Bimbum 2005.02.13 0 0 290 Tapping municipal records that have only recently become accessible after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of East Germany (the nation that included postwar Dresden), he persuasively argues that the real death toll from the attack was somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000 and that Dresden was far from innocent of war-related industry and activity. After scrutinizing and comparing the records and history of British bombing campaigns against the Third Reich in the latter days of the war, he finds that "Dresden was a big raid, but no bigger than a considerable number of others at that time directed against the urban areas of Germany." He comes up with several stated and plausible reasons for the Allies to target the city besides the main motive attributed to them by their harshest critics: bloodthirsty revenge for the bombing of London during the Blitz and anti-German zeal. The strafing almost certainly never occurred. That doesn't mean that Taylor minimizes the horrors Dresden and its people suffered. "Dresden" is not a simplistic or simplifying book. Along with his diligent documentation of body counts and British bombing strategies, he presents the fruits of in-depth interviews with survivors of the attack. The centerpiece of the book is a riveting narrative account of how Dresden's citizens experienced the bombing and the monstrous firestorm it succeeded in fomenting. Twenty-five thousand people killed is still a massacre, and Taylor's description of the bleak aftermath is a nightmare of corpses lying in heaps on a landscape blasted and burned into lunar rubble. The day after, Feb. 14, was Ash Wednesday. That weird metaphorical coincidence is in tune with the many ironies Taylor encountered during his research. Perhaps the first and most striking of those ironies is that Victor Klemperer, the famous Jewish diarist of the Nazi era, had been ordered to report for deportation on Feb. 16, along with what remained of Dresden's Jewish population (all married to "Aryans"). Everyone knew what this meant: "It promised at best transportation to the Theresienstadt ghetto, at worst a death march of the kind that had already consigned tens of thousands of Jews to a bitter and brutal fate just as the new Allied advances seemed to bring deliverance so tantalizingly close," Taylor writes. Klemperer and his wife escaped in the chaos after the bombing, posing as "Aryans" whose papers were destroyed in the fires. (Klemperer's diaries are one cultural treasure that was saved rather than destroyed by the bombing.) Another of Dresden's Jews, Henny Wolf, wrote "For us, however macabre as it may sound, the air raid was our salvation, and that was exactly how we understood it." Előzmény: suto (289)