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Germany 1959 ▶ Dresden in Color - 1945 bombing by US Army Air Force and Royal Air Force 13 - 15. February 1945 Ruinen
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In February 1945 the city was overcrowded with tens of thousands of refugees from the German eastern territories. The bombing of Dresden was a joint British and American aerial bombing attack on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, during World War II. In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 772 heavy bombers of the Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city. The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed more than 1,600 acres (6.5 km2) of the city centre. Minimum 22,700 to 25,000 people were killed. Three more USAAF air raids followed, two occurring on 2 March aimed at the city's railway marshalling yard and one smaller raid on 17 April aimed at industrial areas. Postwar discussions of whether the attacks were justified, and the tens of thousands of civilians killed in the bombing, have led to the event becoming one of the moral causes célèbres of the war. Despite the current understanding of the ability of Nazi Germany to continue the war, at the time, Allied intelligence assessments emphasized the danger of the Russian advance faltering or the establishment of a Nazi redoubt in Southern Germany (see Alpine Fortress). Two United States Air Force reports, published in 1953 and again in 1954, defended the operation as the justified bombing of a strategic target, which they noted was a major rail transport and communication centre, housing 110 factories and 50,000 workers in support of the German war effort. Several researchers assert that not all of the communications infrastructure, such as the bridges, were targeted, nor were the extensive industrial areas which were located outside the city centre. Critics of the bombing have asserted that Dresden was a cultural landmark with little strategic significance, and that the attacks were indiscriminate area bombing and were not proportionate to the military gains. Some have claimed that the raid constituted a war crime. Immediate German propaganda claims following the attacks played up the death toll of the bombing and its status as mass murder, and many in the German far-right refer to it as "Dresden's Holocaust of bombs". In the decades since the war, large variations in the claimed death toll have fuelled the controversy, though the numbers themselves are no longer a major point of contention among historians. The city authorities at the time estimated up to 25,000 victims, a figure that subsequent investigations supported, including a 2010 study commissioned by the city council. However, in March 1945, the German government ordered its press to publish a falsified casualty figure of 200,000 for the Dresden raids, and death tolls as high as 500,000 have been claimed. One of the main authors responsible for inflated figures being disseminated in the West was Holocaust denier David Irving, who subsequently announced that he had discovered that the documentation he had worked from had been forged, and the real figures supported the 25,000 number.

history, ww2, Germany, Dresden
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