Quote:
Originally Posted by Laurent Rizzotti
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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Indeed, and the same occured with other losses, eg. Soviets claimed 4,5 million people killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau. This propaganda figure was only quite recently reduced to confirmed and much more realistic about 1,5 million. The others did it as well, eg. Germans exagerrated number of bodies found at Katyn (actually 'overclaimed bodies' were at another locations and recovered only a few years ago), another accepted number being I believe 2 millions expulsed Germans, the number coming from Churchill's speach.
The one must take any such numbers with extreme caution.