‘In order to combat the
wild rumours the following is a brief extract from the final report of the police chief
of Dresden on the four raids of February 13, 14, and 15, 1945.’ It concluded: ‘By the
evening of March 20, 1945
202,040 dead, primarily women and children, and been
recovered. It is to be assumed that the total will reach
250,000. Only some thirty
percent of the dead could be identified. The regular police in Dresden (Schutzpolizei)had seventy-three dead, and 276 are missing who must mainly be presumed dead. As
the removal of the dead could not be effected fast enough,
68,650 dead* were cremated
and their ashes interred in a cemetery. As the rumours greatly exceed reality,
public use can be made of these figures. The casualties and damage are grave enough.’26
This document was not seen until after the war. It would be possible to dismiss it as
a crude post-war forgery along the lines of the famous ‘Göring’s last letter to Mr
Churchill’, were it not that with the minor exception of the casualties suffered by
the Dresden police all of the other data provided in the Grosse document tally exactly
with those in Colonel Thierig’s secret report dated March 15, 1945, the police
chief’s report retrieved by the communist authorities in 1965: the times that the
raids began and ended, the police estimates of the numbers of H.E. and fire bombs
dropped, the precise numbers of banks, hotels, etc., destroyed or damaged.