Dresden: What the Archives Reveal

A City Without Defences

By early 1945, Dresden was one of the last major German cities that had not been seriously bombed. It was known as a centre of culture — the “Florence of the Elbe” — famous for its baroque architecture, its opera house, and the Zwinger palace. The city had no significant war industries, no major military installations, and virtually no anti-aircraft defences. Its population had swollen with hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the advancing Red Army from the east.

The Original Police Reports

David Irving’s research began not with secondary accounts but with the original German police and civil defence reports filed in the days and weeks after the attack. These documents — many of which had never been published — recorded the systematic attempts to identify and count the dead, clear the rubble, and restore basic services to the shattered city.

The reports describe the firestorm in clinical detail: temperatures exceeding 1,500 degrees Celsius in the city centre, hurricane-force winds sucking oxygen from the streets, and the complete destruction of approximately thirteen square miles of built-up area. The scale of destruction was comparable to Hiroshima, achieved with conventional incendiary bombs rather than a nuclear weapon.

Walter Hahn’s Photographs

Among the most striking primary sources are the photographs taken by Walter Hahn, a Dresden photographer who documented the aftermath of the bombing. His images show the Altstadt reduced to a moonscape of broken walls and rubble, the blackened shell of the Frauenkirche, and the long rows of bodies laid out in the Altmarkt for identification and cremation.

Hahn’s photographs were preserved in the Dresden city archives and remained largely unknown to Western historians until Irving brought them to international attention. Forty-eight of these photographs are reproduced in the current edition of Apocalypse 1945: The Destruction of Dresden.

The Casualty Debate

The number of people killed in the Dresden bombing has been disputed since the event itself. Early estimates ranged from 35,000 to over 200,000. Irving’s original 1963 publication cited a figure of 135,000 based on documents available at the time. He later revised this downward as additional documentation emerged, particularly after German reunification opened the Dresden municipal archives.

A 2010 commission appointed by the city of Dresden concluded that approximately 22,700 to 25,000 people were killed. Whatever the precise figure, the destruction of Dresden remains one of the most controversial Allied operations of the war — a deliberate attack on a city of refugees and cultural treasures with minimal military significance.

Why This Book Matters

The Destruction of Dresden was David Irving’s first book, published in 1963 when he was twenty-five years old. It established his reputation as a researcher willing to dig into archives that other historians had overlooked — or avoided. The book was praised by figures as diverse as Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby (who wrote the foreword) and the distinguished military historian Captain Basil Liddell Hart.

The current edition, Apocalypse 1945, incorporates material that was unavailable when the original was published — including documents from the former East German archives and the complete set of Hahn’s photographs. It remains the definitive account of the destruction of one of Europe’s great cities.

“David Irving’s book on Dresden was a book that changed history. Before that book, nobody had heard of the Dresden raids.”
— Frederick Taylor, historian