The casualties reported by the Nazis were off by an order of magnitude. This report--warning: it is in pdf format and in German-- from 2008 commissioned by the city itself concludes that the fatalities range from 18,000 to 25,000--not the 200,000 that the Nazis reported. So the disagreement over the fatalities count is fairly major. Other firebombings were much more destructive, particularly the Meetinghouse raid on Tokyo that killed over 100,000.

However, we do have to remember that hundreds of bombers with thousands in bomber crews combined to create a hellish firestorm that killed thousands of civilians in a very short time period. That the number of killed at Dresden was less than Tokyo shouldn't diminish the horrors of that day, and that the deaths at Dresden were a huge increase over the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War doesn't diminish the tragedy of that day in the Basque territories either.

Thanks, that's very informative!

This question is fascinating, actually, since Dresden is often used as an example by Holocaust deniers to demonstrate that Allied atrocities were "worse" than those of the Germans (not to suggest you are a Holocaust denier, OP! Merely to say that I'm glad you brought this up. It is an important question!)

Firstly, let's deal with the obvious question here. The bombing of Dresden was indeed horrific. It is incorrect to state, as some have, that Dresden had no strategic value. In the east of Germany it was the third-largest city behind Berlin and Leipzig; as a result, it was a locus for a large Wehrmacht barracks, as well as a hub for communications and rail traffic. It was also home to significant heavy industry. It was therefore a logical target for the Royal Air Force strategic bombing campaign. The moral problem for the RAF and for advocates of the bombing war, however, is as follows: the city was poorly defended, as flak batteries had been removed so as to be used as anti-tank cannons on the Eastern Front, and Luftwaffe fighters, crippled by chronic fuel shortages, could not get off the ground; the main target of the bombing was not the rail yards or industry, but the medieval centre of Dresden, which was largely residential; and Dresden was a culmination of the firebombing campaign that the RAF had begun with the Battle of Hamburg. Indeed, when the Luftwaffe had bombed Coventry in 1940, it had generated a firestorm that swept through the city and incinerated everything in its path. The Germans had done this by accident, but the British, morbidly fascinated by this awful event, were able to reverse-engineer it, and thereby deliberately cause the same effect on a grander scale. This was all the more damaging since most German cities had medieval centres largely built from wood.

Now, the question of the morality of this is something for another time. In my opinion (and you are welcome to disagree), the onus on someone like Arthur T. Harris was to come up with a way to use bombing to end the war as quickly as possible. The doctrine of total war made women and children legitimate targets, since in a totalitarian society (and indeed for any society at war) the mobilisation of the entire population to contribute to the war effort blurs the line between combatants and the home front. Thus, there is a justification for the attack on Dresden, and the method by which it was carried out, but understandably this is contentious. It was, however, brutally efficient logic; in the last days of July 1943, for instance, the bombing of Hamburg created a firestorm that consumed some 43,000 people -- about the same as the number who died in British cities during the Blitz of 1940-1941. Dresden was another raid along the same lines as Hamburg; crucially, the bombing of Dresden occurred in February 1945, when the city was far worse protected than Hamburg was at the zenith of the war.

With this in mind, the destruction was utterly disastrous. Some fifteen square kilometres of the city were burned to ashes. In terms of the numbers killed, however, estimates vary. Hans Voigt, an official in the state of Saxony, was charged with putting together a department that would identify the victims and tally the dead. Given the nature of the destruction, this was quite difficult, since some people were simply incinerated. Voigt's department came up with a four-way filing system to try and cross-reference victims. The first would be a garment directory, which catalogued clothing. Another file kept tabs on the personal belonging recovered. The third file used recovered identity papers. The fourth was a collection of wedding rings that were recovered from the rubble. Through this, the department identified approximately 40,000 people; Voigt himself claimed that there was evidence for 35,000. Nonetheless, these figures took time to collate; in the meantime, in the last months of the war, Goebbels' propaganda ministry spread some rumours of higher casualty rates, with the aim of turning neutral public opinion against the Allies. Indeed, several Swedish papers in late February reported that conservative estimates indicated 100,000 casualties, though "the figure is closer to 200,000." In spite of this, by 10 March the Dresden police had been able only to confirm that some 18,000 people had been killed (though, admittedly, these were early figures.)

In 1963, David Irving published his book The Destruction of Dresden, in which he suggested fatality figures of 135,000. This he came to from taking the estimate of Voigt and (bizarrely) adding one hundred thousand, arguing that Voigt would have knocked the '1' off the total figure because he ended up living in East Germany and therefore had a reason to downplay the casualties. This reasoning is as flimsy as it sounds. He was also upbraided by a gentleman by the name of Theo Miller, who was, in February 1945, a functionary responsible for the clearing of corpses. According to Miller:

Soon after the attack we heard on the radio Joseph Goebbels reporting on the attack on Dresden. He spoke of 300,000 deads [sic.] In your [Irving's] book you mention the figure of 135,000 victims. My records at the Clearing Staff showed 30,000 corpses. If you assume the amount of deads completely burnt etc. would reach 20%, the total figure of victims will not exceed 36,000. Still this figure -- two full divisions -- is terrible enough.

Miller later added to this point by reminding Irving that all recovered bodies were cremated in the Altmarkt, the old town square in Dresden. The problem, he said, was one of mathematics. "Do you believe it possible", he asked Irving, "to burn in about three weeks 110,000 corpses on a fire-grate of railway rails with a dimension of about 70 x 10 metres?" As he pointed out, "If you put [40,000 bodies] down in a line foot to head it is a street of 42 British miles! The inner district of Dresden has only a dimension of 2 times 4 miles!" As a result, Miller, who was in a position to know, insisted that the total fatalities for the Dresden raid could not be more than 50,000, and to his recollections (plus a bit of creative logic) were more likely to be in the range of 30,000 to 36,000. Records from the main Heidefriedhof cemetery in Dresden indicate that 21,271 registered burials (including the ashes of those cremated in the Altmarkt) occurred in the aftermath of the bombing.

The muddying of the waters seems to have come by way of David Irving, noted Holocaust denier and fraud, who has used nearly every opportunity throughout his career to imply that the Allies were as bad as, if not worse than, the Nazis in terms of atrocities. In 1963 he added 100,000 to Voigt's assessment because he said it made sense that Voigt might lie about statistics. Then, he placed great stock in an uncovered document named Tagesbefehl-47 (Order of the Day 47), which had been released by the Propaganda Ministry in 1945, and which listed the number of dead as 202,040, with estimates of the total ranging up to 250,000. In fact, the original TB-47 (as reported by a reservist, Werner Ehlich) listed the number as being 20,204; evidence suggests that Goebbels' functionaries simply added a zero to the end of the figures to inflate them (and thereby influence the neutral press as well.) Even after this source was discredited, and Irving was forced to withdraw from his claims of 250,000 dead, he still clung to the higher numbers. Why? Irving was drawing distinctions. In 1991, for instance, Irving claimed in an interview:

Look at Auschwitz. About 100,000 people died in Auschwitz. Most of them died of epidemics, as we now know, from code-breaking. So even if we're generous and say one quarter of them, 25,000, were killed by hanging or shooting. 25,000 is a crime, that's true. [...] We killed five times that number [i.e. 125,000] in Dresden in one night.

He even attempted to suggest that many of the Jews whose deaths were attributed to the Holocaust were actually victims of the Dresden bombing. In 1989, Irving claimed that Auschwitz was "evacuated by the Germans [so that] there were one million refugees in the streets of Dresden at the time that we burned Dresden to the ground, killing anything between 100,000 and 250,000 of them."

Of course, this is odious and mendacious. Approximately one million people died at Auschwitz, not 100,000, and the majority of them were due to a policy of extermination, not diseases. The Allied bombing of Dresden was not responsible for the deaths attributed to Auschwitz. The best German estimates suggest, as a previous poster noted, between 18,000 and 25,000 dead. This is horrific enough, and no one defends the Dresden raid without also noting its sheer horror. Perhaps, as some have noted, it could be considered a war crime, or perhaps not. But there are reasons why the inflated figures come up, and they are generally not good ones.

Sources

Evans, Richard J. Telling Lies about Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial. London: Verso, 2002.

Irving, David. The Destruction of Dresden. London: Kimber, 1963.

Overy, Richard. The Bombing War: Europe, 1939-1945. London: Allen Lane, 2013.

Süß, Dietmar. Death from the Skies: How the British and the Germans Survived Bombing in World War II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Very informative. Thanks!