Thursday, April 12, 2007

Dresden death toll: BBC Today Programme gets it wrong

According to reports from England, in its obituary of Kurt Vonnegut, the American satirist, the BBC's Today Programme mentioned the death of 100,000 Dresdeners. The fact is that the death toll in that city was 25-35,000 by most German accounts, including the highly pro-Nazi Dresden police in 1945.

Vonnegut's "history" of the bombing also has to be taken with a grain of salt since he relied on Irving's Apocalypse 1945: The Bombing of Dresden as his source. Irving consistently tries to inflate the German death toll in order to show that the true perpetrators were the Allies.

By the way, the BBC web site got it right.

See my History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving or Richard Evans's Lying About Hitler for details on Irving's fictionalized account of the Dresden death toll.

[And to preempt those who love to take my words out of context. I am NOT diminishing the significance of 35,000 deaths. I am attacking the fictionalized web of (dis)information woven around Dresden in order to make the Allies look bad and the Germans look purely like victims.]

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