Reading through Irving’s writings and speeches on Hitler, the Jews, and the Holocaust, I had no doubt that they were full of fabrications and distortions of the documents on which they claimed to be based. Some historians, however, had taken the view that these manipulations only affected a tiny part of Irving’s work. The rest was solid. It was only when it came to Hitler’s involvement in the extermination of the Jews that Irving abandoned his normally sound historical methods. So what of the other topics on which he had written? Irving had made his reputation with a book about the Allied bombing of Dresden in the German province of Saxony. How did it stand up to scrutiny?
The subject was certainly a controversial one. The city of Dresden was subjected to two fierce attacks by British bombers on the night of 13–14 February 1945, followed the next day by two further attacks by American bombers. The city was ill prepared for the attack. Flak batteries had been removed to the Eastern Front, and Dresden citizens had the illusion that their city would escape the fate of other German towns. German defense fighters remained grounded and the first attacking wave had unusually good weather, so that marking the target was achieved without hindrance. Dresden was an important center for administration, communications, and transport. After Berlin and Leipzig it was the largest city behind the Eastern Front, a military installation with garrisons and troops. Its industries were fully integrated into the structure of armaments manufacture.1 Yet these war industries, although cited as a justification for the raid, were not directly targeted. Instead, the British attacked the maze of timbered buildings which made up the historic heart of Dresden and which were easy to ignite. In proportion to the Allies’ declared aim of crippling Dresden as a transportation point, the attack was an act of overkill. Industrial production, although damaged, was not crippled. Even the main railway line remained severed for only four days.
The resulting firestorm blazed in the center of a city clogged with refugees fleeing the approaching Russian army. Fifteen square kilometers of Dresden were destroyed. The death-toll, whatever its final figure, was substantial. This, and the destruction of the historic heart of one of Germany’s finest cultural treasures, became the focal point of impassioned postwar debate about the respective crimes of the Allies and the Axis. It proved hard to disentangle the strategic merits or limitations of Allied bombing from the ethical implications. Opinions were divided between those who saw the British bombing campaign as in some way effective and therefore justifiable,2 and those who condemned it not merely as ineffective but as calculated ‘terror.’3
The conclusion reached by most historians was that Dresden was bombed in an effort to kill German morale, and damage beyond repair the German people’s will to resist the invading Allied armies on the Eastern and Western Fronts. The Soviet advance westward was to be aided by disrupting the German rail network and clogging the transport arteries with refugees.4 An effort may well have been made to impress and intimidate the Soviet Union with Anglo-American air power.5 None of this, however, succeeded in arguing away the impassioned moral debate surrounding the events of 13–14 February 1945.
Among the many authors to write on the bombing raids, Irving perhaps attracted the most attention and had the largest popular readership. The Destruction of Dresden was probably the most widely read of Irving’s books. It went through numerous editions and translations.6 In Germany the book was preceded by a more general account of the bombing offensive against various German cities, serialized in 1961 in the Neue Illustrierte, a glossy magazine, and published in book form as Und Deutschlands Städte starben nicht [And Germany’s Cities did not Die], in Zurich, 1962 and 1963. I sent out one of my researchers to buy up or locate in libraries all the available English and German editions of the book. The resulting comparisons proved extremely illuminating.
How many people did Irving think had been killed in the raids, and on what evidence did he base his estimates? The first source he used was information supplied to him by Hans Voigt, who had been a local official in Dresden at the time of the raids. Four days after the attack, a missing persons search bureau was set up in the Saxon Ministry of the Interior. Voigt, at the time an assistant school master, was put in charge of establishing a dead persons department for the bureau to collect the records and personal effects of those people already dead, and of those still buried in the ruins. Irving said that it was this department which was “responsible for the identification of the victims and for arriving at some final estimate of the death-roll.”7
Voigt’s office had four different filing systems for different data. The first were garment cards, onto which samples of garments taken from unidentified bodies were pasted, together with date, location, and so on. Voigt told Irving that up to the time of the capitulation “we had almost twelve thousand of these cards completed.” The second list was of miscellaneous personal belongings of the unidentified. The third was an alphabetical list of bodies identified by personal papers. The fourth was a list of wedding rings recovered from bodies. With these four indices the dead persons department was “able to clear up the identity of some 40,000 of the dead.” Thus Irving arrived at an “absolute minimum” death toll of 40,000.8 This in turn tallied with the figure of 39,773 given by Georg Feydt, the first person to write a reasonably considered account of the attack, in 1953.9
However, Irving did not accept 40,000 as the actual figure because Voigt had told Irving that he himself “estimated that the final number would have been 135,000.”10 In 1963 Irving was reported to have explained: “The Germans simply struck off the first digit to make the figure more acceptable to the Russians, who contended that Bomber Command was not a powerful weapon.”11 In other words, he apparently thought that the Russians wanted to reassure the citizens of the Eastern bloc that Western bombing was not very dangerous. There was no evidence for this supposition. Voigt wrote to Irving as early as September 1962, blaming the amendment on “Dresden officials” (especially the then mayor Walter Weidauer), who “reduced the figure out of fear of the ‘Big Four,’ so as not to speak ill of them.”12 This did not seem to me to be a particularly strong motive. The Russians were not involved in the bombing of Dresden. At the height of the Cold War, they would have had every incentive for inflating the figure, so as to put the Western Allies in a bad light. Yet Irving repeated the claim in 1995.13
There was no corroborative evidence of any kind about the missing digit. Moreover Voigt was apparently not a popular man with the communist authorities in Dresden. Weidauer decried him as a “virulent fascist” who had been rightfully thrown out of East Germany. This was typical of the language the Communists used for people who proved a nuisance to them. Still, Voigt, then living in West Germany, may have had a political motive in accusing the Soviet and East German authorities of falsifying the statistics. Weidauer added that the death register was still extant in the Dresden Town Hall with a highest card number of 31,102 for an unidentified body. In addition there were the so-called street books. The numbers in the street books, which were compiled according to the streets and houses where the dead were found, exactly matched those on the registration cards.14 Irving could only sustain the figure of 135,000, therefore, by relying on a postwar speculation which he must have known was shaky and was discounted by most other writers on the raid, with good reason. This did not say much for his claim that he based his work on careful research into contemporary documentation. Not long after the first publication of his book, however, Irving discovered a source that seemed not only more plausible, but also gave an even higher estimate than that Voigt had supplied by suggesting the addition of a ‘1’ to the figure in the documents.
Between the English editions of 1963 and 1966 and the German editions of 1965 and 1967, Irving acquired a copy of a document entitled Order of the Day no. 47 [Der Höhere SS und Polizeiführer, Dresden: Tagesbefehl Nr. 47, Luftangriff auf Dresden, henceforth TB 47]. TB 47 was dated 22 March 1945 and attributed to a Colonel Grosse. It introduced itself as “a brief extract from the concluding statement of the Police President of Dresden,” evidently an earlier document. Irving’s copy of the report, besides detailing other physical damage, put the final death-toll at 202,040 and expressed the expectation that the figure would rise to 250,000 by the time all the victims had been recovered. Irving gave the document full prominence in the English edition of 1966 and the German edition of 1967, and reproduced it in both as an appendix. This, then, was the source of his frequently repeated upper estimate of 250,000.
Irving was not in fact the first person to have seen or written about TB 47. Max Seydewitz had photographically reproduced a copy of it and had dismissed it as a forgery as early as 1955. Irving had accepted this.15 He had in fact cited Seydewitz in 1963 himself, branding the document an ingenious piece of propaganda and as thoroughly spurious.16 He was familiar with the reasons for Seydewitz’s dismissal of the document, therefore, and found them convincing. But now he changed his mind, reporting that he had previously not seen the report himself. Seydewitz had only quoted a few sentences, but on seeing the ‘whole’ Irving could no longer agree that it was a forgery.17
What was Irving’s justification for withdrawing his earlier skepticism? He was coy in print about naming his source, referring to him as a “Dresden private citizen” and a “doctor” who had been one of many medical officials and local officers to have received the document through official channels in March 1945.18 But Irving had been obliged to make available to the defense solicitors all the private correspondence and notes relating to his research, under the rules of Discovery. These documents proved extremely revealing about Irving’s research methods. It was not difficult for me to check up on his sources and to establish for a start that the indirect source was indeed a Dresden citizen, Dr. Max Funfack.19
In fact, the documents showed that Irving obtained TB 47 from a Dresden photographer, Walter Hahn, who was a friend of Funfack’s. Funfack had “confidently” shown Hahn the document and “without Funfack’s knowledge, Hahn transcribed the entire document, and made a typewritten copy of it.”20 Irving in turn had visited Hahn on 18 November 1964 and had chanced upon the document on Hahn’s desk, whereupon he asked him to copy it. Hahn’s wife had begun to type a transcript,
while in the sitting room I, Hahn and [Walter] Lange [Director of the Dresden City Archive] began to discuss the implications of the “200,000” figure. Lange had not realised that it gave this figure, and I at once realised why Hahn had seemed reluctant to show it to me (in fact he had had that probably since 1950 or so, yet he had not shown it to me on any of my previous visits in 1962 and 1963). As soon as Lange began to expostulate on this document being a patent forgery, Hahn became very worried, and when his wife brought in the typed copy, plus four carbon copies, and I took one of the copies, he urgently asked me to give it back to him–but realising that they could not very well fight me for it if I was the guest of the Lord Mayor I folded it up and put it into my wallet and assured them that I too thought it highly unlikely that the figure mentioned was genuine.21
Irving’s proposal to visit Funfack that day was rejected by Lange and Hahn, and Irving apparently contented himself with an intention to write to Funfack on his return to England.22
Irving’s subsequent correspondence showed that he was extremely pleased with his find. No sooner had he returned to England than he wrote to Donald McLachlan of The Sunday Times informing him of its existence: “Having now examined the document minutely myself, I am satisfied of its authenticity. It remains to be established whether the ‘200,000’ figure contained is equally genuine.”23 On 28 November he wrote to his German publisher, Dr. Dieter Struss, that the figure was a “sensational” piece of information, and suggesting they publish it as an appendix if a new edition of his book were to appear in German. Now that he had seen a copy “with my own eyes” he no longer had any doubts as to the “authenticity of the document.”24 In a letter to the provost of Coventry Cathedral concerning Irving’s suggestion for staging an exhibition of Walter Hahn’s photographs of the raid on Dresden, he wrote that TB 47 should be reproduced “in large type” to “drive home the impact of the exhibition” because “its nonchalance and the casualties it mentions have a shattering effect.”25
The death toll “constantly grows,” Irving told Stern magazine. “Is that not very impressive?”26 Likewise he wrote to his Italian publisher reassuring her that if anything the 135,000 figure was too low and asked if she could insert TB 47 into the next Italian edition.27 Yet what Irving had obtained in Dresden was not an authentic original at all. It was merely a carbon copy of a typed-up transcript of another typed-up transcript of a handwritten transcript of an extract from an unknown document, unauthenticated by any distinguishing marks such as a signature or an official stamp of any description. Had it not contained information congenial to his purposes, Irving would doubtless have had little hesitation in dismissing it as inauthentic. But the figures it contained led him to suspend his much-vaunted critical approach to archival sources altogether.
Nevertheless, of course, Irving needed to back up his conversion to belief in the document’s authenticity by whatever means he could, and to convince others too that TB 47 was the genuine article. In December 1964 Irving and his German publisher, Sigbert Mohn, set about marketing TB 47 as authentic to the English and West German public. A reader’s letter from Irving’s publisher, Dr. Dieter Struss, to a West German newspaper on 10 December read:
Mr. Irving has found a new document a copy of which I enclose to you. The document has been examined and has been established as authentic. The figures originate with the then deputy Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Max Funfack. Therefore the dead of Dresden need in future no longer be guessed. They are precisely counted and they were 202,040 in all. The truth is therefore much worse than one had previously imagined.28
On 19 January 1965, after six weeks of frantic marketing, Irving finally received a letter from Max Funfack. The East German doctor wondered in a puzzled tone:
Why I should now, after twenty years, be put in the spotlight with the mention of my name in the West German papers and be named as a witness to the number of dead is a complete mystery to me. Exactly like every one else affected I have only ever heard the numbers thirdhand: from city commandants with whom I was friends, from the civilian air-raid protection etc. But the numbers always differed greatly. I myself was only once present at a cremation on the Altmarkt, but otherwise completely uninvolved. Likewise I was never Dresden’s Chief Medical Officer or even deputy Chief Medical Officer; rather I always worked as a specialist urologist in a hospital. How one comes to such suppositions, is incomprehensible to me. I did not have the slightest to do with rendering any such services. The photos of the cremations on the Altmarkt as well as the “Order of the Day 47” were also given to me by acquaintances. Therefore I can give no firm information about the figure of the dead but only repeat what was reported to me.29
Irving’s reply to Funfack’s letter on 28 February 1965 made it clear that Irving had made no attempt to establish the provenance of Hahn’s copy, no attempt to check Funfack’s for stamps or signatures if it were an original, and no attempt to confirm Funfack’s alleged hand in TB 47 before going to press.
Yet both Irving and his German publisher wrote further letters defending TB 47 in the West German press, Irving in full knowledge that Funfack explicitly denied being the author of TB 47. On 12 February 1965, Dr. Dieter Struss wrote to Die Welt, “besides Mr. Irving found the doctor who had calculated the figures and reached the conclusion that the figure of 202,040 dead was not propaganda, but is authentic.” Struss then announced his intention of giving TB 47 full prominence in a new edition of the book.30 In an accompanying letter Irving defended his rejection of Seydewitz’s conclusion that TB 47 was a fake and declared: “One learns from this that one should not accept everything one reads in books as facts. Two thirds of an historian’s efforts lie not in getting hold of exact facts, but in verifying the authenticity and reliability of his sources and documents [sic].” Irving piously rounded off his defense of TB 47 with the words “God knows, I as an Englishman have the least grounds to exaggerate the effects of the air raid on Dresden.”31 Once again, it should be recalled that what Irving had was not an original source at all, but a typed-up transcript at several removes from the original, which he had not seen himself. He had in fact done nothing in the way of verifying the authenticity of the document through tracing its provenance.
In a draft article written in February for the Sunday Telegraph propagating the new source, Irving continued to insinuate that Funfack had an official connection with TB 47:
The document’s pedigree is certainly impressive. It came out subsequently that my host [Walter Hahn] had obtained a copy of it some years before from one Doctor Max Funfack, who still lives in and practices in Dresden. Funfack, during the war a senior medical officer (Oberstabsarzt) in the German army, was in 1945 Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Dresden District; as such he was responsible for supervising the disposal and cremation of all the city’s air-raid victims during the three months following the attack.
According to Funfack, the report had reached him during the war through the normal official channels.32
As late as May 1965 Irving triumphantly sent a copy of TB 47 to the RAF historian Dr. Noble Frankland, informing him that he had obtained it “from the doctor (still in Dresden) who during the war was Deputy Chief Medical Officer of the city.”33 Funfack had explicitly denied holding any such position and Irving had not obtained the document from him. Evidently nothing was going to stand in the way of Irving’s eagerness to capitalize on his new-found belief in TB 47.34
Yet a number of factors should have alerted him to the suspicious nature of his find. In early March 1945 an unsparing report on the attack on Dresden had appeared in the Nazi weekly Das Reich.35 This contained what was later described as “a fictitious top-secret estimate that the casualties had probably reached 250,000.”36 This was the original of the version of TB 47 which Irving took from Hahn, an extract made from a longer official report. The figures cited in it made an appearance in Nazi foreign broadcasts in the final weeks of the war. Goebbels leaked it to representatives in Berlin of the press in neutral countries.37
As Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry evidently hoped, the figures hit a real vein of revulsion in the neutral press during the final phase of the war, especially in Swiss and Swedish newspapers. They duly dwelt on the extent of the destruction and the apparently immense death toll, and questioned the military sense of the action. Previous to TB 47 the neutral press had merely guessed at how many might have been killed. The Dagens Nyheter of 16 February 1945 had reported “several tens of thousands” dead. On 17 February 1945 the Svenska Morgenbladet noted that “currently 100,000 dead are talked of.”38 Following the deliberate leaking of TB 47 by Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, the Svenska Dagbladet wrote on 25 February 1945:
No one knows with certainty how many people lost their lives because thousands of corpses remain buried under the rubble and will long stay there. But according to information compiled a few days after the destruction the figure is closer to 200,000 than 100,000.39
The propaganda effect was therefore twofold: to shock the world and to shock the German people. The Allies were portrayed as monsters in a believable way while at the same time the German population was goaded on to futile efforts at final resistance. This also explained how an inflated number so resolutely remained in the minds of the Dresden population and of former Nazi officials for long after the war.
So the original of Irving’s transcript of TB 47 achieved its circulation above all through the efforts of Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry. This should have been enough in itself to alert anybody to the fact that it could not be trusted. A number of facts should have warned the commonsense reader, as they did Max Seydewitz, of the likelihood that the document was a clumsy forgery. The document started off: “In order to be able to counter wild rumours, there follows a brief statement from the concluding statement of the Police President of Dresden” and closed: “As the rumours far exceed the reality, open use can be made of the actual figures. The casualties and the damage are grave enough.”40 This was the key sentence. Rumors of 200,000 dead did indeed appear to have circulated at the time. But what kind of figure could have been mentioned in a rumor that the death-toll would “far exceed” the supposed reality of a quarter of a million? For this there was no evidence at all.
Even if the attack on Dresden could be considered the worst of the war, the number of deaths would still have remained in some proportion to the extent of the physical destruction. In raids that had cost Hamburg 3.3 percent of its population, 48 percent of dwellings became uninhabitable; in Kobe the destruction of over 50 percent of its dwellings went with the death of one percent of its population. Even allowing for the unique circumstances of Dresden, a figure of 250,000 dead would have meant that 20 to 30 percent of the population was killed, a figure so grossly out of proportion to other comparable attacks as to have raised the eyebrows of anyone familiar with the statistics of bombing raids, as Irving was, even if the population had been inflated by an influx of refugees fleeing the advance of the Red Army.41 And how was it imaginable that 200,000 bodies could have been recovered from out of the ruins in less than a month? It would have required a veritable army of people to undertake such work, and hundreds of sorely needed vehicles to transport the bodies. The effort actually undertaken to recover bodies was considerable, but there was no evidence that it reached the levels required to remove this number. Irving claimed that disposing of large numbers of bodies at Auschwitz would have been impossible. Such skepticism vanished entirely, however, when it came to his estimation of the number of corpses to be disposed of in Dresden.
TB 47 gave a figure of 68,650 dead bodies incinerated on the Dresden market square, the Altmarkt. This referred to the decision by the Dresden authorities two weeks after the attack to burn some of the corpses dug from the rubble to avoid the spread of typhus. Common sense should have given Irving pause for thought before swallowing this. After all, it was he who had brought the gruesome photos of the cremations on the Altmarkt to light in the first place.42 He himself had given prominence to the cremations and talked of scores of police helping in the last-ditch attempt to identify the bodies.43 The Altmarkt, which everyone agreed was the only place where bodies were burned, was 100m by 125m square, a marketplace half taken up by a huge water tank clearly visible in photos. It would have taken weeks and an army of men and materials to burn such a vast number of corpses in an area of this size. As Irving pointed out, gallons of gasoline were needed for each pyre at a time when it was sorely needed by the military.44 None of Irving’s sources or anybody else’s even hinted at an undertaking of these dimensions. Bewilderingly for the attentive reader, Irving reproduced TB 47, including its figure of 68,650 cremated, in his book, but elsewhere in the same book he put the figure of those burned on the Altmarkt at only 9,000. 45
Finally, and quite basically, I wondered how he explained the incongruity of the 250,000 figure with Voigt’s 135,000, on which he also placed considerable weight. At no point in the revised account of 1966 did Irving attempt to reconcile the figures. One or the other of them must have been wrong. Nevertheless, Irving brushed aside these problems in his eagerness to publicize TB 47. When he learned from his original publisher, William Kimber, in May 1965, that Corgi planned to publish the paperback edition of The Destruction of Dresden, Irving requested that “one sensational document” be inserted as an appendix.46 Irving also sent Corgi twenty-one pages of amendments that he wanted inserted into the original Kimber text, many of them concerning TB 47.47
Irving’s correspondence and notes also contained a good deal of information about his attempts to provide plausible support for his championing of TB 47. He claimed to have been able to talk to a number of “wartime police associates” of the report’s author, Colonel Grosse, who “have spoken out for its general authenticity.”48 However, he never identified any of them in his published work. He wrote to the Bundesarchiv, the German Federal Archive, in December 1964 asking them to comment on TB 47 and to help him establish its authenticity.49 They replied that they could not comment on the authenticity of the document, but supplied Irving with the address of Frau Grosse and five former members of the Dresden police.50 Thus Irving was able to establish that there had indeed been a Colonel Grosse, but was no closer to vouching for the document’s authenticity.
In March 1965 the German illustrated magazine Stern conducted investigations into TB 47 (presumably at Irving’s suggestion). On 15 March Irving received the results of their researches. Of the five people named in the letter from the Federal Archive, two would seem to have died and one was marked as “away.”51 A reporter had managed to interview Major Ludwig Nölke, one of those people suggested to Irving by the Federal Archive. Nölke was unable to comment on the authenticity of TB 47. He had not seen it at the time as it lay outside his area of competence. However, Nölke was willing to comment on the figures in TB 47 based on his position as the then police commander of Central Dresden: “Based on his experience and memory the figures about buildings in the Order of the Day could be correct, but not the figure of the dead. Nölke considers the figure of 35,000, which was given by the Lord Mayor Weidauer after the war and that the Soviet officials also adopted, as correct.”52 A reporter likewise interviewed Wolfgang Thierig, who had been responsible for air-raid precautions in Dresden.53 Thierig considered the document authentic, including the number of dead.54 Irving had no way of knowing it, but Wolfgang Thierig’s signature was to turn up a year later on a document which recorded that, as of 10 March 1945 (i.e., twelve days before the issue of TB 47), the police had been able to establish 18,375 persons as ‘killed.’ In view of this document, it was clear to me that Thierig was lying.
As far as I could see, Irving had contacted only one former official himself. In June 1965 Irving approached Werner Bühlmann, a former army officer in Dresden, again at a later suggestion of Herr Teske of the Federal Archive, asking him if he would care to comment on TB 47.55 Bühlmann wrote back that he was unable to comment on TB 47 as he had been hospitalized in Bad Elsten from 20 February 1945 until the end of the war.56 Taken together, these three statements by Nölke, Thierig, and Bühlmann did not amount to an endorsement of the ‘general authenticity’ of the document by any stretch of the imagination. But Irving also interviewed Frau Eva Grosse, the widow of Colonel Grosse. He reproduced his notes of the interview with her on 10 July 1965, as Appendix 5 to the German edition of his Dresden book.57 Since Stern magazine had contacted her in February on Irving’s behalf, Frau Grosse had collected and sorted all the papers of her husband, and at the time of Irving’s visit was occupied with her son in sifting these papers for reference points to TB 47’s authenticity. His papers consisted of (a) his military identification, driving license, etc.; (b) military assessments of his superior officers from 1930 to 1943; and (c) Frau Grosse’s correspondence with the Allied authorities to secure her husband’s release. This was not very much. There was certainly no copy of TB 47 in the collection. The only papers Frau Grosse possessed that could provide any comparison on which to confirm the authenticity of TB 47 were letters her husband had written to her during his imprisonment after the war.58
Without even the slightest hesitation, Irving solemnly declared in point 10 of his interview: “There are clear similarities between the style and expression of the Order of the Day and some of Grosse’s letters from the period May to July 1945.”59 The copy of TB 47 in Irving’s possession was of course a typewritten transcript, so the similarity alleged by Irving referred to the content of the letters and the report, not to the handwriting. But he provided no evidence whatsoever to show what these supposed similarities were, beyond the fact that both were presumably written in German. I thought it unlikely that Frau Grosse’s emotional nourishment during the painful period of uncertainty and separation from her husband would have consisted of letters written in the style and expression of a bureaucratic police document such as TB 47. Nevertheless Irving obviously concluded that he had been able to confirm the authenticity of a report putting the Dresden death-toll at three times that of the atomic bomb attack on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Irving’s notes recorded that the interview had lasted from 9.30 P.M. until 10.30 P.M. Allowing for a minimal amount of small talk and perhaps ten minutes’ perusal of the documents that Frau Grosse handed him to glean the background information contained in points 1–9, it looked to me as if this achievement had been the result of no more than half an hour’s work.
Irving also claimed that Frau Grosse confirmed to him that her husband had mentioned the final figure of 250,000 to her. Point 8 read that Frau Grosse “remembers very well how her husband confided in her the daily number of victims found in the weeks after the attack–it grew daily from a figure of 10,000. She remembered his prediction that the final figure would be a quarter of a million.”60 In the 1966 English edition of his book, Irving wrote that Frau Grosse “confirmed to the author that her husband spoke of the death-toll as having been a quarter of a million.”61 In reporting the details of the interview in 1995, Irving again failed to include the word prediction.62 In Irving’s hands, the future tense became the past, and a prediction became a report.
I did not think the material Irving had garnered from Frau Grosse was worth very much. What else did Irving have to go on? Funfack had offered to show Irving his copy of TB 47 if Irving obtained permission from the East German authorities. He also suggested a number of people Irving might find it useful to contact:
Therefore I can give no firm information about the figure of the dead but only repeat what was reported to me. The city commander Herr General Mehnert spoke on about 22 February 1945 of 140,000, Herr Professor Fetscher of the civilian air defence of 180,000. Nevertheless I have never seen written documentation to this effect. I set great store by these facts to tell the truth. The International Red Cross delegation headed by a Swiss man should actually know best. All the figures were put at their disposal when they as commissioners enquired about prisoners of war. Unfortunately I do not know their names, but was briefly with them at a meeting.63
Irving duly wrote to the Red Cross asking if they could confirm that a Red Cross official had been shown the official casualty figures at the time, and if so, whether they could they send him the report it might be contained in.64 The Red Cross replied: “It is correct to say that one of our delegates, Mr. Walter Kleiner, was in the Dresden area during the period you mention, for the purpose of carrying out his duties of visiting camps. We have in fact in our possession the reports he made at the time on prisoner-of-war camps. We have, however, no information concerning the victims of the Dresden air raids.”65 In a second reply to a second letter, presumably inquiring into the exact contents of Kleiner’s report, the Red Cross replied, “There were no PoW camps in Dresden itself, consequently Mr. Kleiner’s reports did not even allude to the air raids on the town.”66
In his published account of this correspondence, Irving wrote that Mr. Walter Kleiner, the Swiss leader of an International Red Cross delegation, toured Allied PoW camps in the Dresden area on 22 February 1945 and “was in the presence of witnesses informed by the Dresden city commandant, General Karl Mehnert, that the current death-roll was 140,000.”67 Funfack did not mention Mehnert and the Swiss Red Cross official in the same context; rather he had named himself as the person who had heard Mehnert’s figure.68 I could find no evidence, not even of an indirect nature, that a figure of 140,000 was supplied to the Red Cross. However, this small elision gave the story a ring of authenticity to the unsuspecting reader by associating the figure with the Red Cross, when in fact no such association existed.
In the 1995 edition of his book, Irving wrote: “It is also known that on February 22 a representative of the International Red Cross had visited Dresden to inquire after the fate of the prisoners of war; his report to Geneva may well have contained other information than about the number of prisoners amongst the casualties.”69 But the Red Cross had expressly told Irving that Kleiner’s report “did not even allude to the air raids on the town” and Irving’s own letter to Kleiner–returned to him marked not known–stated that ‘they [the Red Cross] have informed me that you made no reference to the air raid in your reports, as of course there was no reason why you should.”70 So I could only conclude that Irving’s suggestion about his report was his own invention.
Not much remained of Irving’s attempts to provide some plausibility to the figures mentioned in TB 47. All that was left to him in 1995 was a last passing jibe at Funfack:
Grosse’s figures were allegedly provided by Dr med. Max Funfack, described as the deputy surgeon-general of Dresden. Funfack, still living in the Soviet zone, protested at having his name dragged into the newspaper columns of West Germany as a witness for the death-roll figures. He claimed to have learned such figures at third hand only, and never to have been surgeon-general. . . . He will have had good reason in the Soviet zone to express himself thusly. He did not however take the opportunity to repudiate the figures.71
This was pure sophistry. Funfack had quite clearly stated he was in no position to comment on the figures. I had no reason to doubt that he was telling the truth, and Irving had no evidence that it was that Funfack was under pressure from the East German authorities that he denied having provided the figure of 250,000. On the contrary, Funfack was surprisingly frank in expressing his personal doubts about the official East German figure of 35,000, even after he had fallen foul of the authorities thanks to the unsolicited exposure Irving had given him in the media.72
Irving had no chance to interview Mehnert, who had died in the late 1950s or early 1960s.73 But he did correspond with Theo Miller, a member of the Dresden Clearing Staff in 1945. In his first letter of February 1965 Miller described his work to Irving (in English) in the following terms:
At the wall of my bunker [the Staff Quarter in the bunkers under the Brühl’sche Terrasse] I had pinned up a big map of the town. Every evening the commanders of rescue units had to report on the figures of corpses found and on the shelters which had been cleared of deads [sic]. The streets and shelters which had been cleared of corpses I marked with red colour in my map. Furthermore, I had to keep book on the figures of deads. In the middle of March, 1945, our task was almost completed. The town was free of corpses. I then received the order to return to my division in Latvia.
Soon after the attack we heard in the radio Joseph Goebbels reporting on the attack on Dresden. He spoke of 300,000 deads. In your book you mention the figure of 135,000 victims. My records at the Clearing Staff showed 30,000 corpses. If you assume the amount of deads completely burnt etc. would reach 20%, the total figure of victims will not exceed 36,000. Still this figure–two full divisions–is terrible enough.74
In a second letter of 25 February 1965 Miller added more detail. He first outlined how, in an attempt to prevent double book-keeping, army logistics had confiscated all brandy and cigarette stocks in Dresden and offered SS salvage teams fifteen cigarettes and a half-bottle of brandy if they reported their figures to the army team.
He then went on to describe a conversation with General Mehnert, telling Irving:
One day General Mehnert visited our Staff. I had seen the general the last time in summer 1939 when he had inspected our battalion. In March 1945 he looked like a very old, broken man. He asked me for the figures of deads [sic] and I showed him my book-keeping, and the map showing the freed areas. He shook his head and said: “These figures are much too low, I do not believe them, it must be much more, I have seen them.” Well, he was an old man and completely desperated [sic] like we all, but generally nobody, no police man, no civilian believed my figures. Maybe only the Lord in Heaven knows whether my figures were right or wrong. However, I had figures to count based on the reports of all salvage units and my counterparts only estimated figures. Their figures, so I believe, were an expression of the dantesque pictures of horror they saw everywhere on their ways through the town.
My counting system was very simple. I used a thick book like that of a book-keeper. In this book I wrote down exactly the names of the reporting unit, the name of the reporting officer, the figure of corpses found and the areas of the town, where they had been collected, and the place they had been buried. When I left the Staff on about March 20 with the order to return to my tank-division in Latvia, I handed this book over to another officer. My last figure of deads [sic] was about 30,000–this figure I remember well, because after my return to my division I was asked by many of my comrades, who were born in Dresden and did not know anything about their relatives.75
Miller added, “P.S. By the way, the figures of deads [sic] were reported every day to a Central Air Defence Staff. This authority was in Berlin.”76
In a postscript typed a day later Miller wrote to Irving with further details:
P.S. I have again to come back to the high figures of victims which I deny as far as they overgo 50,000. It is a fact that all corpses found have either been buried or burnt on the Altmarkt. Now we come to mathematical problems: Do you believe it possible to burn in about three weeks 110,000 corpses on a fire-grate of railway rails with a dimension of about 70 x 10 meters? In fact we started collecting corpses not before February 17 when the town stopped to burn and enough transport media had been brought together from other cities. The burning of corpses started about February 21 (one week after the air raid) and only on the hermetically closed Altmarkt because we feared the reaction of the population. The burning was finished to the best of my knowledge about March 15. When you can find out how long corpses are burning you will believe that a maximum amount of 10,000–rather 7,000–has been burnt. For the transportation of the deads [sic] we had only horse-drawn carts and some rickety trucks which run with producer gas due to the lack of diesel oil or gasoline. This poor transport capacity could not transport the gigantic figures of deads [sic] overgoing 100,000 which are mostly reported. You must check again this problem as one of logistics. But can anybody really imagine what also 40,000 corpses mean? If you put them down in a line foot by head it is a street of 42 British miles! The inner district of Dresden has only a dimension of 2 times 4 miles! So the streets of Dresden looked to the frightened population like overfloated with corpses, and as a normal human reaction the survivors reported gigantic figures out of their phantasy.77
Here was a lucid, sober, and detailed account by a witness who had obviously taken some time and care to recollect his activities following the bombings. Theo Miller’s unequivocal conclusion, imparted to Irving early in 1965, was that all estimates exceeding fifty thousand were inherently implausible.
According to his evidence, Miller, like Voigt, had occupied a key position in the attempts to record the death toll. It seemed to me that he was therefore ideally suited to give an estimate, albeit, like Voigt, from memory, of the numbers killed. Miller’s figures corresponded roughly to those given by the East Germans, by the engineer Feydt, and to Voigt’s reported minimum. I thought the information he provided on Mehnert’s state of mind was convincing and needed to be put against Funfack’s rather different account. He gave a perfectly plausible explanation of why some eyewitnesses had exaggerated the figures. Moreover he had raised some telling points about the sheer logistics of any death toll put at higher than 50,000. Yet Miller, his testimony, and his criticisms remained unmentioned in Irving’s published work. It was all obviously too embarrassing for Irving’s championing of a high death toll. TB 47 was too important in this context for Irving to allow it to be questioned.
As if Irving’s new evidence were not already threadbare enough, the single most important document to date in helping historians decipher the true Dresden death toll was discovered just as he set about publishing his own ‘sensational’ source. Following a lecture in Bad Schandau in East Germany in 1965, a Frau Jurk showed Walter Weidauer a document belonging to her father-in-law. It was the Final Report issued by the Dresden police on 15 March 1945.78 Max Jurk had formerly been with the Dresden police. He had been a colleague of Wolfgang Thierig, the police colonel responsible for the report. The Final Report bore Jurk’s dictation initials and was signed by Thierig.79 This was the very document from which TB 47 claimed to be an extract.80 It contained exact details of all the material damage the city had sustained. The key passage read: “Until early 10.3.1945 established: 18,375 fallen, 2,212 badly wounded, 13,718 slightly wounded, 350,000 homeless and long-term requartered.”81 Unlike the copy of TB 47 obtained by Irving, the Final Report bore both an identifiable signature and was stamped secret. It ended with the commentary: “The above report was submitted after agreement on the documents with the district committee of the NSDAP.” Weidauer was the first to publish the document in 1966 in a second edition of his book Inferno Dresden.
The Dresden City archivist Dr. Walter Lange kindly informed Irving of the existence of this crucial document on 5 April 1966. Irving replied: “As you know I continue to believe in the authenticity of Tagesbefehl 47 signed by Oberst Grosse” based on its stylistic similarity with other documents signed by Grosse.82 Lange then sent Irving a copy of the new document on 27 May 1966, informing him that he would be interested in hearing his opinion on it.83 This was the final piece of evidence any self-respecting historian would have required to halt the printing of TB 47 as authentic. Simultaneously, on 13 May, the West German archivist Dr. Boberach drew Irving’s attention to the discovery of a document in the Federal Archive in West Germany that confirmed the authenticity of the Final Report.84 Among the “Situation Reports on Air Raids on Reich Territory” dated between 23 February and 10 April 1945, Situation Report No. 1404 of the Berlin Chief of Police, dated 22 March 1945, had appeared, a document dated the very same day as TB 47. In it the same data were recorded as in the Final Report, including the then current death toll of 18,375, a predicted death toll of 25,000, and a figure of 35,000 missing. As Boberach informed Irving: “These figures are in complete contradiction to the Order of the Day [i.e., TB 47] of the BdO [Befehlshaber der Ordnungspolizei] Dresden, likewise dated 22.3. The number of dropped bombs and destroyed buildings mentioned deviate only slightly or not at all from the figures in the Order of the Day.”85 Boberach refrained from pushing the implications of this find further, but it was obvious to me, as it should have been obvious to Irving, that (1) the Final Report was authentic beyond doubt and (2) someone had tampered with the death toll in Irving’s version of TB 47.
A further passage in the Final Report drew attention to a possible source of statistical confusion in Voigt’s earlier statements to Irving of a minimum figure of 40,000.
The exact establishment of the number killed will first be possible when the police bureau of missing persons and the registration office establish which people have left Dresden. At the moment some 35,000 missing persons entries have been submitted to the bureau of missing persons and the city authorities.86
Apparently Voigt’s office had also included information on those registered as missing, although many of them had probably fled Dresden following the attack. The last document to strengthen this substantial chain of evidence was published by Bergander on 13 February 1975. The final wartime document to quote a figure for those who had died in Dresden was Situation Report No. 1414 of the Berlin Chief of Police, dated 3 April 1945. It read: “BdO [Befehlshaber der Ordnungspolizei] Dresden. Up to 31.3.45 the number of killed recovered numbers 22,096 persons.”87
With the appearance of the Final Report and these various supporting documents, it had been conclusively proven that no weight could be given to TB 47 and that it was more likely than ever that it was a forgery. Irving was forced to make a humiliating climb-down. On 16 May 1966 he informed Dr. Boberach that he fully realized the implications of the document of which Boberach had apprised him, and announced his intention to give the facts “fullest prominence” in both England and Germany to counter the “false impression” given by TB 47. Unfortunately, he would have to delay any announcement by about a month on “diplomatic grounds” as the new edition of his book had appeared only fourteen days earlier.88 A letter, first drafted and discussed on 29 and 30 June, duly appeared in The Times on 7 July 1966.89 Irving brought readers’ attention to the new documents, concluding that he had “no interest in promoting or perpetuating false legends.”90 Likewise he wrote to the Sunday Telegraph asking them if they would help him “to correct what might otherwise become a dangerous legend.”91 This was too little, too late. Irving had had no grounds for printing TB 47 in the first place. As L. A. Jackets, chief historian to the Air Ministry, commented in a memorandum shortly after Irving’s letter to The Times had appeared: “It is practically impossible to kill a myth of this kind once it has become widespread and perhaps reprinted in other books all over the world.”92
Although I could find no evidence that Irving undertook a similar effort in Germany, his correspondence files showed that he wrote to Kimber and to his Italian publishers in August outlining the alterations that needed to be made in light of the Final Report.93 Likewise Corgi wrote to Irving in September, presumably in reply to a similar request, to say that, as no new edition of his book on Dresden was planned in the foreseeable future, the changes could not be made. In reply to Corgi, Irving wrote that he hoped that Corgi did not think he was pushing them for a new edition, but “otherwise I would lay myself open to charges of having done nothing to bring this to the attention of my various publishers’ attention.”94
Irving’s recantation was not as whole-hearted as it might at first glance have seemed. On the very day his letter appeared in The Times, Irving recorded his conversation with a journalist from the Sunday Telegraph as follows: “I told him that I had lost faith in statistics now, but was still a little suspicious of the new Dresden figure as the man who wrote the report was responsible for civil defence in the city.”95 Likewise in answer to a reader’s letter he wrote: “You probably detected the note of reservation I introduced into my letter to The Times, because it is unlikely that the Germans could have counted accurately the large numbers of victims in such a short time, and in a catastrophe like that who was there left to register relatives as ‘missing’ anyway?”96 This begged an obvious question. If in July 1966 Irving now doubted the police’s ability to count 18,375 dead by 10 March, why had he never previously doubted their ability to count 202,040 dead by 20 March? In reply to another reader who expressed the opinion that the real figure was nevertheless still much higher, Irving wrote: “I share your disbelief regarding the authenticity of the number of losses given by the Dresden police officer.”97 Irving then turned down a request from his Italian publishers to print his letter to The Times. “They [the alterations] are not too sweeping because despite what I wrote to the Times I do not think too much importance can be attached to the figures given in the new German documents. On the other hand, they cannot be ignored.”98
The new German edition of Irving’s book appeared in October 1967. Looking through it, I could see that TB 47 was still given the same prominence as it had been in the Corgi edition of 1966. Irving had not revised his “most probable” figure of 135,000.99 Worse still, the requested changes were not instituted in the Corgi edition of 1971, despite Irving’s prior communication to this publisher of his book about the evidence of the Final Report. TB 47 was still printed in the 1971 Corgi edition as an appendix, five years after Irving had described the figure it gave as a ‘legend.’ All Irving did was to reduce his estimate in the text back to 100,000, which still ignored entirely the much lower figure given in the Final Report.
The final stone in the mosaic of real and authentic sources for the number killed in the bombing raids on Dresden fell into place in 1977, when TB 47, which had long been strongly suspected as a forgery, was conclusively proven to be so. A copy of the original document was discovered by Götz Bergander. He had found a reservist, Werner Ehrlich, who reliably reported that not only had he held the original TB 47 in his hands, but, as a then member of the Dresden police force, he had also made one typed and one handwritten copy of it as part of his official duties. The copy was still in Ehrlich’s possession. It started “In order to be able to counter wild rumours. . . ,” and proceeded to list all the details listed in the version of TB 47 used by Irving–with one crucial difference. In Ehrlich’s copy the actual death figure was put at 20,204, the expected dead at 25,000, and the number of bodies cremated at 6,865. What had clearly happened was that someone, probably in Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, had crudely doctored the document by simply adding a zero to the end of each number it contained. What Irving had claimed as authentic documentary evidence was a blatant forgery.100 In neither England nor Germany had Irving made much of an effort to revise his book in the light of the mounting documentation. He had ignored new evidence that not merely contradicted, but invalidated, his findings. It was not until 1977 in Germany that Irving finally described TB 47 as a Nazi fake, as Seydewitz had argued all along and he himself had originally accepted. Yet he still reprinted it as an appendix, and published the Final Report alongside it.101
It was not until 1995 that Irving was at last willing to come clean with his English-language readers and make Seydewitz’s explanation his own again, namely that TB 47 was in fact a product of the Propaganda Ministry’s “machinations.”102 Without expanding on the information given by Weidauer, Irving wrote imperiously to the Dresden City Museum:
We have recently re-published my work about the massive Allied attack on Dresden, which will be well known to you. . . . In this volume . . . I have revised the number of losses, and independently from the research named by you, I come also to the conclusion that the so-called Tagesbefehl 47 is a forgery of the Ministry of Propaganda.103
How or on what grounds Irving’s conclusions were arrived at “independently” he did not make clear. In fact, of course, this was pure bluster, and there was nothing independent about his change of mind at all. The truth seemed to be in fact that he finally felt unable to persist with his allegiance to TB 47 in the light of the overwhelming weight of evidence, dating back twenty years, indicating that it was a forgery.
Despite having been finally forced to disown TB 47, Irving continued subsequently to keep the legend of a higher death toll alive. In 1985 Irving wrote to a Munich newspaper, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, claiming that the police chief responsible for the Final Report had the “most reason to minimise the losses,” because he was the person charged with air-raid protection. Irving was implying therefore that the figure of 18,375 given in the Final Report was a politically motivated underestimate.104 Yet Irving was quite happy in other places to accept the authenticity of police statistics on air-raid losses. As he himself commented with regard to the October 1943 attack on Kassel, the Germans “kept records of all air raid losses with meticulous care–even those on livestock.”105 He wrote this in the 1995 edition of the Dresden book about the September 1944 raid on Darmstadt: “Once again the police chief’s post-raid report provides the best documentary description of the attack.”106 Irving, indeed, quoted the Final Report no less than eighteen times in 1995. Why therefore should it be unreliable? Moreover TB 47 itself had also been signed by the police chief for Dresden. Yet for a long time Irving had accepted the figure of 202,040 to 250,000 given in the forged version of the document as entirely plausible. Here was yet another example of the double standards that Irving applied in the evaluation of evidence that suited his case, and evidence that did not.
Although the existence of the Final Report, he wrote in 1995, “must inevitably cast doubt” on higher estimates, the report was by nature interim, concluded a mere three weeks after the attack.107 I could not help wondering why, if Irving once again doubted the police’s ability to count the dead by 10 March, he had never previously doubted their ability to count 202,040 dead by 20 March. Yet, Irving went on, the city had been overcrowded, it had had no shelters and no defenses worth talking of, and there was no expectation of raids on such a large scale: “The key element is probably, over and above the identified death-toll, the vast number of missing people which even the Dresden Police Chief put at thirty-five thousand.”108 The night Dresden was hit it was, according to Irving, “swollen to twice its peace-time population by the [massive] influx of refugees from the East, Allied and Russian prisoners of war, and thousands of forced labourers.”109 Dresden had had a “permanent” population of 650,000 and “hundreds of thousands of refugees.” In the 1995 edition these had become “one or two million refugees.”110 It seemed obvious to me in the light of the increase which they underwent between the 1966 and 1995 editions of his book that these figures were entirely arbitrary. At no point did Irving give a source for any of them. They were figments of his own imagination.
Establishing just how many refugees there were in the city at the time of the raids was obviously not a simple task. Dresden was undoubtedly hit in the early part of 1945 by a wave of refugees fleeing westward from the advancing Red Army. The literature on the raids by Bergander and others made it clear that schools and pubs, cinemas on the Prager Strasse, and even the palace in the Grosse Garten were given over to accommodating refugees. None of the refugees was meant to stay longer than three days, and all available manpower was committed to keeping the trains and carts flowing through Dresden. Undoubtedly some became stationary in Dresden, but one or two million? How were so many refugees accommodated? According to Irving, they were not. “These endless, well organised refugee ‘treks,’ each with its own designated ‘Führer,’ had been directed one after another to the designated reception areas–like the Grosse Garten.”111 In other words, they slept under the open skies.
In the Corgi edition of 1966, Irving claimed that the Dresden City authorities had issued a total of 1,250,000 ration cards to the city’s population by the time of the raids.112 Here would be official documentary proof of the number of people in Dresden at the time of the attack. The source given by Irving simply read: “Ration statistics were provided by Mr. Howard Gee who was given them during a visit to Dresden in June 1963.”113 Who Mr. Gee was remained entirely unclear. Without knowing who he was, or where he got his information from, this apparent ‘fact’ remained nothing more than hearsay. Irving saw fit to allow the ‘fact’ to disappear from the 1995 edition.114 Why? Because in the meantime the truth about the 1,250,000 ration cards he claimed had been issued to the Dresden population had now become clear to him. Far from being genuine, many if not most of them had been produced by the Allies in order to confuse the population and hamper the local Nazi administration. In 1995, and in the 1985 German edition of his Dresden book, Irving admitted he had made a mistake on this point in 1966, and conceded that to add to the long-term dislocation the RAF dropped “millions of fake ration cards.” He quoted the Final Report of March 1945, which recorded that such cards had been dropped “in large masses.”115 Yet this openly admitted mistake did not prevent Irving from continuing to claim that Dresden had been packed with immense numbers of refugees in early February 1945, swelling the city’s population to two or three times its normal size.
As early as 1953, the Dresden civil defense engineer Georg Feydt had struggled to defeat the myth of the city saturated with refugees. He wrote: “I cannot imagine a more peaceful and calm picture than Dresden on the afternoon of 13 February 1945.”116 Götz Bergander likewise confirmed from his own memory that at no point did Dresden become crammed with refugees. He himself had been called on to help place refugees in accommodation, and apart from those stragglers around the station and the influxes that came with each train, he remembered most being somehow quartered.117 Scarcely any, in other words, had been sleeping in the open. Bergander then proceeded to calculate the number of refugees in Dresden on 13–14 February 1945 on the basis of what source material he could find: 9,000 had been temporarily lodged in the stations (through which the majority came), 6,000 had been trekking with carts spread out over the whole of Dresden, and 85,000 had been staying in emergency accommodation. Somewhat boldly, Bergander doubled the number to include all those who might have somehow found their own lodgings that night. This made a round total of 200,000. Bergander admitted that this was also a guess, but at least a sensible one arrived at through due process. It was more likely to have been a maximum than a minimum. To have accommodated any more refugees would have required one of two measures: either forced billeting in private homes on a massive scale, or huge temporary camps. Neither of these two measures was in fact undertaken.118
The Dresden historian Friedrich Reichert went one step further. He quoted witnesses who attested that no refugees were billeted in Dresden houses and that no billeting took place in the parks or squares. He then pointed out that the Dresden population was not at its prewar level because of the numbers of men away on active service. Not 630,000, but 567,000 were resident in the city at the time. To that he added 100,000 refugees.119 This was already a very considerable number in view of the city’s overall population; but nowhere near the one or 2 million suggested by Irving in 1995. And it meant that the number of people in Dresden on the night of the raids was not much greater than the number given in the official figure of the city’s population anyway.
How many of these refugees were likely to have been killed? The total figure of just over 18,000 dead given by the Final Report of course included refugees as well as local citizens. Irving implied that many thousands of those killed had officially only been listed as missing and so had been excluded from the official death toll.120 The Final Report put the missing figure known to the register of missing persons and the city administration at 35,000, but 10,000 of those missing were later found to be alive.121 Given the chaotic situation of the final weeks of Hitler’s Germany, with millions of refugees streaming through Europe, many more might have escaped official attention. Irving quoted a refugee from Dresden as saying: “None of the neighbouring towns could send help [after the attack] because all the approaches to Dresden were crowded with refugee columns, peasant carts, pushcarts and army vehicles.”122 Thus even on Irving’s own evidence, the missing must have included many thousands who had left the city immediately after the raids were over. Even if a considerable number of those registered as missing had in fact been killed in the raids, it was still clear to me that they would have added no more than a few thousand to the overall death toll, not the numbers needed by Irving to make up the shortfall between the Final Report figure of 18,000 and his own estimate of 100,000 or even 250,000.
Conclusive evidence was supplied by burial figures. According to Irving, “history relates that the last mortal remains of 28,746 of the air raids’ victims found their last resting place on the Heidefriedhof cemetery.”123 The figure of 28,746 in the Heidefriedhof came from the cemetery’s head gardener Zeppenfeld, who was quoted by Seydewitz as having given this total from the head-count of those buried and the ashes of 9,000 bodies burned on the Altmarkt.124 In fact, a rather smaller total of 6,865 corpses were burned on the Altmarkt (the forged TB 47 had turned this into an implausible 68,650 by adding a zero). Weidauer quoted the director of the Johannisfriedhof cemetery as reporting that 3,660 victims of the attack had also been buried there.125 In 1993, new official material was found from the Dresden burial offices confirming the exact number of those buried.126 Quite contrary to Irving’s image of chaotic and botched mass burials,127 this material made it clear that the counting of the dead was conscientiously carried out, with the figures being reported regularly to the city administration. Exactly 17,295 bodies had been buried in the Heidefriedhof cemetery, including the ashes of the 6,865 people burned on the Altmarkt. In addition to 3,462 burials in the Johannisfriedhof cemetery, 514 were buried in the Neue Annenfriedhof cemetery. This gave a total of 21,271 registered burials.128 Head gardener Zeppenfeld’s figure of 28,746 thus overestimated the true number by more than 7,000, unsurprising perhaps, given the fact that, despite its apparent precision, it lacked any written authentication and was arrived at only in a rough and ready way. The official figures were far more likely to be closer to the truth.
Another possible point of statistical confusion, according to Irving, lay in the fact that many people had searched for missing relatives to “spare them the indignity of mass burial in a common grave” or even resorted to digging up their next-of-kin already buried in mass graves.129 There were indeed witnesses quoted elsewhere as rescuing bodies from the rubble themselves. But it seemed highly unlikely to me that people had broken open sealed mass graves in the hope of finding their relatives among the number buried there. Moreover, this in no way precluded the victims from appearing on one of the official lists. On the contrary, people who had by then identified their relatives would have been bound to have reported their death to the authorities. Or did Irving think that thousands had been secretly buried in unconsecrated grounds and their deaths for some strange reason kept secret from the authorities? Reichert added that the burials in the smaller graveyards were scrupulously recorded and did not exceed 2,000.130 The total number of burials, therefore, approximated to the total figure of deaths in the raid already known from other sources such as the Final Report, namely, 21,000 compared to 18,000.
Irving’s last refuge was to claim that too much of Dresden remained unexcavated to say how many bodies might still be buried there.131 Some corpses, of course, were buried beneath the rubble and were not discovered until later. Weidauer, who as sometime mayor of the city was in a position to know, pointed out that between 8 May 1945 and 1966, exactly 1,858 bodies had been dug from the ruins of Dresden. Only in four instances had it been impossible to establish the number of victims in one place. The total for the four could not have been higher than a hundred.132 He likewise made it clear that by all accounts the majority of victims had died through suffocation and that only in a small number of cases were bodies so mutilated or burned that the exact number could not be ascertained. Reichert quoted a slightly smaller figure for between October 1945 and late 1957 of 1,557 bodies.133 Yet, although he must have been aware of Weidauer’s figures, Irving still wrote in 1995 of an immediate postwar Dresden “where thousands of victims were still being recovered each week from the ruins.”134 He himself, however, had written in 1963 that “most of the bomb sites in Dresden’s Inner City have been cleared anyway.”135 Reichert added in 1994 that not a single body had been found since 1990, despite heavy building and despite archaeological excavations on the Altmarkt and around the Taschenberg Palace.136
Thus all of Irving’s attempts to justify a high figure rested on fantasy, invention, speculation, the suppression of reliable evidence, the use of unreliable sources, or, most shockingly, the repeated deployment of a document that he knew to be a forgery. An honest historian would have taken due consideration of the convergence of the major authentic sources around estimates in the area of 25,000 dead. When Reichert added the three sums together cited above he came to the inescapable conclusion that the final number of deaths for the raids of 13–14 February and 17 April was 25,000, corresponding to the real TB 47’s prediction of the same number, and all of it based on documentary evidence, not the kind of hearsay, third-hand reports, and unauthenticated copies of forged documents, on which Irving relied.
Irving’s book on Dresden was published right at the beginning of his career. Reflecting on the distortions that it contained, I found it striking that Irving had massaged up the death toll from the Allied bombing raids in Dresden long before he began to argue that Hitler had been a friend of the Jews, and more than two decades before he started to deny the existence of the gas chambers. Even as a young writer Irving seemed to have used his manipulations of the evidence on the bombing of Dresden to peddle what was then relatively ‘soft’ form of revisionism. Irving variously claimed that his interest in Dresden was first awakened either by reading an article in the German magazine Stern in March 1960 or by conversing with fellow-workers while employed at a steel mill in Mülheim. In April 1961 he placed advertisements in British and American newspapers to trace the surviving air personnel. William Kimber was one of the people to answer his advertisement and subsequently became his publisher.137
That Kimber’s relationship with Irving was an uneasy one was borne out by the correspondence between the two that I was able to consult thanks to the Discovery rules. Kimber wrote to Irving on 3 April 1963, after his legal advisers had suggested he check the proofs for “certain allegedly historical statements.” Once they had started, wrote Kimber,
it became abundantly clear that the first proofs were riddled with falsifications of the historical facts. The picture painted by these falsifications led to the inescapable conclusion that your book could be interpreted as the work of a propagandist for Nazism who had not scrupled to distort many facts and omit numerous others in order to vilify the British War Government and in particular Winston Churchill. . . . I have no doubt that it was a scoop for the Germans to find an Englishman prepared to concoct a mixture of fact and fiction which would vindicate or extenuate Nazi actions (because of course there is an extensive movement trying to achieve this aim in Germany and elsewhere) and at the same time to denigrate English leaders.138
Irving stiffly denied this and argued that in Germany he had been accused of being a lackey of British Air Command.139
According to Irving, Kimber then instituted a number of textual changes against his wishes. He altered chapter headings, softened criticism of Churchill and the head of RAF Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, and erased the more “harrowing” details of the attack; all testimony to Kimber’s “sincerely held belief that, after all, perhaps the Germans had merely been repaid, with interest in their own coin.”140 Although Irving told his readers in 1995 that it was “several years before I noticed these little modifications,” there was documentary evidence to the contrary. In the same letter of April 1963, Kimber had written to Irving informing him that after “intensive work” by the office staff checking and changing the proofs, “we now believe the book to be cleansed of its somewhat evil undercurrents.” Later in April Irving had berated Kimber for changing some of the historical sections in the book.141 So he had known about them right away.
Irving wrote to Kimber in 1963 declaring his view that the crime of World War II had not been genocide but “innocentocide,” the killing of civilians, and that therefore the Eastern and Western powers were just as guilty in his eyes as the Germans and the Japanese. For him Dresden was a crime.142 Nowhere in the earlier editions was there an explicit effort to draw the parallel. Instead, Irving allowed others to draw this obvious conclusion and then somewhat disingenuously congratulated them on their independence of mind. Thus he wrote to Sydney Silverman MP, who had reviewed the book in Tribune: “I am not someone who holds political views similar to your own, but I really must congratulate you–in spite of this–for having stuck your neck out so firmly and unmistakably by drawing a parallel between the Nazis’ atrocities and what happened in Dresden; this is something I myself did not claim in my book.”143
Three decades later, Irving was making the parallel explicit. In a speech delivered in Toronto on 8 November 1992, he estimated the numbers who died in Auschwitz (“most of them from epidemics,” he said) as 100,000. “Around one hundred thousand dead in that brutal slave labour camp.” Around 25,000 of these had been killed by shooting or hanging, according to German radio reports from Auschwitz received and decrypted by the British, he added. He continued:
Twenty-five thousand killed, if we take this grossly inflated figure to be on the safe side: That is a crime; there is no doubt. Killing twenty-five thousand in four years–1941, 1942, 1943, and 1944–that is a crime; there is no doubt. Let me show you a picture of twenty-five thousand people being killed in twenty-five minutes. Here it is, in my book, a vivid picture of twenty-five thousand people being killed in twenty-five minutes by the British (in February 1945) in Pforzheim, a little town where they make jewellery and watches in Baden, Germany. Twenty-five thousand people were being burned alive. . . . That is what it looks like when twenty-five thousand civilians are being burned alive in twenty-five minutes. One person in four, in twenty-five minutes. One person in four in that town. As I said when I was speaking in Kitchener yesterday, it is as though somebody came to Kitchener, a town of about a hundred thousand people, and killed one person in four in twenty-five minutes. That too is a crime. Twenty-five minutes! In Auschwitz it was a crime committed over four years. You don’t get it spelled out to you like that. Except by us, their opponents. When you put things into perspective like that, of course, it diminishes their Holocaust–that word with a capital letter.144
Irving’s almost incantatory repetition of the figures “twenty-five thousand” and “twenty-five minutes,” mentioned in this passage respectively four times and five times, compared with his figure of twenty-five thousand for Auschwitz mentioned only twice, left no room for doubt about which crime he considered the greater.
In fact, quite apart from the fraudulent minimization of the Auschwitz figures, Irving’s equivalence did not stand up to examination because of his wild exaggeration of the number of deaths caused by the Pforzheim raid, which was estimated in a report of the Statistical Office of the City of Pforzheim in 1954 not as 25,000, as Irving claimed, but as 17,600.145 And the bombing of Dresden, however indefensible it might have been in moral terms, was never legally condemned as a crime against international law. Irving’s efforts to boost the numbers killed in the Dresden bombing raids seemed designed from the very beginning to establish a moral equivalence with the Nazi killing of the Jews.
By the 1990s this position had hardened, as Irving had come to propagate a far lower number of Jews killed than he had accepted two decades before. When it suited, him, he still repeated the ‘innocenticide’ refrain. In answer to the rhetorical question, put to him in 1995, if there was a parallel between Dresden and Auschwitz Irving replied: “To my mind both teach one lesson: that the real crime of war and peace alike is not Genocide–with its implicit requirement that posterity reserve its sympathy and condolences for a chosen race–but Innocenticide. It was not the Jewishness of the victims that made Auschwitz a crime; but their innocence.”146 There was of course no implication in the concept of genocide that posterity should reserve its sympathy and condolences for a ‘chosen race’–this was purely Irving’s invention, for the concept of genocide had been applied to many other victims of genocide besides the Jews.
While Irving always maintained a more balanced tone in his books, in his public speaking his opinions became increasingly strident. Despite his frequent rhetoric against the propagating of other myths in history, especially the ‘myth’ of the Holocaust, and despite his earlier pronouncements to the contrary, Irving seemed to me to be proud of his own role in keeping alive what he himself had described at one point as the legend of a Dresden death toll many times higher than the official estimates.147 During a speech in South Africa in 1986 he told his audience:
I realised that I was being told [about Dresden] of what we would now call a Holocaust I suppose, of which we English at that time, 1961, knew absolutely nothing at all. Of course now everybody talks about Dresden in the same breath as they talk about Auschwitz and Hiroshima. That’s my achievement ladies and gentlemen. I’m a little bit proud when I look at the newspapers every 13th or 14th of February, when the anniversary comes and they mention Dresden, because until my book was published on that subject the outside world had never heard of what happened in Dresden when 100,000 people were killed in one night by an RAF and American air force air raid on one undefended German town at the end of the war.148
It was more than coincidence that Irving, his mind perhaps constrained by a convenient symmetry, stubbornly maintained a false figure of 100,000 deaths in Dresden in the face of all evidence to the contrary, while at the same time he manipulated his figure of deaths at Auschwitz down to a similar number.
In a television documentary screened on 28 November 1991 Irving made the comparison explicit in the following interchange:
INTERVIEWER: So what’s the point in quibbling about the exact number of Jews that were killed by Hitler?
IRVING: Exact numbers are important. Look at Auschwitz. About 100,000 people died in Auschwitz. Most of them died of epidemics, as we now know, from code breaking. So even if we’re generous and say one quarter of them, 25,000, were killed by hanging or shooting. 25,000 is a crime, that’s true. 25,000 innocent people executed by one means or another. But we killed that many people burning them alive in one night, not in three years, in a city like Pforzheim. We killed five times that number in Dresden in one night.
INTERVIEWER: So we’re as bad as that?
IRVING: I’ve pleaded for equality in the writing of history. Not just truth but also equality.
INTERVIEWER: So lining up Jews in pits and machine gunning them was as bad as bombing Dresden?
IRVING: I see very little difference.149
What he really meant, it seemed to me, was that bombing Dresden was as bad as killing Jews.
Following his conversion to Holocaust denial toward the end of the 1980s, Irving’s utterances connecting Dresden and Auschwitz became increasingly bizarre. Launching the Leuchter Report in 1989, he told journalists:
Obviously if the gas chamber now turns out to have been phoney then we have to try and explain what happened to the figures. Now, one possible reason is the large number that turned up in the state of Palestine, what’s now the state of Israel. The Jews that were in Israel didn’t come from nowhere. Another part of them, when Auschwitz was liberated were set out on the roads to be shipped westward where they ended up in cities like Dresden. I don’t have to tell you what happened in Dresden three weeks after Auschwitz was evacuated by the Germans. There were one million refugees in the streets of Dresden at the time that we burned Dresden to the ground, killing anything between 100,000 and 250,000 of them. Large numbers of people on the streets in Europe that winter also suffered normal deaths of exposure and starvation epidemic. I’m offering to you alternative solutions to where the people went.150
Irving repeated this explanation in a 1993 promotional video intended for viewing in Australia, where he had been refused an entry visa:
Many concentration camps as the Russians approached were evacuated and set out on the long cold march through the European winter of December 44, January 1945 to the West. The concentration camp inmates arrived in Berlin or in Leipzig or in Dresden just in time for the RAF bombers to set fire to those cities. In Dresden a million-and-a-half people camping out in the streets on the night of February 13, 1945. Nobody knows who they were. Refugees, concentration camp prisoners, citizens of Dresden itself. After the bombers retired, 45 minutes later another wave came, and then at noon on February 14 the American air force joined in. Over 130,000 people died in that particular air raid. The same kind of raids took place on Leipzig, Berlin, Cottbus: refugee centres up and down the centre of Germany. Nobody knows how many Jews died in those air raids, nobody knows how many Jews died on the roads of hunger or starvation or just sheer cold.151
This attempt to bring together the raids and the marches was speculation, unsupported by any contemporary documentary evidence.
In fact, the ‘death marches’ took place in the closing months of the war as the Nazi authorities cleared concentration camps and ghettos in the East in the face of the victorious Red Army. Between 17 and 23 January 1945, some 60,000 prisoners of Auschwitz were evacuated, mainly on foot. Many of them died of cold, physical exhaustion, thirst, and hunger, or were beaten or shot to death on their way to other concentration camps within the Reich. There was no evidence that any of those prisoners forcibly evacuated from Auschwitz passed through Dresden, nor those marched out of other camps either. It was not credible that the deporting authorities would have quartered thousands of starving and emaciated Jews in the historic heart of Dresden. The suggestion that the Allies were somehow responsible for killing Auschwitz prisoners in Dresden in what were their last agonizing weeks of suffering was completely fantastic. It sprang full-grown from Irving’s own fantasy and had absolutely no basis in any kind of documented fact.
In ways such as this, Irving played a pivotal role in keeping the myths of the Dresden attack persistent in the public mind. This involved deliberately falsifying statistics, misrepresenting testimony, attributing false conclusions to reliable sources, using evidence that he knew to be unreliable or forged, and bending reliable sources to fit his argument in order to arrive at conclusions that were historically untenable–precisely the kind of historical falsification itemized by Lipstadt in her book. Irving’s estimation of the purposes and biases of those compiling historical sources varied not according to the sources themselves or their authors, but according to the extent to which he found them useful in his attempt to maximize the numbers killed.
It was clear to me that Irving’s overriding purpose was to drive up the figure of those killed in the raids by any means until it became many times greater than the actual number, and began to achieve implicit and in the end explicit comparability with the mass murders carried out by the Nazis at Auschwitz and elsewhere. In the light of his consistent and deliberate falsification of the historical evidence to this end, and the amount of time and energy he spent on these manipulations, I thought it somewhat hypocritical of him to put the rhetorical question to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a reputable Munich newspaper, in 1985: “Is the question of the number of deaths really of consequence?”152 and to say to The Times that “It is odious to debate whether we killed 200,000 or ‘only’ 35,000 that night.”153 In 1991, after all, Irving was once again to insist that “exact numbers are important.”
Few historians defended the Allied bombing raids on Dresden on 13–14 February 1945 without equivocation; certainly it had always seemed to me that they were extremely hard to justify, to put it no more strongly than that. The war was virtually won anyway, and it was extremely doubtful whether the raids saved more lives in terms of Allied and other troop losses than they cost in terms of civilian deaths. I could see no evidence that they weakened the German war effort in the final months of the conflict, or damaged the German will to fight to the end. Nor could I underestimate the terrible cost they wrought in terms of human life and suffering, or to ignore the wanton destruction of some of Europe’s most beautiful and significant buildings, whose reconstruction was still not complete when I visited them in the late 1980s and saw some of the damage for myself.
But the way to reach a reasoned judgment on these events was not to falsify the evidence, which was already horrifying enough: all that did was to obscure the real issues. Irving’s manipulations and exaggerations merely got in the way of a proper discussion of these events, rather than assisting it, since dealing with his falsifications took up time and effort that would have been better spent on researching other aspects of the bombings. Although his distortions of the truth had long since been exposed, Irving persisted for decades in presenting them to his readers as an accurate depiction of the historical record. Perhaps the best way of dealing with his version of the destruction of Dresden was found in 1985 by his German publishers, who appended to the title page of his book the description, “a novel.”