On the 80th Anniversary of the Bombing of Dresden

This is the final version of a presentation about the bombing of Dresden that was broadcast on WBCQ six times in February 2025: on 14 & 21 February 2025 on 7490kHz at 8PM New York Time, and on 17 & 24 February on 6160kHz at 10PM, and on 7490kHz at 11PM New York Time. Download an ogg file of this show here (right-click, and pick “Save Link As…” from context menu).
All broadcasts and podcasts by Hadding Scott’s “Devil’s Advocate Radio” are also accessible on X/Twitter @UnapprovedRadio.

February 13th, 14th and 15th of 2025 mark the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden, carried out mainly by the British Royal Air Force, but with some participation by the United States Army Air Forces.

On July 8th, 1940, Winston Churchill wrote a letter to the Minister of Aircraft Production, Lord Beaverbrook, in which he stated the following:

“But there is one thing that will bring him back and bring him down, and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.”

– said Churchill.

It is important to understand that during the British Royal Air Force’s bombing campaign of the Second World War, in which 60 German cities were largely reduced to rubble and hundreds of thousands of German civilians were killed, the people in charge understood perfectly well that they were committing massive war crimes, that they were deliberately massacring civilians. This was their plan, and the reason why they did this is that they believed that it would help them to win the war, and if they won the war, nobody would hold them to account for it anyway.

In his book The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War over Europe, 1940 to 1945, British historian Richard Overy writes:

“For a long time, the official histories have shaped the way the story has been told.”

That’s in 2013, he’s still saying that. Richard Overy was still saying in 2013 that we had not overcome the official propaganda about bombing in the Second World War.

In addition to avoiding careful scrutiny of British bombing policy after the war, the British authorities also suppressed any public discussion about the true nature of the bombing campaign during the war. Overy writes:

“Throughout the war, the public presentation of the bombing offensive in Parliament and in the press never deviated from the claim that the RAF bombed only military targets, ‘unlike the enemy’.”

Overy puts that last phrase in ironic quotation marks. So you see, the British authorities maintained the pretense that deliberately bombing civilians was something that only those wicked Axis powers would do. Back to Overy:

“When attacks against ‘industrial populations’ were included in a draft directive in August 1942, the Air Ministry insisted that the term be altered to ‘industrial centers’ to avoid the impression that civilians were deliberate targets, ‘which is contrary to the principles of international law – such as they are’.”

The principles of international law, although understood and recognized, were regarded as an annoying impediment – but one should avoid openly violating them.

But Arthur “Bomber” Harris himself said:

“The aim is the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized life throughout Germany. It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battlefronts, by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories.”

Overy comments:

“When Air Marshal Harris tried to persuade the Air Ministry in the autumn of 1943 to be more honest in its publicity about bombing, by showing that killing civilian workers was a stated aim of the bombing campaign, the Ministry refused to change. ‘It is desirable,’ ran the reply, ‘to present the bomber offensive in such a light as to provoke the minimum of public controversy.’ Discretion was always observed in describing British bombings as directed at military targets, even to the crews who could see the results of their later raids that obliterated whole cities.”

Arthur Harris’s obvious motive for urging his superiors to come clean and own the responsibility for what they were doing, was that he didn’t want to become the scapegoat for it, which is to a considerable degree what happened. About Arthur Harris, Overy tells us:

“He was not, as is so often suggested, the originator of the area bombing campaign.”

This also explains why Harris kept a copy of Churchill’s letter, because any commander ordered to do something that is likely to become highly controversial, which could make him subject to prosecution for war crimes, will want to have the order for that action in writing.

And in 1979, he told a biographer:

“That was the RAF mandate.”

So it was the RAF’s mandate to conduct “devastating, exterminating attacks” – in the very words of Winston Churchill.

George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, delivered a speech in the House of Lords on February 9, 1944, that condemned Britain’s already ongoing campaign of mass murder and destruction in German cities, of which the most notorious instance up to that date had been the bombing of Hamburg in 1943. The Bishop said:

“How can we hope to build up a peaceful world if we are destroying the very foundations upon which peace can be built? The bombing of open towns and cities, the killing of civilians, the destruction of homes and churches, of schools and hospitals, is not only an outrage on humanity, it is also a crime against civilization. We are defeating the very purpose for which we are fighting, if we descend to these methods.”

In that speech in 1944, George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, was cataloging war crimes committed by the Royal Air Force that were continuing to be committed. Especially when one understands that the bombing of Dresden was part of a campaign of conscious war crimes committed over the course of more than four years, it is impossible to argue that the bombing of Dresden was not a war crime and an atrocity on a gigantic scale. It was at the time called a terror bombing.

The fact that this was a war crime cannot be disputed, but other details about the bombing have been disputed. It is alleged that there were some legitimate targets for military bombing in Dresden. In particular, the rail hub is cited. This cannot explain why residential areas of Dresden were blanketed with incendiaries. It has been alleged that this rail hub was bombed in order to prevent German troops from being sent eastward to face the Soviet Red Army. But if that was the purpose, then it could have been accomplished better by bombing the strip of railway between Dresden and the area where the Red Army was. According to Albert Speer, the hub was operational again within a few days.

It just happened to be the practice of Churchill’s government to allege what might seem to be legitimate targets for bombing as a pretext for bombing civilian populations, which they believed was going to be the most effective way to end the war quickly – through some psychological effect that they expected.

Associated Press reporter Howard Cowan got past the military censor with a report stating that a deliberate policy of terror bombing had been adopted, and that the bombing of Dresden was an application of this policy. It appeared in American news media on the 18th of February 1945. The Associated Press reported:

“The Allied air bosses have made the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of the great German population centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom. More raids, such as the British and American heavy bombers carried out recently on the residential sections of Berlin, Dresden, Chemnitz and Cottbus are in store for the Reich, and their avowed purpose will be creating more confusion in the German traffic tangle, and sapping German morale. The all-out air war in Germany became obvious with the unprecedented daylight assault on the refugee-crowded capital two weeks ago and subsequent attacks on other cities jammed with civilians fleeing from the Russian advance in the east.”

The report refers to Operation Thunderclap, a specific stage of the bombing campaign that focused on cities packed with refugees fleeing the Red Army.

In a separate report, the Associated Press said that the political director of German radio broadcasts, Hans Fritzsche, had accused the Allies of “organized murder of refugees” on German roads, especially in the recent bombings of Berlin, Dresden and Cottbus. Fritzsche is quoted:

“In Berlin, Dresden and Cottbus, only civilians and refugees have been bombed under the excuse of attacking important junctions”

– meaning railway junctions. That appeared in the Newark Sunday Call, 18th February 1945, and it’s from the Associated Press. What Hans Fritzsche said in that German radio broadcast was precisely correct.

About this reporting from the Associated Press, Richard Overy says:

“For the first time, the real nature of area and blind-bombing attacks came under public scrutiny.”

This caused a firestorm of controversy.

After controversy erupted about the firebombing of Dresden, Churchill seemed to try to distance himself from it. On March 28th, 1945, Churchill sent a minute to the Royal Air Force’s chief of staff, Charles Portal, suggesting that the policy of bombing, “for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.” So Churchill quietly admitted with this memo to Charles Portal in March 1945 that the Royal Air Force indeed had been engaged in attacks on civilian populations – which was called terror bombing.

It cannot be disputed that killing civilians was British policy, and became over the course of the war American policy as well.

Instead of denying that this war crime was committed, the apologists more often rely on counteraccusations. We are told that the Germans somehow brought it on themselves, or that Hitler caused the Allied terror bombing of Germany by starting the war, or by refusing to give up, even though Franklin Roosevelt’s demand for “unconditional surrender” meant that a negotiated end to the war was impossible, while news of the Morgenthau Plan and other proposals being discussed in the USA underscored that a surrender without conditions would be a far greater disaster for Germany than what had happened in 1918.

Dr. Björn Schumacher, author of Die Zerstörung der deutschen Städte im Luftkrieg, (The Destruction of German Cities in the Air War), points out that this kind of response, blaming Hitler or blaming the Germans for provoking Allied bombing of German civilian populations during the war, conflates two distinct questions. There is the question of jus ad bellum, the question of whether waging war is justified, and the question of jus in bello, the question of what means of waging war are permissible. Schumacher does not dispute that the Allies’ war against Germany was justified, but he does argue that this did not give the Allies a license to slaughter German civilians.

Note that one need not approve of Adolf Hitler or any of his actions in order to see and to acknowledge the correctness of Schumacher’s point. This long-neglected distinction between the just war and lawful conduct in war has extraordinary relevance. It means that, when Rabbi Dennis Prager last year responded to Tucker Carlson’s criticism of the use of atom bombs, by affirming that Japan had attacked the USA first, he was making an utterly irrelevant point.

A more immediately relevant application of Dr. Schumacher’s observation would be that, whatever happened on the 7th of October 2023, even if we completely accept the Israeli account of what happened that day – the 40 beheaded babies and all that – it did not give license for the Israel Defense Forces to reduce northern Gaza to rubble, killing many thousands of civilians in an attempt to drive out the entire population.

The Hague Convention of 1907 prohibits indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations, and the question of who started the war is utterly irrelevant.

Another excuse for Anglo-American bombing of cities is that the Luftwaffe initiated bombing of civilian populations in the Second World War, with Warsaw, Rotterdam and Coventry being most often named.

This is not exactly true. The Luftwaffe’s actions in Warsaw and Rotterdam were instances of tactical bombing, which means bombing in support of a ground operation. Those cities were bombed because enemy troops had taken up positions in those cities, and bombardment under those circumstances has never been contrary to the laws of war. Coventry was a center of war industries that was bombed only after repeated bombings of German cities by the Royal Air Force. Furthermore, the casualties of these bombings were greatly exaggerated during the war, and have since been revised downward by mainstream historians.

Wartime estimates of civilian deaths from the bombing of Warsaw in 1939 ranged from 20,000 to 40,000. Historians after the war have revised the figure down to 6,000 or 7,000 civilian deaths.

Although during the war, a death toll of 30,000 was claimed for the May 14, 1940 bombing of Rotterdam, post-war historians have concluded that fewer than 900 civilians died as a result of that bombing.

The German bombings of both Warsaw and Rotterdam were instances of tactical bombing, which is to say, bombardment in support of ground operations. Tactical bombing does not deliberately target civilian populations and is not a war crime.

Winston Churchill, however, used those outrageously inflated wartime death tolls for the bombings of Warsaw and Rotterdam – in the tens of thousands – as a justification for deliberately bombing German civilian populations, inflicting similar tens of thousands of casualties.

Coventry was a center of war industries that was bombed only after repeated bombings of German cities. The number of deaths from bombing in Coventry during the Second World War, despite the exaggerated importance given to it in British propaganda, is known to have been 1,250. That’s for the entire war. It is comparable to the death tolls that Anglo-American bombing inflicted on some French cities in a single day. Nonetheless, the bombing of war industries in Coventry, like the tactical bombings of Rotterdam and Warsaw, was used as a justification for the Royal Air Force to bomb civilian populations in Germany.

Mainstream history’s reduction of the death tolls of German bombing seems to have gone unnoticed by many who persist in spouting old war propaganda. In particular, Poles like to wave the bloody shirt regarding the bombing of Warsaw, and sometimes an English person will bring up Coventry.

Another related argument that is sometimes used, especially by poorly informed people, is that Hitler or the Germans would have performed bombings like the bombing of Dresden if they had had the means to do it. This is obviously based on an impression of utter ruthlessness created by old war propaganda. In fact, Hitler’s Germany, like the Soviet Union, like France, like most countries in the world, chose not to pursue bombing of civilian populations as a strategy because, unlike some British generals, the German generals did not believe that bombing population centers would be an effective way of waging war.

Indeed, in terms of achieving military victory, bombing population centers is not effective. We see this today in Gaza, where the Israeli defense forces spent 15 months reducing densely populated communities to ruins, thereby severely damaging the Jewish State’s reputation around the world, only to be defeated in the end by a Palestinian militia.

Terror bombing, such as the British Royal Air Force and, to a lesser extent, the United States Army Air Forces used in the Second World War, and such as the Israel Defense Force recently used in Gaza, is militarily ineffective, and ends up destroying the morale of one’s own supporters more than that of the enemy.

Above all, however, what saved the British and American governments from being widely regarded as despicable war criminals by public opinion in their own countries, has been the counteraccusation that Germany had committed mass murder on a much larger scale. A. C. Grayling observes:

“The risk that public concern over the destruction of Dresden would escalate into a major problem for the Allied governments was defused by something even more horrifying: the news of what was found when Belsen, Buchenwald and other camps were liberated by Allied troops. Newsreel footage from the concentration camps hugely revived anger and hostility towards Germany. For many in this mood, area bombing in general, and the destruction of Dresden in particular, seemed no more than just punishment.”

That’s Anthony C. Grayling from his book Among the Dead Cities: Is the Targeting of Civilians in War Ever Justified? published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2006.

It was thus not only useful but practically necessary for the British and American governments to save themselves by accusing the Germans of mass murder on a scale more than 10 times that of Anglo-American bombing. Such accusations had been made during the war, but they were widely doubted. Seeing is believing, however, and the films made by Hollywood directors George Stevens and Billy Wilder, which pretended to be simple documentation of what British and American troops found, rather than the professionally staged and directed productions that they were, convinced many people.

Mainstream historians today, even so-called Holocaust historians in fact, concede that at least some of the accusations made in the 1945 propaganda films about concentration camps captured by British and American forces were false, especially the claims of gassings in those camps. So-called Holocaust historians today have shifted their focus to Auschwitz, where they still claim that gassings happened.

Incidentally, since 1985 it has also been acknowledged that the Soviet government falsified footage depicting the so-called liberation of Auschwitz. It is evident that this falsification was inspired by the propaganda that the British and the Americans had already made about the camps that they captured. I explained this in my program “The Liberation of Auschwitz, a Soviet Propaganda Hoax,” which you can find on CODOH.com.

A.C. Grayling tells us that in 1945, what is today called the Holocaust, was at that time a convenient diversion from Allied guilt for the war crime of bombing civilian populations. Whatever blame could be laid upon the defeated Germans was exploited to justify what the Allies had done, and also what they intended to do. And we revisionists know that this exploitation also included fictitious German guilt for fictitious German crimes.

Liberal and leftist political rhetoric today in Germany, however, asserts precisely the opposite causality, accusing the “far right” of exaggerating and exploiting the indisputable war crime of Anglo-American bombing to divert attention from German guilt – which those liberals and leftists in Germany wish to preserve. The political motivation of far-right commemoration of the bombing of Dresden is criticized, while the very clear political motivation of those who wish to minimize the Anglo-American crime of terror bombing is ignored.

Shortly after the Second World War, the authorities in the Soviet puppet state commonly called East Germany, began staging annual commemorations of the bombing of Dresden as a way of highlighting the barbarity of Britain and the United States of America. Although the Red Army had committed many atrocities, the Soviet government could at least claim that it had not engaged in that kind of bombing, and this fact was exploited for the purpose of anti-Western propaganda.

I have this report from Reuters, dated the 13th of February 1955:

“Otto Grotewohl, East German Prime Minister, today described the Allied air raid on Dresden, 10 years ago today, as comparable to the atom bombing of Japan and ‘bacteriological warfare in Korea.’ Speaking at a commemorative mass rally in Dresden, broadcast over Communist East Berlin radio, the Prime Minister described the raid as a ‘war crime’ and said it was militarily unnecessary.

The Paris treaties to rearm West Germany were intended to join ‘the murderers of Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin and Hiroshima to the murderers of Lidice, Oradour, Rotterdam and Coventry,’ he said.”

Grotewohl there was lumping together Anglo-American bombings, which were indisputably war crimes, with some supposed crimes of Hitler’s government that had been magnified by Allied propaganda. In fact, there is not much similarity between the Anglo-American bombings that Grotewohl condemns and the German actions to which he compares them.

Apart from his effort to paint a swastika on NATO, however, it is hard to argue with what Prime Minister Grotewohl said. The bombing of Dresden was indeed a war crime, and it was militarily unnecessary, as he said.

In reaction to the invocation of the bombing of Dresden as anti-Western propaganda, a report was written for the United States Air Force in 1954, Joseph P. Tustin’s Why Dresden Was Bombed: A Review of the Reasons and Reactions. Joseph P. Tustin was the chief historian of the Historical Division of the Office of Information Services of the United States Air Forces in Europe. On page 16, Tustin tells us that the Soviet estimates of the fatalities in the bombing of Dresden ranged from 25,000 to 32,000. He also tells us about the contemporary death toll published by Flugwehr und Technik, the Swiss journal. Flugwehr und Technik was published especially for professionals in the military and especially military air defense. The title of the magazine translates to Air Defense and Technology. Because it is a publication by and for air defense specialists, the representation of the bombing of Dresden in Flugwehr und Technik carries more than just the average level of credibility. Tustin quotes from Flugwehr und Technik:

“According to reliable sources, the total dead during the three heavy attacks was said to be 100,000.”

Tustin, however, does not accept this number. I’m going to read to you what Tustin wrote on page 17:

“One may reasonably consider that the figures given by the German authors Herr Rumpf and Herr Görlitz are closer to the correct figure than the excessive death toll earlier mentioned. The former author stated that by April 1945, approximately 30,000 bodies had been recovered. Without question, a vast number of the missing and presumed dead were buried under the ruins, estimated at another 30,000 persons, making the total number of victims 60,000, the same figure mentioned by the latter author.”

So, an official historian of the United States Air Force in 1954 estimated the death toll of the bombing of Dresden at 60,000. Tustin in 1954 said 30,000 bodies were recovered, and there are likely another 30,000 buried.

However, Tustin goes on to say:

“One thing is certain: The exact toll of this tragic event will never be known and will continue to create never-ending speculation and controversy.”

In other words, you really can’t know how many bodies are buried.

Now, in East Germany at this time, the standard estimated death toll for the bombing of Dresden was 35,000. But this official historian for the United States Air Force, Joseph P. Tustin, has told us that 30,000 corpses were already recovered in Dresden, which means that 30,000 is an absolute minimum. And the number of corpses that may still lie buried under the rubble, he admits, is unknowable. It is clear, however, that Tustin believes that the number of victims lying under the rubble is a significant number, probably much higher than the number presumed by the official East German estimate of only 35,000 total victims. In that case, the upper limit to how many may have died in the bombing of Dresden depends on how many refugees were in the city.

The subject of the bombing of Dresden seems to have received much more attention in the 1960s, beginning with the publication of David Irving’s book The Destruction of Dresden in 1963. With this book, David Irving acquired both notoriety and respect. Since Germany as a unified nation did not at that time exist, and since the bombing of Dresden was rather a reproach against Britain and the United States, used especially by the Soviet bloc, David Irving’s work was not seen as some kind of neo-Nazi propaganda. Rather, it was seen as broad-minded self-criticism. And in fact, it was even used by some people who wanted to criticize American bombing in Vietnam. They could point to the bombing of Dresden as an illustration of the horrors of bombing.

David Irving’s work was taken very seriously. The estimated death toll for the bombing of Dresden, published in David Irving’s book, became the figure that one most often saw, at least in the English-speaking world. How did David Irving arrive at that figure of 135,000 deaths for the bombing of Dresden? David Irving writes that immediately after the bombing of Dresden, on the 15th of February 1945, Saxony’s interior ministry set up a new agency, the Vermissten-Nachweis-Zentrale, the Missing Persons Documentation Center, to compile a list of the missing and the dead, and to identify or to record details facilitating eventual identification of the remains that were found. Within this organization of nearly 400 workers, a local school administrator, Hanns Voigt, was put in charge of the records and personal effects of the dead. Voigt was an important source for David Irving, who writes:

“Voigt’s recollection was that using these four indexing systems, his section was able to establish the identity of some 40,000 of the dead. Another figure, not too widely different, was provided to this author by the city’s civil defense engineer, Georg Feydt who wrote, ‘The official number of identified dead was announced as 39,773 up to the morning of May 6, 1945.’ These figures may be taken as the absolute minimum death toll in Dresden.”

That’s David Irving, and that’s in the 1995 edition of his book about the bombing of Dresden, on page 266.

Roughly the same passage is found on page 197 of the 1963 edition. So, that particular set of facts is unchanged.

What one does not find in the 1995 edition, however, which was the most famous feature of the 1963 edition, is Hanns Voigt’s estimate of the total number of dead, including remains that had not been recovered. In the first edition of The Destruction of Dresden from 1963, David Irving published a death toll estimated by Hanns Voigt as 135,000. This figure roughly doubles Voigt’s actual head count, based on perhaps consideration of how much of the city’s ruins could not be excavated. Irving, in 1963, called Voigt’s estimate conservative, because, although 35,000 was the official death toll espoused in East Germany, in the U.S. puppet state of the Federal Republic of Germany, it was not unusual for people to say that more than 200,000 had been killed, and some even much higher numbers were espoused in 1945, when Voigt was compiling information about the deceased. In that context, Voigt’s estimate of 135,000 seems downright moderate. Voigt told David Irving that the standard East German death toll for the bombing of Dresden, which was 35,000, was created simply by erasing the 1 from his estimate of 135,000.

Irving, however, publicly tried to distance himself from that figure of 135,000 as early as 1966. In his letter to the Times of London, dated 7th of July 1966, David Irving quoted a document that East German authorities, he said, had finally released to him that was authored by the Regional Chief of Civil Defense. This document stated that by the 10th of March 1945, 18,375 dead had been found in Dresden, and 35,000 were missing. The dead were said to be primarily women and children, and the report anticipated a death toll of 25,000.

With the addition of 35,000 missing, however, the true death toll could be much higher, as high as 53,000 or so. Irving says that the content of that report, very coincidentally, was confirmed by a summary of air raids on Reich territory, dated the 22nd of March 1945, which had been misfiled, but happened to be discovered and was given to David Irving, he says, within a very few days of that other report.

It certainly is odd that these two reports stating the same numbers both appeared 20 years after the war within a few days of each other. David Irving, however, accepted them as authentic.

Irving writes that, in early March 1945, Hanns Voigt was ordered to discontinue the work of identification, because of the risk of a disease epidemic, from further delay of burial of corpses.

Unidentified corpses numbering 28,746, he writes, were buried together in a cemetery outside of Dresden called the Heidefriedhof. This number, says Irving, represents a literal head count. The number of recovered human heads, then, combining the identified and the unidentified, numbers 68,519, according to the information that David Irving relayed from Hanns Voigt in 1995.

This does not greatly exceed the figure of 60,000 supplied by General Hans Rumpf and endorsed by an official historian of the United States Air Force, Joseph P. Tustin, in 1954. Tustin, however, accepted the view of Rumpf and Görlitz that a number equal to the sum of recovered corpses might still be under the ruins, which, if we apply that principle, would legitimize the estimate that Irving quoted from Voigt in 1963, 135,000.

The figure of 135,000 was not considered fantastic in 1963. Significantly, it was endorsed by the commander of the United States Eighth Air Force, which had bombed Dresden, retired Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker. Anyway, this canonical figure of 135,000 lasted into the 1980s. That figure appears, for example, in an article by Kenneth Jautz that appeared in the Dispatch of Lexington, North Carolina, on the 14th of February 1985, where it is titled “Dresden Marks 40th Anniversary of Firebombing,” and Jautz wrote:

“Western historians have estimated the two-day raid claimed between 135,000 and 150,000 lives. East German historians say 35,000 people died in the firebombing. The attack is regarded by many historians as the culmination of Allied bombing policy aimed at demoralizing the German populace and terrorizing the Nazis into surrendering. Last Sunday, the Observer newspaper of London quoted a bomber crewman who took part in the raid as saying the pre-mission briefing spoke of a deliberate attack on civilians.”

So, that was the consensus of Western historians, according to that reporter for the Associated Press, reporting 40 years ago. David Irving thus had established a consensus about how many died in the bombing of Dresden, even though he himself only three years later had doubts about it.

David Irving began to get into controversy, however, with the publication of his book Hitler’s War in 1977, when he argued that, according to the lack of documentation, it did not seem that Adolf Hitler knew anything about any effort to kill all the Jews of Europe. And he offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could supply a document demonstrating that Hitler did know.

In fact, the lack of any such document had been observed long before the late 1970s, but it was not much discussed. The lack of such documents was noted for example by the Jewish attorney Léon Poliakov, in his book Harvest of Hate, originally published [in French] in 1951.

In 1977, however, David Irving did not argue from this lack of documents that the Holocaust had not happened. Instead, he continued to accept that the Holocaust had happened, and argued that it seemed to have happened without Hitler’s knowledge.

In 1988, however, because David Irving had attracted so much attention from saying that Adolf Hitler didn’t know anything about the Holocaust, he was invited to testify for the defense in Ernst Zündel’s False-News Trial in Canada. David Irving was expected to testify about the lack of documentation of the Holocaust.

While he was there, however, David Irving saw the Leuchter Report, which was a forensic report on the alleged gas chambers at Auschwitz and Majdanek, and it found that these facilities could not have been used as mass gassing chambers. David Irving read this, and he believed it, and he endorsed the finding.

And after this, the sky fell on David Irving. Everything that he had said up to that date came into question.

Until that time, he was a celebrity historian. David Irving is prominently mentioned in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel and in the movie Slaughterhouse Five. You can see David Irving featured as an expert on Eva Brown in Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of TVseries from January 31^st, 1982, where he was introduced like this:

“Author David Irving tracked Eva Braun among others during ten years he spent finding and interviewing German eyewitnesses released from Russian prisons.”

During that introduction, David Irving’s credibility is established by having the camera scan across a shelf of books, showing the spines of books written by David Irving, including Hitler’s War.

So, it is clear that David Irving’s reputation, and his career, survived his promulgation, in 1977, of the unlikely thesis that the Holocaust had happened, but without Hitler’s knowledge or approval.

But after David Irving let it be publicly known that he no longer believed that there had been gassings in Auschwitz, David Irving’s name was mud. He had a hard time getting his books published anymore.

What happened with David Irving is eye-opening for a couple of reasons. For one thing, most obviously, it shows that you can go from being a celebrity to being a nobody just by crossing the wrong people, just by saying the wrong things. It’s okay to be controversial, but only certain kinds of controversy are allowed, regardless of whatever reputation for expertise you may have enjoyed up to this point in time. And that indicates that, what we think is a consensus, may not really be a consensus. It may be just what you have to say in order to be approved.

And that in turn leads to the question: if David Irving was such a terrible historian as they began to say after 1988, how is it that he was so highly regarded from 1963 until 1988? – I mean, at least until the late 70s, when he started questioning a few things. For quite a few decades, David Irving was very highly regarded and a celebrity historian. It raises serious doubts about the other historians that are put in front of us. How about Stephen Ambrose? Maybe he’s a shit historian, huh? Maybe all of these people that are put in front of us as the great authorities need to be questioned.  I would say so.

Now, I actually do have a lot of criticisms of David Irving. You can read about them on CODOH.com. I’ve got a series there called “Talking Frankly About David Irving.” Not about his work on the bombing of Dresden. I don’t find serious fault with that. But his later work includes some narratives that are not really supportable, I would say. Really, David Irving puts too much imagination into his histories. He massages the material too much to try to make an interesting story. His histories are really more like historical novels.

But he got away with all of that for as long as he didn’t start to question, you know, gas chambers. When he crossed that line, then everything else that he said came under the microscope. The great irony to me is that he only got into trouble as an historian when he started to say something that needed to be said, when he started to say something that was true and demonstrable, after saying so many other things that were not supportable, which, again, you can read in my series called “Talking Frankly About David Irving.”

After all of that, David Irving was more cautious. He no longer endorsed Voigt’s estimate that 135,000 had been killed. Instead, he wrote:

“So how many did die in Dresden? The key element is probably, over and above the identified death roll, the vast number of missing people, which even the Dresden police chief put at 35,000. The police president of Darmstadt, in his report on the raids of September 1944, stressed that in catastrophes of this scale very often whole families were wiped out, leaving nobody to report anybody as missing. The same would go for the refugees. It is unlikely that, given the magnitude of the Dresden catastrophe, the police authorities could have conducted a realistic estimate in the short space between the raids and the reporting date, March 10th, when much of the city was still under rubble and ruins that have indeed not been excavated to this day.

60,000 or more, perhaps 100,000….”

That’s from page 289 of the 1995 edition of David Irving’s book. And you see, there, he has already addressed in 1995 the so-called conclusion of this commission of historians from 2010, which is now being pushed in Germany. Note also that the document that David Irving discusses there in 1995, it’s the same one about which he wrote to the Times in 1966, and it also happens to be the main exhibit in the so-called commission-of-historians’ report about the bombing of Dresden that insists that the death toll was not more than 25,000.

They’re able to say that because they assume that out of the 35,000 missing that the same police report mentions, not more than 19% of those missing people were dead, which does not seem to be a reasonable assumption at all. Never mind the fact that an official historian for the United States Air Force already wrote in 1954 that 30,000 corpses had already been recovered, which makes a claim of only 25,000 dead certainly appear to be impossible. Such is politically motivated history.

The purpose of the so-called commission of historians was to combat so-called far-right exploitation of the bombing of Dresden. The Lord Mayor of Dresden who established the commission was well known as an enemy of Alternative for Germany. Strangely enough, it has become common practice to accuse David Irving of being politically motivated in his conclusions about how many died in the bombing of Dresden, and that just doesn’t seem to be the case at all.

With the figure of 60,000 that David Irving proposed in 1995, he takes us back to the estimates of Rumpf and Görlitz, which were endorsed in 1954 by an official historian for the United States Air Force, Joseph P. Tustin, while Flugwehr und Technik’s estimate – 100,000 dead – apparently widely accepted in the 1950s, is still regarded as possible.

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