Air influence of Dresden bombing

Shortly after the Dresden bombing, the police report showed that the old city and the eastern suburb of the inner city were swallowed up by the fire, and about 12000 apartments, including residential shacks, were destroyed. The report also mentioned that air strikes destroyed "24 banks, 26 insurance buildings, 365,438+0 department stores and their affiliated retail stores, 647 stores, 64 warehouses, 2 markets, 365,438+0 large hotels, 26 public hotels, 63 administrative buildings, 3 theaters and 65,438+08 cinemas. 19 hospital institutions, including affiliated hospitals and private clinics, 5 consulates, 1 zoo, a waterworks, a railway facility and 19 post office; , 9 schools, 4 tram lines and 19 ships and barges. The report also mentioned that the 19 military hospital and a large number of unclassified military facilities were destroyed in the headquarters of the National Defence Force in Taushenberg Palace. Almost 200 factories were damaged, 136 were seriously damaged (including several Carl Zeiss optical/precision instrument factories), 28 were moderately damaged and 35 were slightly damaged.

"The British estimate that ... it is inferred that 23% of urban industrial buildings have been seriously damaged, and 56% of non-industrial buildings (except apartments) have been hit hard. Of all the residential structures in urban areas, 78,000 have been leveled, 27,700 are temporarily uninhabitable, but they can be repaired eventually, and 64,500 can be easily repaired after minor damage. Later estimates show that 80% of urban housing structures have been damaged to some extent, and 50% of houses have been razed to the ground or seriously damaged. " The US Army Air Force "air strikes on urban railway facilities on February 14 and 15 caused serious damage in a large area, and communication was completely paralyzed ..." "The railway bridge across the Elbe River, the lifeline of traffic, was also destroyed and closed for several weeks after the air strikes." There are about 284 10 houses in the city center, of which 24,866 houses were destroyed by air strikes, and the completely destroyed area reached 15 square kilometers, including:14,000 houses, 72 schools, 22 hospitals, 19 churches, 5 cinemas and theaters. There are 222,000 apartments in the city, of which 75,000 are completely destroyed, 1 1000 are seriously damaged, 7000 are damaged and 8 1000 are slightly damaged. At that time, the damaged area of the city was about 300 square kilometers. Although the main railway station was completely destroyed, the railway line was still running.

The exact number of deaths is difficult to count and unknown. The difficulty of estimation stems from 1939. The urban area with a population of 642,000 and its surrounding suburban counties are crowded with as many as 200,000 refugees and thousands of wounded soldiers. The fate of the refugees is uncertain. They may be slaughtered, burned beyond recognition in the flame storm, or they may leave Dresden for other places without the official knowledge. The early famous death toll was estimated to have changed from 25,000 to more than 60,000, but historians now believe that the possible range is about 25,000-35,000. The latest study 1994 by Frederic Richter, a historian in Dresden, tends to the lower part of this range. These estimates show that the number of casualties in the Dresden explosion is disproportionate to the number of casualties in other urban areas in Germany.

The number of people buried in contemporary German official records is about 2 1 and 27 1, including 6,865 people cremated in Markert, Alte. According to German official mobilization order No.47, by March 22nd, 1945, about 25,000 military and civilian bodies were officially buried. (TB47) During the period from May to September in 1945, there was no registration of the number of people buried. In the records of the following years, from 1 June 1945 to1September 1957, the number of war deaths was recorded as1557; From May 1945 to May 1966, 1858 bodies were found again; During the period from 1990 to 1994, although the city was built and excavated on a large scale, no war relics were found. Authoritative records show that there are 35,000 missing persons, and it is found that there will still be about 10000 people in the future. In recent years, the estimated death toll in Germany has increased slightly, while the estimated death toll in Britain has decreased, which is just the opposite of the earlier situation.

The higher death toll is estimated to be as high as 300 thousand. Controversial data sources may be unreliable, such as the German Ministry of National Education and Propaganda headed by Soviet historian Josef Goebbels, and the once popular but now discredited self-taught historian David Irving, who retracted his high death toll estimate. The death toll listed by Columbia Encyclopedia and Microsoft Electronic Encyclopedia ranges from "35,000 to135,000", which is in line with Owen's higher estimate of "authority".

The Nazis tried their best to make a fuss about Dresden in the propaganda department and promised to retaliate quickly. At the beginning of the Cold War, the Soviet Union also used the Dresden bombing as a propaganda tool to alienate the feelings of East Germans, Americans and British people.

Dresden suffered as much damage as other German cities, although the number of bombs dropped in this bombing was not the highest. However, the combined factors of good weather, wooden houses, interconnected basements and insufficient preparation in advance (Nazi local governor Martin Muximan is considered to be mainly responsible for this) made the Dresden bombing extremely destructive. In addition, at the end of 2004, a member of the Royal Air Force who participated in the bombing mentioned another factor in an interview with BBC Channel 4, that is, the German air defense firepower was lower than expected, which ensured the high accuracy of some bombers.