The horrific bombing of Dresden by British and American aircraft. The capital of the German state of Saxony was hit in four raids between February 13 and 15, 1945, by 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), which dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city. The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed more than 1,600 acres (6.5 km2) of the city center. An estimated 22,700 to 25,000 people were killed. Three more USAAF air raids followed, two on March 2 targeting the city’s railway marshalling yard and a smaller raid on April 17 targeting industrial areas. In the decades since the war, large variations in the reported death toll have fueled controversy, although the numbers themselves are no longer a major point of contention among historians. In March 1945, the German government ordered the printing of a falsified figure of 200,000 casualties for the Dresden raids, and 500,000 deaths were claimed. City authorities at the time estimated as many as 25,000 victims, a figure supported by subsequent investigations, including a 2010 study commissioned by the city council. One of the main authors responsible for spreading inflated figures in the West was Holocaust denier David Irving, who later announced that he had discovered that the documentation he had been working on had been falsified and the actual figures supported the figure of 25,000.
