post-war years the-then East German government under influence from Moscow attempted to stir up trouble between NATO allies by exaggerating casualties figures during the Cold War.

Dresden had not been bombed by the RAF previously because it was at extreme range which would have necessitated a nine-hour flight over defended territory, which in turn would have potentially resulted in large RAF losses, for a target which at that stage in the war was only of minor industrial importance. By 1945 however with the industry in the cities listed above more or less destroyed, Dresden then took on a higher relative importance; simply put, the other cities were more or less completely burnt-out and no longer worth bombing. In addition, the constriction of the Kammhuber Line made such a long flight much less risky for the aircrews. Then Stalin asked for attacks in the East, and so Dresden then became important. That's why Dresden was bombed.

The destroyed state of the main German industrial cities is why the RAF had by then transferred its attentions to the lesser cities and towns, such as Pforzheim, Braunschweig and Darmstadt, because whereas previously they had only been of minor industrial importance, by late 1944-early 1945 they had assumed an importance they had not held previously.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.148.220.15 (talk) 11:31, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Britain bombed Germany first

Closing discussion initiated by sockpuppet of banned HarveyCarter. Binksternet (talk) 19:58, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Should the article mention the fact that the RAF bombed Germany first in 1939? (JeffersonStar (talk) 12:32, 9 February 2015 (UTC)) Not really relevant this late in the war. Leaving aside 'reaping the whirlwind', bombing early in the war was generally by small numbers of aircraft and scrupulous in its attempt to avoid civilians. GraemeLeggett (talk) 22:34, 9 February 2015 (UTC) People often try to justify the destruction of Dresden by talking about Coventry or the London Blitz, so I think this article should point out the fact that Britain bombed German cities first. (JeffersonStar (talk) 16:17, 10 February 2015 (UTC)) You are forgetting the German Zeppelins over London in WWI. Binksternet (talk) 16:32, 10 February 2015 (UTC) The article on strategic bombing in World War I says the British air force bombed a zeppelin factory in Cologne on 22 September 1914, and the Germans were only allowed to bomb London in May 1915 after the British had already bombed cities in Germany. (JeffersonStar (talk) 16:51, 10 February 2015 (UTC)) Some people may try to justify the bombing of German cities but then again many people don't consider any justification necessary. "What goes around comes around" as they say - "They sowed the wind ...". Personally I also don't consider any justification necessary. They asked for it. They thought that the Luftwaffe was gong to bomb the s**t out of everyone with no comeback on Germany. They were wrong. Until around 1942 many German civilians thought that war was all about victory parades and marching bands. They were wrong. War is unpleasant, and the bombing of German cities taught the average German 'man in the street' that. Twice in twenty years the German people had followed a lunatic leader into completely unprovoked and unjustified wars, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and later millions, of innocent people. So no, the bombing didn't need any 'justification'. They asked for it. That fact may be unpleasant to some, but that doesn't make it any less true. Having their cities bombed was one of the unfortunate prices the German people had to pay for removing Hitler from power - who they had elected back in 1933. It's a shame they were unable to do that for themselves before all those millions of lives were lost. If you elect a mass-murdering lunatic into power (and allow him or her to remain there) then you have only yourself to blame if it has unfortunate consequences for yourself. In other words, in a democracy - which Germany was, at least in 1933 - you have a responsibility to keep your government in-check - no matter what politicians might like or say. And until 1942 many Germans thought Hitler wonderful. By 1945 many had changed their mind. What a shame it took them so long, and at such cost. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.29.18.220 (talk) 11:20, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

NPOV Tag

I will not repeat the arguments given in article 1, this page, "Death Totals Again".

Most of this article is well written and comprehensive in it's coverage. However I strongly object to the biased use of just a few sources out of many (presumably by a small number editors), to support an intentionally low estimate of deaths, whatever the reason. Among other things there is selective cherry picking of evidence - as in the citation of two obscure german sources to support the article's principal estimates - one a newspaper, without giving any details or caveats of the estimates; and without mentioning other points of view. The insertion of the section about "Holocaust deniers" would seem to be out of place, and the unproven statement as to the 200,000 death estimate being propaganda of the Nazis all seem to fit into a pattern of attempting smear anyone who wants to actually minimizing the horror of Dresden, which goes beyond numbers.

It does not mention the problems of counting, identification, and disposal of bodies killed by smoke and asphyxia but then incenerated in the 1,000 degree temperatures of the Firestorm. It doesn't mention the similarly wide divergence of death totals found by different estimators in the Iraq War; say between Iraq Body Count - which relied on published newspaper accounts, and the surveys done by the British Medical Journal The Lancet.

When 1,250 heavy bombers attack one small city, which had never suffered a major attack in six previous years of war, this suggests that something unusual is going on. The article mentions the use of both conventional and incendiary bombs but does not explain the theory behind Firebombing a theory which was tested, with success, over Dresden. It was a pure revenge attack and many English people said so at the time, albeit approvingly. One comparison that springs to mind is Hiroshima, also previously untouched, which was openly chosen as an ideal location to measure the destructiveness of the A bomb - because it was a "clean" target. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cspoleta (talk • contribs) 15:47, 6 March 2015 (UTC) Cspoleta (talk) 16:16, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

Cspoleta - I don't understand why you inserted the NPOV tag. Everything that you raised questions about has been addressed in the article. Your second paragraph especially does mention the issue of disposal of x number of bodies. No "...theory behind firebombing..." is needed, albeit in a separate article. Why the tag? Dinkytown talk 21:46, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

@Cspoleta. I am going to remove the template. It has been there for weeks and no reliable sources have been produced to challenge any of the content of the article. Comments like "1,250 heavy bombers attack one small city, which had never suffered a major attack in six previous years of war, this suggests that something unusual is going on" It is explained why it was attacked in the article. Indeed many of your comments indicate that you have not read the detail. If you want to engage in a detailed discussion of the facts in this article then please indicate which sentences you think are biased and produce reliable sources that support you contention. For example you says "and the unproven statement as to the 200,000 death estimate being propaganda of the Nazis" do you have a reliable source that claims that 200,000 is and accurate figure and not one based on the war time forgery that David Irving used? -- PBS (talk) 19:02, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

The RAF attacks on Dresden were just a normal type of RAF night attack that places such as Berlin, Essen, Cologne, etc. had been undergoing for the past two years, as can be seen by the list of bomb tonnages in the section above, and as a matter of fact Dresden doesn't even make the list of most bombed cities. In fact, the French towns of Bolougne and Calais had a far higher tonnage of bombs dropped on them by the RAF than Dresden - at around 2,353 long tons - did.

... and if the British had wanted to carry out 'revenge' attacks, they could have sent the same number of bombers carrying the same load, over again the next night, and again the next night. In one 24-hour period RAF Bomber Command dropped over 10,000 long tons of bombs on Duisburg and Brunswick. If they had wanted to they could have done that to Dresden. They didn't.

BTW, Dresden got around 2,353 long tons dropped on it by the RAF. Berlin got 45,517. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.31.130.99 (talk) 12:15, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

Accuracy Issues Comment

The line "The attack was carried out in direct violation of international law..."

If you take the time to read the actual citation you may find, at least in my interpretation, that the citation doesn't actually say anything of the sort. It's disappointing but I could be misreading it.

"So long and thanks for all the fish." (talk) 00:16, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

You are correct. The line is an extrapolation and not directly stated in either of the cited sources. I have removed the line per WP:NOR. Mbarbier (talk) 19:29, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

The text added was:

The attack was carried out in direct violation of international law^{http://www.dannen.com/decision/int-law.html#D} and the Hague Convention of 1907.

This has been raised many times before, and there is a whole article dedicated to it. (The text used to be in this and some other articles and was centralised into one see Aerial bombardment and international law). The legal position is that there was no positive international law controlling aerial bombardment as there was for both naval and land based bombardments. So it is not correct to say that the bombardment was a "direct violation of international law". The current article has a summary section on this: Bombing of Dresden in World War II#Legal considerations, as to whether the attacks were a breach of the general laws of war, is part of the debate as described in this article. So any statement in the lead that it was or was not a breach of international law is expressing a non-neutral point of view. Also in this specific case the editor who added the sentence is extrapolating an position from primary sources, which contradict many secondary sources. This is a breach of WP:PSTS -- PBS (talk) 18:16, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

The only legal issues that would have arisen was whether the cities were undefended or not. Attacking an undefended city was a war crime. Attacking a defended one was not.

The German and British cities were well-defended with numerous anti-aircraft guns as well as excellent night fighter forces protecting them. So they weren't undefended.

So neither country's bombing campaigns constituted a 'war crime'. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.29.18.184 (talk) 10:42, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

BTW, one of the most important legal principles on which most Western Law is based - and which some of the more extremest and unscrupulous politicians would like to change - is that you cannot have retrospective law-making. In other words, you cannot prosecute someone under current law for previously doing something that is now unlawful, if it was no offence in law and was otherwise perfectly lawful at the time it was carried out.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.29.18.153 (talk • contribs) 10:27, 22 July 2015 (UTC)

Does one delete a forum-y discussion or just close it?

Recently a discussion topic was deleted. It was quite clearly opened up by someone with an agenda and twas quite clearly an attempt to turn the talk page into a discussion forum re his views. However, my problem is that some admin type came by and instead of closing the topic and marking it as a foruming..he deleted it. This is not behavior I have seen before. Is this the new normal? Juan Riley (talk) 21:57, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

If you are talking about this removal then I support the removal based on the guideline at WP:NOTAFORUM. There were no suggestions in the discussion about how to improve this article. Binksternet (talk) 15:04, 22 July 2015 (UTC)

• Thank you Binksternet. That some admin type was me, of course. Drmies (talk) 17:07, 22 July 2015 (UTC)

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Marshall Inquiry

Section on Marshall Inquiry implies that the inquiry used the presence of a national air defense command to justify an attack on Dresden, which was locally undefended. This is untrue. Below are the two misleading passages.

The inquiry concluded that by the presence of active German military units nearby, and the presence of fighters and anti-aircraft within an effective range, Dresden qualified as "defended".

I am unsure why the word "defended" is in quotations. A city is defended from air attacks if there are fighters and anti-aircraft within effective range. It is impossible logically to argue otherwise.

By this stage in the war both the British and the Germans had integrated air defences at the national level. The German national air-defence system could be used to argue—as the tribunal did—that no German city was "undefended".

This passage is utterly misleading. The Marshall report does not argue that Dresden was defended based on the presence of a national air-defense system that was not available for Dresden. The report shows that the USAAF acted on the information that Dresden was defended by a locally available air-defense system composed of anti-aircraft, search lights, and fighter defense. (See page 6 of Angell 1953 cited in the article). This passage should be stricken from the Wiki article. 2604:2000:F273:DC00:3D4B:9C28:7BE7:D56F (talk) 15:41, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

Both the RAF and USAAF had to fly past/through several hundred miles of what was then still the most heavily defended air space on Earth, so no, Dresden wasn't "undefended" in any way. IIRC, the RAF lost three Lancasters shot down on the raid.

The only way Dresden could have been classed as "undefended" would have been if the Nazi government had withdrawn ALL flak and night fighters/fighters from anywhere near the city and made a declaration in the international press to that effect beforehand, i.e, before the raids, so that the British and Americans were aware of the fact before they attacked it. Making such a claim afterwards when it was self-evidently untrue doesn't count.

... and IIRC, the only reason for the relative lack of flak guns around Dresden was because many had been removed and transferred to Berlin to protect that city.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.148.220.13 (talk) 10:05, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

All of which is in addition to the extensive ground based defenses and military facilities that were very much apparent, and which were a major reason for Soviet pressure for the bombing of the city. It could not in any way be described as undefended.NiD.29 22:47, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

Death total again

An IP editor is removing cited text which says that the death toll was between 22,000 and 25,000. We have discussed this already and arrived at a consensus. Here are a few relevant sources:

• "British bombers killed 500,000 in Dresden. Wrong, it was more like 18,000, say German historians", the Daily Mail.
• "Abschlussbericht der Historikerkommission zu den Luftangriffen auf Dresden zwischen dem 13. und 15. Februar 1945", Matthias Neutzner et al. Landeshauptstadt Dresden

When using this one should at least be familiar with the background of the report. It was tasked by the government there to arrive at a figure as low as possible. Also, their sources are classified and locked up in the archives for several decades. Which means that this is hardly a scientific report. --154.69.27.250 (talk) 16:33, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

• Richard J. Evans, Telling Lies About Hitler, page 162. "The 'Final Report' put the 'missing' figure known to the register of missing persons and the city administration at 35,000 but 10,000 of these missing were later found to be alive." Evans says that the death toll was about 20,000–21,000.

Just a few words on this. Evans is obviously a highly biased source and also lies about excavations not finding remains of dead humans in Dresden. It's just that this isn't widely published. The "Historians commission" has clearly been tasked to minimize the figures of victims. Given that some of it source material has been made inaccessible to the public, the report is scientific neither. Btw. The City of Dresden published a figure of more then 200.000 victims when asked about this before the year 2000. --197.228.6.202 (talk) 17:49, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

Malarkey. Evans is a Cambridge professor and his book was published by respected left-wing imprint Verso Books. Some anonymous South African guy on the internet is not going to negate the Evans book. Binksternet (talk) 18:33, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

Malarkey indeed! "respected left-wing" - There are no words to describe this, a physics professor once said "this is so far off the mark, it is not even wrong." There are left-wing propaganda rallys in Dresden every year with stupid idiots chanting "Bomber Harris, do it again". Would you accept Mengele's opinion about Auschwitz as the complete factual truth? Would you ask Mao and his gang about the great leap ahead?

I do not see any reason to change the article text and casualty numbers. Binksternet (talk) 00:00, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Whatever the protesters are up to, is not relevant to the numbers, which are based on the best information available. The Nazi government's own internal report came up with similar numbers, and was based on actual people missing from ration allocations - which given that almost everyone present would have been listed, will be fairly accurate (if a little high) - and body counts correspond well with those numbers. Had there been hordes of people completely consumed, then these counts would not have been similar. Every other number and claim comes after the same government claimed in its propaganda that ten times as many died - which was about scoring points and not about what happened. There is nothing to suggest that the panel of respected historians had any reason to falsify anything since their own reputations and careers would be damaged if they did, and they have little reason to make the numbers higher, or lower than they actually were - and they - unlike any of those claiming higher numbers, had access to the records and actually consulted them.NiD.29 (talk) 21:07, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

Right. In German Wikipedia we face the same problem of permanent manipulation of these numbers, usually by IPs or "new" accounts of the ever the same far right fringe people. They like to exploit inconsistencies and mistakes for their purposes. So an article on this matter should be very accurate. However, this article contains several ambiguities about these numbers:

• The introduction says: "Between 22,000 and 25,000 people were killed". Where is the source for the minimum "22,000" in the article?
• The last sentence in section "Casualties" (apparently the only sentence indirectly referring to a minimum) reads: "...stated that a maximum of 25,000 people were killed, of which 20,100 are known by name.[83][84]". If these names are known and no other hint for a minimum is given, 20,100 seems to be it. That's inconsistent to the 22,000 in the introduction.
• Two sources are given for that sentence. But reference Nr. 84 is only a media article of 2008 on a "preliminary" report, which is a. not as reliable, b. outdated by reference Nr. 83. That link leads to the official Final Report of the Dresden Historian Commission in 2010, pages 50 and 67.
• Page 50 belongs to a section titled: "Auswertung der Datenbasis personenbezogener Daten", english: "Evaluation of the data base of person-related data." Quote:

"In der Datenbasis sind Informationen zu etwa 24.900 namentlich bekannten Dresdner Luftkriegstoten enthalten, von denen etwa 20.100 sicher oder wahrscheinlich im Februar 1945 getötet wurden." English: "The data base includes informations about approximatly 24,900 namely known Dresden citizens killed by air raids, of which approximatly 20,100 were certainly or probably killed in February 1945."

This obviously represents only part of the whole evaluations and refers only to the namely known deads, not including the unknown deads for which there is also a data base. So this is not a conclusive minimum estimate; page 50 cannot count as source for that.

• This conclusion should be found on page 67 in the last section of the report under the title "Zusammenfassung der Ergebnisse" ("summary of the results"). Quote:

"Bei den Luftangriffen auf Dresden vom 13. bis 15. Februar 1945 wurden bis zu 25.000 Menschen getötet." English: "Within the Dresden air raids from February 13 to 15, 1945, 25,000 humans were killed." No minimum estimate is given there.

• The whole report has also been published as a book (see footnote 2 on bottom of page 4). It says on page 48/49 as result of the "Einleitung" (introduction, which summarizes task, methods and findings):

"Die Untersuchung der Bergung, Registratur und Bestattung der Luftkriegstoten ergab mindestens 18000 Tote, ..." English: "The investigation of recovery, registration and burrial of those killed by the air raids [in Dresden in February 1945] revealed at least 18,000 dead, ..."

Now this is a real minimum number; not an estimate, but a factual result.

• But this was not the last word of the Historian Commission. It stated on S. 34 of that book:

"Um zu prüfen, ob die Einzelnachweise in den Unterlagen des Heidefriedhofs unvollständig sind, wird das Projektteam die in der Datenbasis erfassten Informationen zum Heidefriedhof noch einmal im Detail untersuchen..." English: "To check whether the single evidence in the documents of the Heide-Cemetery is incomplete, the project team will examine the information recorded in the data base for Heide-Cemetery in detail again."

• This examination was finished a few months later. In April 2010 they found documents on additional 1.600 unknown dead bodies burried on that cemetery. So the minimum number totals to 22,700. Source:

"Die Kommission kann über 20.000 Tote namentlich benennen und geht insgesamt von mindestens 22.700 Opfern aus. Das sind über 4.000 Opfer mehr als zuvor gedacht. Bisher ging man von mindestens 18.000 Opfern aus. Die maximale Zahl der möglichen Opfer schätzen Wissenschaftler weiterhin auf 25.000 Menschen." English: "The Commission can name over 20,000 deads and assumes a total of at least 22,700 victims. These are over 4,000 more victims than previously thought. So far at least 18,000 victims were assumed. Scientists still estimate the maximum number of possible victims to 25,000 people."

So the introduction and the last sentence in section 2.4 should be completed and corrected accordingly. I will do that in a moment. Kopilot (talk) 09:42, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Done. Kopilot (talk) 10:02, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

The last sentence of the 1st paragraph in the lede says "Between 22,700 and 25,000 people were killed." Then the last sentence in the last paragraph of the lede states the 25,000 number again. Does it need to address the actual number of casualties twice in the lede? 98.209.42.117 (talk) 10:05, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

I think it's necessary here: the first time is in the opening paragraph where the event is succinctly described; the second instance, three paragraphs later, deals with the still rumbling 'controversy' about the death figure, saving the reader from having to scoot back to the first paragraph to check the inflated level of the figures given by the Nazis and their apologists. Alfietucker (talk) 11:15, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

@Kopilot, in the section casualties he text says "Three municipal and 17 rural cemeteries outside Dresden recorded up to 30 April 1945 a total of at least 21,895 buried bodies of the Dresden raids, including those cremated on the Altmarkt.", and two paragraphs down it says "A further 1,858 bodies were discovered during the reconstruction of Dresden between the end of the war and 1966". That would make a total of 23,753 known bodies. -- PBS (talk) 19:17, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

A German wartime message has been found that says 100,000+- were missing in addition to the 20,000+ bodies recovered. This message was in the possesion of the British. Looks like the earlier numbers were closer to the truth( not a wiki goal). 159.105.80.64 (talk) 19:08, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

All those details have been accounted for. This isn't new news. Rmhermen (talk) 20:25, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

The death toll given by revisionist German historians is obviously false. Unless you believe Germans to be actual Superhumans whose bureaucracy works perfectly right through the end of the war and massive firebombing you will consider these facts: Dresden was considered a safe city by many refuges because it had no industry contributing to the war, therefore no air raid was expected. These refuges never registered due to the chaos. The reports after the bombing e.g. from American POWs speak of molten stones, compare that to reports from the Vietnam war where large casualty numbers from bombing with Napalm were given although hardly any bodies were found. The obvious conclusions are that a) more people were inside the city than officially registered and b) the bodies of virtually everybody above ground were incinerated and could not be retrieved. The 20.000 bodies found and identified were from those persons who were inside air raid shelters that protected from the heat but had insufficient supply of oxygen. A better idea of the actual casualties are given by the numbers of inhabitants: December 31. 1944 566,738 -> April 30. 1945 368,519 Within four months, 200,000 inhabitants had vanished. Directly after the war tens of thousands of refuges were relocated to the city, among them my own family. These relocations were possible because the original owners did not exist any more. Historians who claim that only 20.000 died probably also think that only 333 humans died when the Titanic sank (number of recovered bodies), the other 1200 victims just walked off or what? Even published "scientists" write complete bullshit, I really deplore that Wikipedia reiterates that instead of relying on other, better works! (80.133.123.101 (talk) 01:37, 16 April 2014 (UTC))

The above contribution is well reasoned and placed, and a statement that is with all respect overdue. (John G. Lewis (talk) 00:00, 17 October 2014 (UTC))

I agree with preceding comment by John G. Lewis, above cited count of inhabitants before and after the 1945 air raids is a safe way for establishing death toll, in round numbers 560,000 - 370,000 = 190,000 death toll. In further support, the Wikipedia article Dresden states the following: During the final months of the Second World War, Dresden harbored some 600,000 refugees, with a total population of 1.2 million. Dresden was attacked seven times between 1944 and 1945, and was occupied by the Red Army after the German capitulation. The death toll therefore could run as high as 1,160,000 - 370,000 = 790,000. hgwb (talk) 07:19, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Has a deplorable and in this case disgusting policy, shaped through years of strife and bureaucracy that declares that anything cited enough trumps any argument of logic. This is the sad state of this now soulless machine. 78.68.210.173 (talk) 01:11, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

The Evan's numbers were published before the more recent German investigation published their sources. Clearly the German who wrote under with an IP address of 80.133.123.101 (English language usage is to use commas to denote 1,000s), is either being disingenuous or does not know how the figures were derived. The German writes

• "revisionist German historians" an interesting propaganda inversion for a term usually used for David Irving who is the major proponent for inflated numbers of casualties.
• "more people were inside the city than officially registered" says who?
• "A better idea of the actual casualties are given by the numbers of inhabitants: December 31. 1944 566.738 -> April 30. 1945 368.519" So suddenly the figures that before were unreliable have become reliable?
• "200.000 inhabitants had vanished." They had not vanished. By this stage of the war one could not eat in Germany without a ration card. The fact is (as the article says) "35,000 people were registered with the authorities as missing after the raids, around 10,000 of whom were later found to be alive".

The Number killed, missing etc are detailed in the section Bombing of Dresden in World War II#Casualties all of the facts are backed up with inline citation to reliable sources.

Take 35,000 registered missing and subtract those who were later found alive and one gets a figure of about 25,000 which is roughly the number that were found to have been killed by counting the dead. This is a form of double entry book keeping. The numbers also tally with what is found by doing a statistical analysis of the dead from similar Allied bombing raids. If there had been a large discrepancy between any of these then questions should be asked about the accuracy of the figures. However as they tally it is a good indication that the numbers derived in three different ways is probably accurate. Therefore if the numbers are to be challenged then as Exceptional claims require exceptional sources.

@user:154.69.27.250, user:80.133.123.101, User:John G. Lewis, user:78.68.210.173 and user:Cspoleta where are the exceptional sources? -- PBS (talk) 18:52, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

You say "This is a form of double entry book keeping." (...) Not necessarily. The figure of [a] 25,000 dead, calculated by subtracting those subsequently found (10,000), from the early reported missing (35,000), and [b], after a search that found 25,000 bodies, does initially seem to use two heuristics, yes... But the correlation may be merely a coincidence, or perhaps more likely: a self fulfilling prophecy. It is not conclusive: I will explain. The main goal, and what one should keep in mind, after an air raid of this sort, for Germany, was of course finding and feeding the living, taking care of the sick, keeping them alive, and etc., rather than conducting scientific tallies of the dead. (...) My point is that the numbers are perhaps likely to represent the entrenched German population, and not any vagrant, or moving populations, German or otherwise, that may have been present. And so, when 25,000 were discovered missing, as a secondary tally, investigators went out to look for them: and found 25,000 dead bodies, after a cursory search. They were not matching the bodies to the missing individuals, anyway: it was a very crude search. True? And when a rough figure of 25,000 had been met, there was perhaps no longer any reason to search, as the missing population had been (seemingly) accounted for. Therefore, the apparent two heuristics may collapse into a single, problematical 'analysis': a mere tally of the formerly established German population. As a representation of the former it may well be fairly accurate, but it is leaving out the vagrant and moving populations. I would therefore suggest that a figure "25,000" to be (1/2) to (1/3) of the true figure.

Populations were in flux, and moving, some were being bombed out of existence, and... people can go without food for some time, or get it from local farmers. With reports of a fire so hot that metal, at times stone, melted, leaves one very reluctant to trust immediate post disaster figures, in such a chaotic situation. *There was never was a scientific search and discovery, person count, either before, or after, the bombing, and that therefore, we are left to speculate to a degree.* I would submit that this is the only recourse. That the 25,000 matches similar Allied bombing raids is not of much help, due to the level of uncertainty involved, and the unusuality of the Dresden situation. That in the West we may want to minimize the disaster, should not be reason to exclude (or not attempt) a more accurate, though problematical, assessment. I will let the Doctors speak for me, but from what I generally hear, one might say: "The figure is unknown, with widely varying estimates, but 50,000 to 100,000 are believed to have perished in the Dresden Raid." And one more point, please: the fact that a German propaganda machine says something, then or now, does not ipso facto of itself mean anything, one way or the other. The figure of 200,000 cannot be disproved because Goebbels uttered it.

To summarize, exceptional sources are not needed, because the estimates themselves are not worthy of refutation by any such source. (John G. Lewis (talk) 18:12, 20 April 2015 (UTC))

The "Mail" is a right-wing British paper, that wants to minimise the extent that Britain killed civilians during the Second World War. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Azul441 (talk • contribs) 11:42, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

Excellent, thank you for your reply PBS, even when it took a year for anybody to try and find counter arguments. You claim double entry bookkeeping for your numbers, but my numbers derived from the official statistics (which are reliable because taken with appropriate temporal distance from the cataclysmic events) with regard to the number of inhabitants are exactly that. Your numbers are the revised (therefore revisionist historians) numbers from the farcical historians' commission. The first message sent by a local to Berlin reporting 200,000 dead might have been influenced by panic. But it should be noted that Goebbels would have wanted to downplay German loss of life because of its effect on morale. Your argument about ration cards is wrong, my grandparents who grew up on farms in Silesia never had ration cards before they fled to the west. They and their peers told me about hunger only being an issue from 1945 until 1948. Persons who had only shortly before the bombing entered the city with a refugee trek from the east were probably never registered. During the turmoil of the last months of the war, several million civilians from eastern Germany vanished. Some of those might have died in Dresden without anybody noticing. There are reports from American soldiers in Vietnam that Vietcong being bombed with Napalm completely burned to ash not leaving a body. In Auschwitz and other places there were Crematoria so that there were no 6 million bodies to be found. Nevertheless it is a crime in Germany to claim that the numbers reported with regard to the Holocaust might be even a little overstated. But in Dresden only found and registered bodies count while there are credible reports of molten metal and even stone. When parts of Dresden were rebuilt after the reunification, construction crews routinely found skeletons and duds from the bombing. If there were 25,000 bodies found initially and properly buried (mass grave probably) and reported, the remains of many others were never included in these reports. I find your acceptance of the official number of 25k dead exceptional that the only explanation I can imagine is that you really consider Germans to be superhumans. Knowing myself and having read both eyewitness reports and the reports of British historians (who after the war would want to downplay the loss of civilian life to avoid the war crime debate) my conclusion is that 25k is just the number of immediately found bodies. Considering this to be the entire death toll is an insult to common sense. A really solid count will probably never be achieved so that we have to accept a probability range with high error margins. Imho the article should mention the dispute and give a range of the possible death toll from 25k to 200k which would include most guesstimates in existence. I thank John G. Lewis and the other contributors who apply their minds to this complex problem. Like John G. Lewis stated, even the Nazi propagandists were not always lying: Their reports about the murders of thousands of Poles by the Russians near Katyn have been proven to be essentially correct. In the same vein not everything even reputed and respected historians claim is correct. Some false claims are imho based on honest mistakes or bad data, but in this case I am more and more forced to accept the conclusion that the false claims are based on malice.93.196.232.251 (talk) 23:52, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Since this is coming into question again, what should the upper limit be for the death toll? There has been substantial editing of that, so I think we need a consensus on whether or not to put 200,000 in. I personally think it would be highly misleading, but I want to hear other opinions. GeneralizationsAreBad (talk) 16:26, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

The 200,000 is already mentioned in its proper place - as numbers cooked up by the Nazis to demonize the Allies. Both internal Nazi reports and more recent research by respected historians agree on the 18-25,000 number, which is the most accurate range possible. Any other (higher) numbers lack similar credentials and are based solely on Nazi propaganda - their presence in English literature is largely the result of one quisling politician trying to score debate points against a nearly senile Churchill, and repeated ad nauseum by others with an axe to grind.

The Nazis lied (frequently) when it served them to do so, and this was a prime candidate - in the case of Polish POW's, it served them to use the highest numbers they could, but they were limited as the number of possible victims was known. In the case of Dresden, there really was no upper limit that someone could call them out on for the simple reason that the large number of soldiers and refugees made higher estimates easy to pass off, and so they added an extra 0.NiD.29 (talk) 21:14, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

99,000,000 Germans died in Dresden. Never Forget! (To pay us our reparations!)112.198.79.18 (talk) 04:29, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Reparations? For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. And no, Nazis internal documents show that they themselves knew the death toll was in the 20-25,000 range which more recent German historians have confirmed, almost to the body, not 4-5 times that, which doesn't even match the propaganda claim.NiD.29 (talk) 11:19, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Germany has not sown the wind. Britain declared war on Germany. Britain started aerial bombing. As stated above, 20-25k bodies were recovered immediately, many more were found piecemeal during reconstruction efforts and a great many were never found because the bodies were incinerated where the innocent civilians died. How many bodies were recovered after 9/11 from the twin towers. Do you want to revise those numbers as well?

Wrong on several points - Germany started the war by illegally invading, bombing and annexing Poland, Belgium and then France (all British allies) - and was the first to use terror bombing, whether you include using Zeppelins to bomb undefended cities in WW1 (thus starting a nhuge debate about the legality of doing so), or the Third Reich's bombing of innocent civilians at Guernica in Spain - weasel all you want but the war was started by Germany, deliberately and with considerable malice aforethought, and no sane individual without a Nazi axe to grind will support you. Second is that the 20-25k were not counts of bodies found immediately followed by others, but counts of ALL missing persons, taken from German records (including ration allotments) and then verified by the bodies they found - there was no other bodies to find. The Nazi government which you seem to adore so much the LIED for its own ends. Do you really want to talk about revising numbers from such a shaky foundation, when the revisionism is that of Nazis, neo-nazis and those who love them? - NiD.29 (talk) 03:46, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Don't fatten the trolls by feeding them..Irondome (talk) 04:00, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Add'l source

I came across this source while working on another article. I see that it's not being used in this article; most of the pages appear to be searchable/accessible online.

• A German Catastrophe?: German Historians and the Allied Bombings, 1945-2010, by Bas Von Benda-Beckmann.

Hope this helps! K.e.coffman (talk) 03:19, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Basically, the Von Benda-Beckmann discusses the different approaches of historians, inter alia, to Dresden bombing. He doesn't give new figures, and I find no reference to a "death toll of 830,000", (but I may have missed it...) --Joel Mc (talk) 10:33, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Just did a search and 830 returned 0 results, however it does state that the authorities estimated the toll at 25,000 and reported it to the public as 250,000 (p.146), while the GDR claimed numbers from 60,000-300,000 (p.147) and they discuss Irvings "exaggerations" based on a photocopy of a typewritten copy of a report that even the GDR recognized as a forgery, on p.147 - NiD.29 (talk) 23:43, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

At first puzzled that Von Benda-Beckmann doesn't seem to refer to the final report of the Historikerkommission zu den Luftangriffen auf Dresden... (referred to in the article) but the two documents seem to have been published at about the same time in (March/April) 2010. Joel Mc (talk) 09:51, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Unprofessionalism

The "On The Ground" section starts off with a quote and provides a gripping, entertaining summary. However, this is an Encyclopaedia, not a novel. In addition, the caption for the Churchill picture sounds overly confident and accusatory. It should be something like "...many consider British Prim Minister Winston Churchill to be ultimately responsible for the bombing..." or something like that rather than the current "...was ultimately responsible for the bombing..." Widgetdog (talk) 23:38, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Flammability of Dresden as a city

I remember learning in my history class in Illinois in 1975 (and it seems confirmed by the tables of tonnage of bombs dropped per capita on the top-7 cities), that Dresden was far more susceptible to a firestorm than other german cities that had less wooden construction and more stone buildings, and which had been bombed before, which led to more fire-proof construction afterwards. I find no notice of this information in the article and would like somebody to come up with a reference to improve the article (either confirm or deny these suspicions) in this way. SystemBuilder (talk) 02:05, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

As had been mentioned in the page, Dresden hadn't been previously targetted on a large scale so had many intact buildings, but wasn't otherwise unusual. Most German buildings of the period had brick or stone over wood frames, or were just wood structures, which the bombloads of mixed high explosives, which first turned buildings into kindling, followed by incendiaries which ignited them, worked very well against. What was unusual about Dresden was the day-night-day continuous bombing by both the RAF and the USAAF. What the tonnages don't tell is that other cities received those tonnages spread over six years and many attacks (many much smaller - and thus less effective), while Dresden got almost all of it in one shot, which is what created the firestorm. Once a city had been bombed, firebreaks could be built - which Dresden lacked. Tokyo suffered a similar fate but it WAS highly flammable, as the Japanese used largely wooden structures, with paper partitions, had few firebreaks and fire fighting was undeveloped.NiD.29 (talk) 08:04, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Firestorm#City_firestorms argues that Dresden had more old wooden buildings - and may be the largest actual firestorm as Tokyo was not a firestorm at all, but a fire driven by windy weather. I am not certain how far the sources back those conclusions though. Rmhermen (talk) 17:48, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

I hadn't realized the effect of existing wind for the Tokyo bombing, but reading through the firestorm page I get the impression that many Germany cities were like Dresden, and few like Berlin, which had more modern and thus less flammable buildings, but then many of those cities had been hit repeatedly with smaller less concentrated attacks which ultimately made a firestorm harder to achieve when they did have the necessary concentration. At the same time the earlier attacks prior to 1943 also failed to diminish German industrial production (which didn't reach capacity until 1943 - even the dam raids didn't have much lasting effect) and didn't do much to German morale either, but did divert badly needed German resources away from the Russian front, allowing them to recover and push the Germans back. So much for bomber doctrine.NiD.29 (talk) 05:29, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

The true firestorm requires suitable weather conditions, namely a temperature inversion over the target, and the only times this occurred with any certainty were over Hamburg in 1943 and at Dresden in 1945. The other instances often quoted almost certainly were not true firestorms, as this is signified by howling winds of great force at ground level. The inversion creates in effect a chimney over the burning area and this acts to cause an updraft which then drags in cold air at ground level with winds up to hurricane force which howl as they pass through narrow streets - hence the 'storm' part of the term. The cold air being drawn in adds more oxygen for the fire which causes the fire to continue to increase temperature, dragging more ground level air in at a steadily increasing rate until it reaches equilibrium or everything is burnt out. During this process the wind speeds can exceed 100 mph at ground level and temperatures reach 1,000 C.

Neither the Hamburg nor Dresden firestorms were planned, the Hamburg one was the first time this phenomenon had been observed, and the Dresden one occurred before the details of its production had been deduced. Although the RAF had access to the pre-raid Mosquito Met Flight weather observations, it was only post-war that the appropriate German weather records for the relevant periods were obtained. This is one of the reasons that the reports of great casualties were disbelieved - apart from the usual 'enemy propaganda' reasons - in the UK at the time.

The phenomenon never occurred in Berlin and other places because many being of more modern development the streets were wide and the buildings not closely-packed as they had been in Hamburg and Dresden. Hence large numbers of the dropped incendiaries burnt out harmlessly in roads, open places, etc. In addition, the widely spaced buildings when burning would not generate a mass of fire in a concentrated enough area to cause a large column of rising air that could be drawn up further and at a greater rate by any inversion. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.31.130.71 (talk) 11:40, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

BTW, the term "firestorm" is a German one coined after the 1943 Hamburg raid, originally translated from feuersturm. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.30.162.162 (talk) 09:48, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

Strafing

"In 2000, historian Helmut Schnatz found that there was an explicit order to RAF pilots not to strafe civilians on the way back home from Dresden"

There was no way any RAF aircraft would have been able to do any strafing as they would all have been flying at over a mile - 8,000 feet - high. No RAF pilot in his right mind would have been flying around Dresden at an altitude low enough to see people on the ground for his gunners to shoot at, as there were likely to still be late-arriving bombers above them dropping their loads. There were no RAF Mustangs involved. The Mosquito markers were otherwise unarmed, and carried no guns. Flying at low-level increases fuel consumption and as the raid was at the limit of a Lancaster's range, and a nine-hour trip, few pilots and crews would have chosen to have flown low enough on the return journey, and risk running low on fuel, just to shoot-up anyone on the ground they may have come upon. It would be risky and utterly pointless.

In addition, it was the middle of night, and dark outside. The bombers carried tracer ammunition in their guns which can been seen in the dark, with the risk of attracting night fighters. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.150.100.255 (talk) 17:22, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I have looked into the sentences concerned: one was a fringe POV supported by a sole, amateur/non-specialist historian (whose book significantly was warmly welcomed by the Institute for Historical Review); the other based on an anonymous web page source. I have accordingly cut both as WP:undue; certainly it seems mischievous the way they were presented and positioned in the paragraph. Alfietucker (talk) 10:05, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply, and thank you. Actually there may well have been an order saying such. But it certainly wasn't normal for RAF Bomber Command aircraft to strafe anyone on the ground, for the reasons I set out above. For one thing the bomber stream usually flew at around 18,000 feet. The order may however have been issued to expressly forbid any crews being tempted to do so. Once a crew had dropped their bombs they were more or less free to make their own way home in any way and by any route they saw fit, although most would have stayed with the bomber stream all the way back to the UK. The Dresden attack was carried out from an unusually low altitude - 8,000 feet - and so the order may have been seen as a precaution against some crews deciding to fly home very low and fire at anything they saw. This would not have been a good idea for the reasons I stated earlier. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.149.173.74 (talk) 10:23, 20 May 2016 (UTC)

The claim is still there in the article, and it's false. What Helmut Schnatz actually wrote was that, contrary to the false claims made by David Irving, no order was issued to US escort-fighter pilots to strafe ground targets in the vicinity of Dresden during the Eighth Air Force daylight raid on 14 February. Nothing to do with the RAF. (See Taylor 2004, p.500.) Half the US Mustangs, denominated as the 'A groups', were detailed to go low and strafe transportation -- but only an hour after target, a couple of hundred miles to the west, when shorter-ranged Thunderbolts could take over escort duty. The idea that RAF heavy night bombers would have to be ordered not to engage in strafing is self-evidently absurd. They very rarely flew low over enemy territory and the weather that night, with all of Europe except the Dresden area under thick cloud, the cloudbase as low as 400 feet, meant that even Mosquito fighter-bombers would find strafing difficult. Khamba Tendal (talk) 17:56, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

5 Group attack

The article makes the false claim that the whole of 5 Group bombed within two minutes except for one Lancaster. This is a rather stupid misunderstanding of what Frederick Taylor says on p.286 of his 2004 book. In fact that paragraph refers solely to 49 Squadron. 5 Group's Main Force bombing lasted from 22.13 to 22.28. (Taylor 2004 p.296.) Official H-Hour for the Main Force ('Plate Rack') was 22.15, but many crews bombed early because the Master Bomber and the Pathfinders took so long fussing about. The first parachute flares were laid by 83 Squadron's Lancasters, to light up the scene, at 22.03. Pathfinder Lancasters of 83 and 97 Squadrons then kept on laying parachute flares and green TIs on radar to give the low-flying Mosquitos of 627 Squadron a line on the target so they could place their Red Spot Fire TIs visually.

The article is also wrong to say that the bombers attacked as low as 8,000 feet. 49 Squadron were stacked from 12,000 to 13,500, and that was an unusual concession because of the absence of heavy flak. (Taylor 2004 p.286.) 627 Squadron's few fast-moving Mosquitos were right on the deck, but Lancasters were unlikely to fly as low as 8,000 where light flak could engage them. 'Check 3', the 97 Squadron Pathfinder Lancaster detailed to report the visibility of the TIs to the Master Bomber from attack height, was up at 18,000. (Taylor 2004 p.282.) Khamba Tendal (talk) 18:13, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

Counting dead

Counting casualties is a bit mean, in that reduces to numbers the personal tragedies involved, however, with 3'900 tons of bombs dropped on Dresden, the figure in article, of 22'000 to 25'000 victims, would yield around 6 victims per ton of bombs, that seems quite low for the densely populated, several stories buildings residential area Dresden was then, and continues being. The 135'000 overal casualties figure that David Irving proposed in his early 70s book: 'The destruction of Dresden', looks more realistic, but this historian was put in jail later in XX century, in Austria, under the accusation of: 'Holocaust denial', that even if it were an untrue accusation, I won't discuss this, would reduce the credibility of his writings. 135'000 (one hundred and thirty five thousand) may be the accurate balance of victims from the two days of 1945 Dresden bombings, that destroyed also the home where Richard Wagner lived, one of the composers loved by A Hitler, with the peculiar element that the piece favourite to A H was in its structure and general sound somehow close to the baroque work by the great British composer Henry Purcell. Regards, + Salut--Caula (talk) 20:38, 9 October 2016 (UTC)

Irving's work on Dresden is not considered credible, nor are estimates of 100,000+; the death toll is generally put at 25,000 to 35,000. See the Evans Report on Irving's distortions regarding this issue (and others). Even without taking into account the issue of Holocaust denial, his work has still been heavily criticized. GAB^gab 20:47, 9 October 2016 (UTC)

Casualties were limited by the well-practiced use of air raid shelters, and the high proportion of civilians was due to poor knowledge of local shelters by refugees (mostly former settlers of the recently occupied and then lost territories annexed from Poland and the USSR). The 20-22,000 was arrived by a double entry bookkeeping, of counting dead bodies against missing ration holders and was arrived at by both the Nazis (as per their internal reports) at the time, and much later by a group of historians who had little reason to fudge the numbers. All other estimates have good reasons for overestimating casualties and are therefore suspect. - NiD.29 (talk) 12:27, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

Blitz

The bombing of England extended beyond London. I (born 1947) grew up in a Liverpool street, about two miles from the docks, where three houses had been bombed. It was a slum area, so the houses were never rebuilt (Pamour (talk) 22:10, 19 October 2016 (UTC)).

War crime / Claim

Clear consensus against the edit demonstrated. Discussion now Hijacked by suspicious I.P. activity. Irondome (talk) 20:02, 31 October 2016 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Given the enduring controversy, the allegations that the raid was a war crime need to be included in the lede. (Dsklw (talk) 17:59, 30 October 2016 (UTC)) I would suggest you would be better off expanding the existing sections dealing with this debate. If consensus indicates it should be in the lede, it should be reworded in a WP:NPOV style. See WP:LEDE. It is an ongoing debate, and you should mention that others disagree that it was a "war crime". Irondome (talk) 18:15, 30 October 2016 (UTC) A single sentence saying some think it was a war crime in the lead does not accurately reflect the body of the article. The controversy of the bombing is already mentioned in the lead, and the arguments for it being or not being a war crime are made fully in their own section. Please abide by WP:BRD while it is discussed. (Hohum @) 18:18, 30 October 2016 (UTC) I think there should be some mention in the lede because the raid was widely regarded as a war crime under the international laws on aerial warfare at the time, unlike other Allied raids on Germany in World War II. (Dsklw (talk) 18:25, 30 October 2016 (UTC)) I don't believe that the current consensus is for inclusion, as three editors have disagreed with the addition. K.e.coffman (talk) 03:34, 31 October 2016 (UTC) Please see Aerial bombardment and international law#International law up to 1945. Your assertion that it was "widely regarded as a war crime under the international laws on aerial warfare at the time.." is unsupported and incorrect. It was a defended city, which existing laws at the time made it a legitimate target for attack. It was also a major supplier of war-related components, despite the myth of it being an "innocent" target. The debate amongst historians continues, and your proposed edit is WP:UNDUE. Irondome (talk) 03:51, 31 October 2016 (UTC) Dresden was neither defended nor a military target. Churchill admitted the raid was illegal at the time. (Bndjs (talk) 07:43, 31 October 2016 (UTC)) Thanks but Wikipedia requires reliable sources, not opinions or wild claims. Johnuniq (talk) 08:20, 31 October 2016 (UTC) Churchill famously wrote in 1945 that the city was not a military target and the raid was ordered simply to kill civilians. (Bndjs (talk) 08:33, 31 October 2016 (UTC)) First, everything in Germany was a defended target thanks to the Luftwaffe, second, Dresden was a major center of manufacture of a wide variety of war materiel, third, it was the centerpiece in the German defence against the advancing Russians as well as being one of the largest transportation hubs in Germany, and quotes taken out of context from years later when Churchill was senile hardly count as references. - NiD.29 (talk) 15:09, 31 October 2016 (UTC) The Luftwaffe no longer existed in 1945. Churchill wrote in February 1945 that Dresden was bombed only to terrorize the civilian population. (81.159.6.116 (talk) 15:42, 31 October 2016 (UTC)) WP:DNFTT may be applicable at this point; should this discussion be hatted? K.e.coffman (talk) 15:50, 31 October 2016 (UTC) Indeed. Irondome (talk) 15:56, 31 October 2016 (UTC) I don't think this requires discussion. Not even the arch-detractors (Grayling and his mob) have been able to show, beyond opinion, this was a war crime. In any case, international law permitted bombing of this kind or certainly didn't regard it as criminal. I also think the IP shows a lack of appreciation for how dangerous air operations were in 1945. Does he care to know how many Bomber Command crews lost their lives at the hands of this "non-existent Luftwaffe" in 1945? Dapi89 (talk) 17:38, 31 October 2016 (UTC) Bomber Command crews were only terrorists like ISIS and al Queda. Churchill admitted in his secret note that the raid was only ordered to terrorize German civilians, and that the myths about Dresden being a military target were only used as a pretext for the terrorism. (81.159.6.116 (talk) 17:41, 31 October 2016 (UTC))

Churchill's secret memo / Another claim

OP indeffed as sock. Johnuniq (talk) 01:38, 6 November 2016 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Churchill's secret memo on 28 March 1945, in which he admitted Dresden was only bombed in order to spread terror among the civilian population, should be mentioned in the intro as it proves the city had no military significance, despite later claims. (Sjdkl; (talk) 17:29, 5 November 2016 (UTC)) *A case of WP:DNFTT? K.e.coffman (talk) 17:48, 5 November 2016 (UTC) Huh? I'm just saying the secret memo should be mentioned in the intro. (Sjdkl; (talk) 18:05, 5 November 2016 (UTC)) This was discussed recently in the thread immediately above: "War crime / Claim". The consensus was not to include such material in the lead. K.e.coffman (talk) 18:17, 5 November 2016 (UTC)

Falsified figure?

As I understand it, the German medical authorities offered a figure of 260,000 dead and stated that others in the centre of the city were disintegrated. The figure of 20,000 referred to those victims who could be identified and named. A website of 2016 states a figure of 10,000 deaths. Such a figure would be a seventh of the deaths during the bombing of Hamburg - it is ludicrous. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 1.144.96.234 (talk) 03:58, 11 October 2016 (UTC)

The death toll is fully discussed in the article. This is not a page for debate, only for offering improvements to the article. Rmhermen (talk) 04:17, 11 October 2016 (UTC)

The 22,000 refers to the total number of actual dead rather than being an estimate - the Germans had incredibly good records thanks to almost everyone being on rations. The death toll was relatively low because they had a very effective system for getting people under cover during air raids, and Dresden was at the limit of the RAF and USAAF's range, so the Germans had more than their usual amount of time to take cover. The majority of casualties were civilian refugees who had the least preparation and experience for doing so and they tried to use whatever cover they could find, which included the basements of buildings that were not adequately fireproofed. That Kurt Vonnegut survived on the surface (as a POW and hence of low priority for the Germans) should tell you something in that regard. - NiD.29 (talk) 16:08, 30 October 2016 (UTC)

Vonnegut survived during the night raid by being in an underground meat cellar, the so-called "Slaughterhouse 5", from-which the novel took its name. Vonnegut's work party had been taken there by their guards when the air raid sirens started. Vonnegut used his own experience of this for the Billy Pilgrim character.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.150.100.249 (talk) 11:46, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

Addition to the popular culture section

German metal band Accept made the song Hellfire on album Stalingrad (2012). In the physical album lyrics notebook, Dresden is mentioned as an alternative name to the song and the lyrics are about bombings. Should it be added? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.157.75.151 (talk) 15:57, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

no. "mentions" are rarely worth putting in popular culture sections, which themselves are rarely worth putting in articles. --jpgordon^{𝄢𝄆 𝄐𝄇} 00:31, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

More on the popular culture section

I am not a big fan of popular culture sections, but the reference to The Kokoschka Doll which was removed was legit if a little obscure to english readers as it was written in Portuguese. But it did win a european prize. Here is a reference in English: Cruz Joel Mc (talk) 20:20, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Rehashing old material

Suspected sock
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
As Churchill said the raid on Dresden was a war crime that is how it should be described in the external links. (ManfredLawler (talk) 16:32, 3 January 2017 (UTC)) Please present the exact quote where he says that. Even if he did, one individual's alleged utterance does not make it such. There is no consensus for this in academic circles, see relevant sections in article please to help you out. Irondome (talk) 16:36, 3 January 2017 (UTC) Here is a source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/area_bombing_01.shtml (ManfredLawler (talk) 16:43, 3 January 2017 (UTC)) Just a condensed rehash of the arguments in the relevant sections in the article. No where does the article use the term "war crime". Irondome (talk) 16:46, 3 January 2017 (UTC) Deliberately bombing civilians was a war crime. Churchill ordered the first deliberate terror bombing of World War II at Mannheim in 1940. (ManfredLawler (talk) 16:48, 3 January 2017 (UTC)) Happy new year Harvey Irondome (talk) 16:51, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

Categories

Currently the article has [[Category:British World War II crimes]] but not [[Category:War crimes by the United States during World War II]] Superficially, given that this was a joint action, I would expect it to either be a war crime for both or neither country. In a perfect world I'd be brave enough to make the modification myself but looking at this page I can see that this is a contentious topic and I don't wish to appear a partisan in an argument I lack deep knowledge for. Kiore (talk) 04:15, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

Strictly speaking, under international law prior to 1945 this was not a "war crime". See Aerial bombardment and international law#International law up to 1945. I am surprised that such categories exist. There is no overwhelming historical consensus to label it as such. Frankly I am tempted to remove the category altogether. Irondome (talk) 04:32, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

@Irondome: Thank you. If nobody objects I'll remove the British category from the page. Kiore (talk) 02:58, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. We are in slightly unfamiliar territory here however. I am unsure who authorizes such categories to be created, and whether it is via a consensus or merely an individual being WP:BOLD. I suggest we wait for input from other colleagues. However, as far as I am aware there is no overwhelming historical consensus that it was indeed a war crime, and therefore maybe under a spurious or POV based category. Regards Irondome (talk) 03:05, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

I removed both "Category:British World War II crimes" & "Category:Crimes against humanity". These are disputed characterisations. K.e.coffman (talk) 03:34, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

I concur with that edit, which is supported by the reality that no current academic consensus has being arrived at. Irondome (talk) 03:43, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Churchill's admission that the raid was only authorised to murder civilians proves it was a war crime under the international laws in 1945. (TelAvivson (talk) 18:49, 2 January 2017 (UTC))

The Americans only bombed the oil pant and the marshalling yards. The British deliberately bombed civilian areas of the city, which constituted a war crime by the standards of the time. (ManfredLawler (talk) 16:19, 3 January 2017 (UTC))

No it did not. Irondome (talk) 16:37, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

Deliberately bombing civilians was a war crime in 1945. (ManfredLawler (talk) 16:42, 3 January 2017 (UTC))

"Deliberately bombing civilians was a war crime in 1945" - actually that should read "Deliberately bombing defenceless civilians was a war crime in 1945". The German cities had plentiful defences, as around 55,000 RAF and Commonwealth aircrew would testify, if they had survived those same defences.

BTW, here's a link to The Blitz page, if any of you wish to make the same 'war crimes' argument on the Talk Page there. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.149.173.13 (talk) 11:25, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

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Complaints department

I question this articles NEUTRALITY as it relies almost exclusively on official military, i.e. suspect sources such as US and UK military "investigations" aka coverups.

Moreover, the neutrality failure of this article is self-evident by it failing to place either of the quotations from survivors atop the article in addition to OR IN LIEU OF officials statistics and mind-numbing bureaucratic bla bla bla bla.

The neutrality failure of this article is also self-evident by its failure to include objections to the Dresden bombing atop the article rather than burying at the end of the article, making it seem as if official, i.e. suspect sources are the only ones available. The non-neutrality is also indicted by libel of British members of parliament and intellectuals and others who questioned this TERROR BOMBING of civilian populations.

And Kurt Vonnegut's novel and the film SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE should be mentioned atop the article.

The tone of the article is defensive as it the writers themselves know that a DESPICABLE WAR CRIME was committed by the US and England and the writers of this article are attempting a Nixonian coverup. Thom Prentice (talk) 01:15, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

Article talk pages are for actionable proposals to improve the article, based on reliable sources. See WP:TPG. General moaning should occur at another website. Johnuniq (talk) 03:49, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

Ah yes, the 'righteous indignation' of people who have never even been remotely in danger of their lives, nor of ever having had to face an angry man coming over to their country and dropping bombs on them first.

BTW, here's a link to The Blitz page, if any of you wish to make the same 'war crimes' argument on the Talk Page there. Six months after I originally posted the link in the section above, still no-one's added anything. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.150.10.248 (talk) 09:13, 13 August 2017 (UTC)

Image sizing.

@Beyond My Ken: The strangest mini-edit war I've seen. Per Policy - WP:IMGSIZE, "Except with very good reason, do not use px ..., which forces a fixed image width.". The entire point of this is so logged in users can use their preference sizing. "thumb" with no hard coded size defaults to 220px width for non-logged in users.

It is utterly ridiculous to use a hard code of 220, because all that's doing is stopping preference sizing working, and doing nothing to what non-logged in users see (because they will get 220 either way). Additionally, reverting an edit which allows preference sizing with a comment "only those with Wikipedia accounts can set preferences" is truly bizarre - yes, of course - that's what it's for and what Policy strongly encourages - it's not a good reason to not use it -it's the reason *to* use it. (Hohum ^@) 00:06, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

You're not listening: Only Wikipedia editors can use their "Preferences" setting to set their preferred size of thumb. Every other person in the world gets to see 187px no matter what, that's all the millions upon millions of people without Wikipedia accounts. We are not making an encyclopedia solely for the people who register with us, we are making an encyclopedia for everyone, and it's those readers that we should be thinking about when we lay out our articles visually.

It must be said: WP:IMGSIZE is a piece of errant WP:MOS that somehow got made into a policy, but it is not in any respect what Wikipedia policies are all about. It is, to my knowledge, the only "policy" which demands MOS-type requirements. It's eminently suitable for ignoring per WP:IAR, and I have done so, to the betterment of the article for the greater portion of our readers. Beyond My Ken (talk) 00:16, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

One of us is really confused, and it's not me. (Hohum ^@) 00:47, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

One of us is editing robotically, and it's not me. Beyond My Ken (talk) 02:36, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

Ok, one more try, then I'll seek a third opinion, etc.

Logged out users see 220px wide thumbnails if no other option is set. (not 187 - I have no idea where you're getting that from). See Wikipedia:Picture_tutorial#Thumbnail_sizes

Logged in users get to set preferences for their default image width in Special:Preferences. Supporting these preferences doesn't cause ANY problem to logged out users, because they will see everything based on the default of 220. For logged out users, setting no parameter to a thumbnail, or fixing it at 220 makes no difference. But setting a fixed pixel width DOES break preferences for logged in users, for no reason. Additionally, any fixed pixel size has an "upright=<factor>" equivalent which policy very strongly encourages using, for the reason mentioned.

This doesn't apply to infoboxes, and other things which expect specific sizes for correct formatting. It does apply to most thumbnails in the body of an article.

Your utter misunderstanding of this is perplexing. Hopefully you will make the effort to remedy that. (Hohum ^@) 16:43, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

It's also worth pointing out that readers are now more likely to be using mobile devices, not desktops, which can lead to problems with forced sizes. Parsecboy (talk) 18:40, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

I categorically disagree with any attempt to define picture size using pixels, if you want it to appear a different size, do it proper. I agree with the reasoning put forward by Hohum. And I cannot understand why Beyond My Ken wants to hard code an image to its default size 'for the betterment of our readers', when it will infact break the page for all logged in and mobile users and not affect for anyone else. Dysklyver 19:04, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes, that's why the |upright=value approach should be used. --Finlayson (talk) 19:07, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

in all my (wasted?) years editing Wikipedia I have found two image sizes work for 99+% of instances. Those sizes are 300px for images at top of article, and 'thumb' for everything else. These are good defaults for good reasons. GraemeLeggett (talk) 13:00, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

• this must be the strangest conversation I've ever encountered on WP. There are reasons that the defaults are set so as not to break up the reading for most users, whether logged in or not. If you are logged in and you want to see images a certain size, then set your personal preferences so. Why we would we to restrict or define other people's viewing of images on whatever their devise of choice? auntieruth (talk) 15:31, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

Further complaint

Even the chapter about Kurt Vonnegut novel is incorrect. It states that Vonnegut accounted more than 135000 victims, but in the novel the figure reported multiple times is more than 200000 in some points it is 235000. I assume it has been downplayed because Vonnegut is an eyewitness of the event, the whole article seems striving to understate the scale of what happened. — Preceding unsigned comment added by WornOutCog (talk • contribs) 17:49, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

There is a broad consensus that the death-toll is nowhere near that figure. GAB^gab 22:07, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Being an eyewitness is perhaps the worst possible position to be in to determine the scope and scale of a catastrophic event. One can be a good reporter of what happened to oneself, and what one saw and heard and was told, but afterwards the eyewitness has to do the same kind of research anyone else has to do to get the bigger picture. What's worse is that the eyewitness's experiences can actually blind them to other aspects of the event, which can be worse or better than what they went through, and the emotional impact of the catastrophe can coulor the memory of the event in a way that potentially distorts it.

Vonnegut's book is a landmark, and his experiences should not be downplayed – nor should the continuing controversy about the military value (or lack of it) of bombing Dresden, or the pity of the (probable) unnecessary destruction of a architecturally notable city – but Vonnegut is not an expert on anything except what he perceived to have happened, and he should not be considered to be a reliable source for anything else. Certainly whatever sources he drew on while writing Slaughterhouse-Five in the mid-to-late 50s are unlikely to be as accurate as current information is after almost 50 years of additional research and the opening of formerly closed archives. Beyond My Ken (talk) 00:41, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

The broad consensus is about the events, invoking the broad consensus as a reason to change a number explicitly stated in a book is unjustified. The figure might be put in context, but attributing to him a different number is a fake and unfortunately it appears a fake made on purpose. wornOutCog (talk) 11:50, 27 September 2017 (ECT)

Just to clarify, my response was to the last sentence: I assume it has been downplayed because Vonnegut is an eyewitness of the event, the whole article seems striving to understate the scale of what happened. GAB^gab 18:47, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

@user:wornOutCog: It is widely know that when Vonnegut wrote his novel SH5 (fist published 1969?) that he based the facts around the bombing that he did not personally witness on David Irving's account:

• Vonnegut, Kurt (1988). Allen, William Rodney (ed.). Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut (Illustrated, reprint ed.). University Press of Mississippi. p. 175. ISBN 978-0-87805-357-5.
• Leslie, Pat (25 May 2008). "Kurt Vonnegut: voice from beyond the grave". Telegraph.

He is not a fault for being mislead by David Irving many people in the 1960s and 1970s (indeed some up to today) have been so mislead. For example this article cites Norman Longmate (1983), for some facts, but not the numbers, as his numbers came from Irving, because when he wrote his book about RAF bombing during WWII general, he relied on historians who had published detailed works about particular raids and used and cited cited some of Irving's "facts". If a similar general history is written today, it would rely on more modern specialised books like Tylor's.

If you have a copy of Kurt Vonnegut novel then please add the number he uses and add a full citation to the novel including with the edition, year of publication and the page number. That will tie in nicely with the book I have bullet pointed above (Conversations ...) as that states he relied on Irving, but does not mention a number. -- PBS (talk) 12:18, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Did Vonnegut update the novel? Beyond My Ken (talk) 20:48, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

For much of the post-war period considerably larger casualty numbers than are now accepted were put out by the government in the-then East Germany and as the Cold War was then on-going they were considered in the West to have been inflated for anti-Western propaganda purposes. Vonnegut, and others, may have used these figures.

Vonnegut is entitled to his opinion, but his country wasn't bombed by Germany.

BTW, at the time of the bombing of Dresden the Allies had no way of knowing that the European war was going to end in May 1945. Intelligence had informed them of all sorts of 'secret weapons' in development in Germany, and the Allies could not know whether these weapons might turn-the-tide of the war in Germany's favour. They could also not know until after the war that Germany was nowhere near creating an atomic bomb. The Allies did what they did to finish the war as quickly as possible, with an Allied victory. On the Allied side of the fence these German 'secret weapons' were not known about by the average person or foreign diplomat, they were only known about in the highest levels of Allied government. Thus although the average man in the street or soldier,etc,. may have thought the war almost over, those in high places had understandable and justifiable doubts.

It's one thing judging people (the Allies) by what is now known after 1945, and quite another judging them by what it was possible for them to know at the time.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.149.172.141 (talk) 10:09, 15 November 2017 (UTC)

War crime - "far right" opinion?

"The bombing has been referred to by some in the German far-right as a war crime."

This sentence in the introduction, while perhaps true, gives off the impression that calling the bombing of Dresden a war crime is a "far-right" opinion. It might be characteristic of those in some circles of the German far-right to call it a war crime, for obvious reasons, but the prominence of this , as well as being the only sentence in the introduction where the phrase "war crime" is used, makes one think that the "non-far-right consensus", in Germany or elsewhere, is that it doesn't deserve the label.

"WO Irons is also depressed by the sloganising that surrounds Dresden. The far-Right’s claim that the raid was a “bombing Holocaust”, an Allied war crime on a par with the Final Solution, used to trouble him."

This is a quote from the article. The phrase "bombing Holocaust" and "Allied war crime on par with the Final Solution" are the obvious points of contention, not the phrase "war crime" in an of itself. Maskettaman (talk) 08:32, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

For now I have changed the line to "a war crime on par with the Holocaust", which I think more accurately conveys the attitude and rhetoric the article describes. Maskettaman (talk) 08:38, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

"Far right" terminology still exists in the article without context. German "far-right" may be totally different from options expressed by Allied forces at the time.

In addition, "far right" of that time is NOT the same as options expressed of "far right" at this time. The article still needs improvement. 2600:6C48:7006:200:D84D:5A80:173:901D (talk) 03:41, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

"The bombing has been referred to by some in the German far-right as a war crime." - these 'far-right' are the same sort of people who thought cold-bloodedly exterminating six-million of their fellow human beings was a good thing.

An impartial observer might be justified in thinking these sort of people's views are hardly worthy of inclusion, having previously by their actions just about disqualified themselves from ever again being classed as civilised members of the human race.

"Allied war crime on par with the Final Solution" - presumably that's the very same Final Solution that many on the 'far-right' deny ever having occurred.

It was exactly because of the same sort of 'far-right' nutters that the unfortunate bombing of the German cities such as Dresden had to occur in the first place.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.30.162.158 (talk) 10:31, 16 February 2018 (UTC)

Michael Clodfelter's claim

"Military historian Michael Clodfelter observes [sic] that at the time the Dresden raids constituted the largest slaughter of civilians by military forces in one place at one time since the campaigns of Genghis Khan." This may be true if the immediately preceding numbers (from the same source) - 39,773 to 135,000 killed - are accepted, but 1. these numbers contradict all other reliable estimates cited in the article, and 2. even with them, the claim still sounds implausible in the context of WW2, and carries a whiff of the same far-right revisionism that refers to the bombing as the "Dresden Holocaust". Nanking (1937), Hamburg (1943), and Babiy Yar (1941) are just three examples of preceding events with higher casualties.

Restricted to the context of the eastern front, if the claim is not outright false it is at least highly misleading. Accepting the estimate of 7,400,000 Soviet civilians killed by direct military action in 37 months, between June '41 and July '44 (after which the Axis were mostly out of Soviet territory), casualties amount to a mean of 200,000 a month, or roughly 20,000 for each 3-day period (the same length of time as Michael's claim considers "at one time" in regards to Dresden), for over three years straight. Those numbers roughly double when starvation, disease, and overwork are considered in addition to guns and bombs. BlackNBlue (talk) 18:35, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

@BlackNBlue: 135,000 is not a credible number; I reverted recent changes with this edit. K.e.coffman (talk) 00:33, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

Using the low numbers for Dresden, the earlier bombing of Hamburg on 27 July 1943 was deadlier "in one place at one time". Rmhermen (talk) 17:44, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

" ... the largest slaughter of civilians" - he is wrong anyway, as the term 'slaughter' implies defenceless victims who are unable to escape, whereas none of the German cities were in any way undefended, nor were the Allies preventing the inhabitants from moving elsewhere.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.149.55.51 (talk • contribs) Revision as of 09:17, 4 August 2018 (UCT) (UTC)

Sack of Magdeburg in 1631 was on a similar scale to the bombing of Dresden. -- PBS (talk) 14:10, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

Michael Clodfelter's claim

"Military historian Michael Clodfelter observes [sic] that at the time the Dresden raids constituted the largest slaughter of civilians by military forces in one place at one time since the campaigns of Genghis Khan." This may be true if the immediately preceding numbers (from the same source) - 39,773 to 135,000 killed - are accepted, but 1. these numbers contradict all other reliable estimates cited in the article, and 2. even with them, the claim still sounds implausible in the context of WW2, and carries a whiff of the same far-right revisionism that refers to the bombing as the "Dresden Holocaust". Nanking (1937), Hamburg (1943), and Babiy Yar (1941) are just three examples of preceding events with higher casualties.

Restricted to the context of the eastern front, if the claim is not outright false it is at least highly misleading. Accepting the estimate of 7,400,000 Soviet civilians killed by direct military action in 37 months, between June '41 and July '44 (after which the Axis were mostly out of Soviet territory), casualties amount to a mean of 200,000 a month, or roughly 20,000 for each 3-day period (the same length of time as Michael's claim considers "at one time" in regards to Dresden), for over three years straight. Those numbers roughly double when starvation, disease, and overwork are considered in addition to guns and bombs. BlackNBlue (talk) 18:35, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

@BlackNBlue: 135,000 is not a credible number; I reverted recent changes with this edit. K.e.coffman (talk) 00:33, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

Using the low numbers for Dresden, the earlier bombing of Hamburg on 27 July 1943 was deadlier "in one place at one time". Rmhermen (talk) 17:44, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

" ... the largest slaughter of civilians" - he is wrong anyway, as the term 'slaughter' implies defenceless victims who are unable to escape, whereas none of the German cities were in any way undefended, nor were the Allies preventing the inhabitants from moving elsewhere.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.149.55.51 (talk • contribs) Revision as of 09:17, 4 August 2018 (UCT) (UTC)

Sack of Magdeburg in 1631 was on a similar scale to the bombing of Dresden. -- PBS (talk) 14:10, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

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