The Dresden Bombing

I am a strange person. I like to fixate on things.

The other day, Joe Biden was talking about propaganda. He mentioned that after Dresden was bombed, the German propaganda machine put out the notion that 250,000 people had died.

The truth, he stated, was that only 25,000 people died.

I became interested in this because I had always believe that 250,000 people had died during the Dresden bombing.

So I immediately went to Wikipedia to see what I could learn.

Indeed Wikipedia does talk about the propaganda that Joe Biden alluded to.

But I like to look into things. I like to see if there’s another way that I can figure out the truth besides listening to people.

Obviously, I can’t go back in time and be there. Nor do I have the time to search through death records.

Here it is what I was able to glean from various websites.

Modern Dresden has 127 mi.² of surface area.

This translates to 393,000,000 square yards.

3900 tons of bombs were dropped.

This equals 7,800,000 pounds of bombs.

Thus there was:

1 pound of bomb for every 50 yd.² or

1 pound of bomb for every 450 ft.²

A 20 x 20 room is equal to 400 ft.²

There were 625,000 people living in Dresden in 1940.

The number of pounds of bombs per person during the Dresden bombing was 12.48 pounds of bombs per person.

I guess they wanted to be sure they were really dead.

German propaganda claimed that 250,000 to 500,000 people died. American propaganda claims that 25,000 people died.

The German numbers seem more likely. It may be the only piece of truth that Goebbels uttered.

Why do I believe this?

I believe this because on an average basis there were 12.48 pounds of bomb per person in Dresden during the bombing.

A modern day hand grenade weighs about a pound.

The kill radius of a hand grenade is about 10 meters.

The formula for the area of a circle is pi x radius squared.

3.14 x 100 = 314 sq meters.

314 sq meters = 3,378 sq feet.

3,378 sq feet = the size of a medium sized house.

Taking our ratio of one 1 LB bomb for every 450 square feet we arrive at a number of 7.5 bombs per medium sized house.

Now, if I threw 7.5 of these 1 pound grenades into your medium sized house (while you were inside of course) over three days, would you be likely to die?

Even if you moved around the house, would you be likely to die?

I think so.

I’m surprised that everybody didn’t die in Dresden.

Now, let’s look at this a slightly different way. If we divide the square footage of Dresden by the number of people we have 3.537 billion sq. ft. divided by 625,000 people or 5,659 sq ft per person. Now, if I throw 12.48 bombs on to your area over three days, will you be likely to die?

It sounds reasonable.

Note: A grenade, a bomb, kills by concussive blast. It also kills through spread of shrapnel. The spread of shrapnel goes far beyond 10 m. Given that the majority, if not all, the hospitals would have been destroyed in Dresden, it is more than likely that proper medical attention could not be paid to non-life-threatening wounds that would then lead to death. The people who did survive the Dresden bombing must have moved out of the city in order to survive.

I suppose theoretically that the majority of the people could have hidden in cellars or bomb shelters, but this seems unlikely. Nor does it seem likely, given anecdotal reports, that bomb shelters provided that much protection..

Adding to the death count would be the hundreds of thousands of refugees who had fled into the city plus the general unpreparedness of the city for a bombing attack.

Given the increasing propensity of our own fascist government here in America to lie, 25,000 dead seems quite impossible.

Sincerely,

Archer Crosley

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