Dresden Bombing Deaths Exaggerated

In a new report, British and American historians have concluded that the number of civilian deaths attributed to the February 13-15, 1945 Allied bombing of the German city of Dresden has been exaggerated. In contrast to the claims of Nazis and other leftists that there were hundreds of thousands of deaths, the historians report that there were only 25,000 civilian deaths, according to the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Dresden was a military and industrial target defended by anti-aircraft artillery near the Eastern Front. The Allies dropped a comparable tonnage of bombs on the city as they had other Axis cities, in which there were more civilian deaths.

The exaggerated claims of upwards of half a million deaths were used by the Nazis and their sympathizers to portray the Allies as the moral equivalents of the Nazi Germans, so as to make the Nazi Germans appear relatively less evil, as well as by other leftists to support their anti-American views.

One such leftist, Kurt Vonnegut, had been an American prisoner of war held by the Germans in Dresden. He wrote a novel, Slaughterhouse Five, loosely based on his experience in Dresden, in which he cited the exaggerated claims of the Nazis.

Thus, Vonnegut's misleading and crude book has become the second liberal text out of only a handful I had to read in school that has since been discredited, joining Guatemalan communist Rigoberta Menchu's autobiography I had read in college in which the Nobel Peace Prize laureate fabricated human rights abuses against indigenous civilians by the Guatemalan government. In conclusion, one should be skeptical of any liberal historical claims.