Bombing of Dresden

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. Up 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.

Post-war discussions about whether the attacks were justified led to the event becoming one of the moral causes célèbres of the war. Nazi Germany's desperate struggle to maintain resistance in the closing months of the war is widely known in the present day; but Allied intelligence assessments at the time gave a different picture. There was uncertainty over the ability of the Russian advance to maintain momentum, and rumours of the establishment of a Nazi redoubt in Southern Germany were taken too seriously.

The Allies saw the Dresden operation as the justified bombing of a strategic target during ongoing hostilities, which United States Air Force reports, declassified decades later, noted as a major rail transport and communication centre, housing 110 factories and 50,000 workers in support of the continued Nazi German war effort. Several researchers later asserted that not all communications infrastructure was targeted, and neither were the extensive industrial areas which were located outside the city centre. Critics of the bombing have asserted that Dresden was nothing more than a cultural landmark with little strategic significance, and that the attacks were indiscriminate area bombing and were not proportionate to military gains. Some have claimed that the raid constituted a war crime. Nazi propaganda exaggerated the death toll of the bombing and its status as mass murder, and many in the German far-right have referred to it as "Dresden's Holocaust of bombs".

In the decades since the war, large variations in the claimed death toll have led to controversy, though the numbers themselves are no longer a major point of contention among historians. 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. 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. These falsely inflated figures continued to be disseminated in the West for decades, notably by David Irving, a Holocaust denier, who in 1966 announced that the documentation he had worked from had been forged, and the real figures supported the 25,000 number.