The book, an international best seller when published in the 1960s, is based on a series of 37 articles about strategic bombing during World War II titled Wie Deutschlands Städte starben which Irving wrote for the German journal Neue Illustrierte.
Deaths
In the first edition, Irving estimated that the two RAF raids and the first USAAF raid combined were "estimated authoritatively to have killed more than 135,000 of the population ..." and the "documentation suggests very strongly that the figure was certainly between a minimum of 100,000 and a maximum of 250,000". In 1965, General Ira C. Eaker identified the number as 135,000. Irving's first edition figures became widely accepted and were used in many standard reference works. In later editions of the book over the next three decades, he gradually adjusted the figure to:
In the 1971 edition, the three raids "estimated authoritatively to have killed more than 100,000 of the population...".
In the 1995 edition, the three raids "cost the lives of between fifty and one hundred thousand inhabitants....". Richard J. Evans states that "Elsewhere he dropped the lower figure and said the attack cost 'up to a hundred thousand people their lives'".
According to Richard J. Evans, an expert witness for the defence at the 2000 libel trial of Deborah Lipstadt, Irving based his estimates of the dead at Dresden on the word of one individual, Hans Voigt, who provided no supporting documentation, used forged documents, and described one witness named Max Funfack as Dresden's Deputy Chief Medical Officer. Funfack had made it clear by letter to Irving on 19 January 1965 that he had not been either the Chief or Deputy ChiefMedical Officer in Dresden, that he had no knowledge of any documentation about the number of people who were killed in the bombing, and during the war he had only heard rumours, which varied greatly, over the number of people who were killed in the raids.
Influence on literature
The writer Kurt Vonnegut used The Destruction of Dresden as a source for the 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five where he wrote that he emerged from the slaughterhouse to discover that "135,000 Hansels and Gretels had been baked like gingerbread men".
