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Re: Dresden casualties and an Atom bomb target?
I don't think something like true figures will ever be determined for the Dresden bombing. Hundred of thousands of people (mostly German refugees, but also soldiers, Allied POWs, forced workers, concentration camps prisoners... in 1945 more than 10% of people in Germany weren't German, and their fate is even less recorded than Germans) disapperead in the late month of war, and it will be impossible to find most of them, so allowing any people with an idea behind their mind to give any number about the "body count" in Dresden.
It seems to me that 35 000 dead is now the casualty figure accepted by the most of the "serious" German historians as the most probable.
By the way, most raids in 1945 in Eastern Germany had seen for long the numbers of dead artificially inflated by Soviet or communists, that counted with the raid casualties people that died in the ground battle when Red Army invaded the area. For example, Postdam in April 1945 where the raid casualty figure was reduced from 5000 to 1500. Another example is the USAAF raid on Berlin in early February 1945, often cited as having done 25000 dead and that probably did only 10% of this number.
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