The Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany, in February 1945 has served as a propaganda tool against the West for over eight decades.
No one denies the horrifying scale of destruction: a massive bombing campaign triggered a firestorm that killed thousands of civilians. But almost immediately, various parties began using Dresden as supposed proof that the Allies were just as guilty of war crimes as the Nazis.
Unlike other Allied bombings, where the Nazi regime often downplayed civilian casualties to maintain morale, the Nazis actively highlighted and exaggerated the Dresden death toll. Their aim was to recast themselves as victims.
On February 25, Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet estimated nearly 200,000 killed in the raids without citing a source.
The Nazi Federal Foreign Office picked up on this article in a telegram in which it instructed the diplomatic mission in Bern to quote this Svenska Dagbladet article in its communication about Dresden.
It seems entirely possible that the Germans "leaked" the death toll to the Swedish reporter, who eagerly printed his scoop. The Nazis could then use it as proof of Allied war crimes.
The Germans knew this was a lie. The Dresden police estimated a month after the raid that about 25,000 had been killed.
But the Nazis told Westerners that the numbers were much higher.
In May, British POWs who were released in Dresden reported that the Nazis told them that 300,000 were killed in the raids.
Note the last paragraph describes how German propaganda newspapers seized on Dresden as a way to position the Allies as wiping out the an entire civilian city.
Kurt Vonnegut's classic 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-5 centered on the Dresden bombings, and Vonnegut asserted that 135,000 people - mostly civilians - were killed, comparing it with Hiroshima. Vonnegut probably got his 135,000 figure from Holocaust denier David Irving, who published that number in the 1966 edition of his book "The Fall of Dresden."
But the city of Dresden created a historians' commission to determine the real death toll.
The report, released in 2010, estimates that the number of dead was
no more than 25,000 - the same number the Dresden police estimated in 1945.
That doesn't stop anti-Western movements to continue to exaggerate the death toll for the same sort fo propaganda that the Nazis used.
Protesters, today, still quote the 300,000 figure. Here is
2008 graffiti in a Dresden railway underpass saying "300,000 dead" overwritten with "Antifa."
And here is a recent German right-wing demonstration with a banner claiming 250,000 killed in the Allied "holocaust."
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The Russian Foreign Ministry
tweeted in 2023 that the numbers killed were as high as 135,000 in an attempt to discredit the US and UK criticism of the Ukraine war.
Propaganda thrives on numbers, especially when they’re unverified. By 1945, concern for German civilian casualties was not a priority for the Allies. The war's aim was victory and the destruction of the Nazi regime.
That moral framing gave Nazi propagandists an opening.
It took 65 years for historians to agree on a realistic death toll in Dresden. Wartime casualty estimates are notoriously unreliable in the moment, and that uncertainty offers a rich opportunity for manipulation.
The media, hungry for numbers, often reports the first figure it finds, regardless of source. In the fog of war, those figures can become permanent fixtures in historical memory, long after the facts are known.
Wednesday, July 23, 2025
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