Dresden: The true numbers revealed

The number of people killed in the Allied bombing of the German city of Dresden in WWII was "up to 25,000," according to a historians' commission report published in 2010, DW stated today (Thursday).

The Allied bombing of the city of Dresden has long been a rallying point for those seeking to morally equate Nazi genocidal massacres with Allied aerial bombing campaigns.

Part of this effort includes greatly magnifying the number of the number of those killed. Holocaust denier David Irving used the figure of 130,000, which author Kurt Vonnegut and others such as the Russian Foreign Ministry repeated this number or something like it uncritically. It was since revealed in Irving's famous libel trial that the document this number allegedly came from was not a valid source.

Other far-right and neo-Nazi sources throw around numbers such as 100,000 or 200,000 to blunt the moral argument against the Nazis or indeed reverse it to damn the Allies fighting them. Indeed, the Nazis themselves took an estimate by a Swedish newspaper of 200,000 and instructed its officials to repeat that number.

According to DW, the official number published by the Eastern Germany during the Cold War was 35,000, a number they never strayed from.

In 2004, the lord mayor of Dresden and the Saxon state parliament appointed a historical commission to conduct a thorough investigation of the available evidence and statistics to get at the real number, as much as possible.

An examination of police records, cross-checked with multiple other archives and sources, pointed to a number of "up to 25,000" people killed - still many, but very far from the much larger numbers claimed so often on social media.

The commission also refuted the idea that there were enormous numbers of civilian refugees who probably died uncounted. At the time, refugee trains were not allowed to stay for more than 24 hours in the city due its already strained resources and difficulty in taking care of them. Therefore, the number of refugees in the city, let alone those killed, would not have greatly increased the death toll, uncounted or no.

While Dresden remains a genuine tragedy and a testament to the horrors of war, it did not take on the dimensions some claim - or wish - it to be.