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#66 July 19th, 2004, 12:42 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by PrinzMegaherz:
Hm, before I posted this, I checked some links for information about this topic. Although the were german weppages, I doubt that any of them had any nazi background.

there were 600.000 civilians inside the city, around 300.000 bombs were dropped, und you really want to tell me there were only 30.000 casualties?

And even 3 months before germany's surrender it was clear who would win the war.

Mark, I see that you live in london, and I dont want you to understand my posting as an personal affront against english people. But this was a war, and there are soldiers on every side who enjoy doing evil. Just think about the americans in Iraque. Even though most surely have good intentions, there are black sheeps, like those in the prison. [/QB]

I didn't take offense at your statements that Hiroshima or Dresden were war-crimes. I strongly disagree, but you'll find plenty of people in this country who'll say the same thing so it's not a viewpoint that's new to me. What I did take strong offense at was your backing up your argument with outrageously exaggerated or invented "facts".

It's all very well to say that the war was obviously over in Feb 1945 (though there would still be hundreds of thousands of casualties on the battlefield between then and May). But what you wrote the first time was that Britain (actually it was Britain and the US) bombed Dresden after Germany had surrendered. It's hard to take your argument seriously when you back it up with a statement like that.

As for the casualty figure in Dresden; it's difficult for anybody to know. Thus the wide range of estimates. During the course of the entire war, the millions of German bombs dropped on Britain killed "only" 60,000 (or slightly over). A simplistic calculation based on that evidence would imply that an estimate of 30,000 for Dresden would be very high! But the estimates from historians who have researched the episodes have ranged as low as 30,000 based on far more information than either of us have to hand.

BTW my reference to Nazi Propoganda was to that of the time (1945), when the German government announced that over 200,000 had died; their "calculations" were based on falsification of the known records, by - for example - simply adding a zero to the number of bodies recorded as buried. The only historians who have taken that number seriously are apologists like David Irving.