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Irving Finds Cache Of German Transcripts
I methodically read each one, and type a copy of those messages I
may need for
my Heinrich Himmler biography. Hard sledding, but it is worth it.
Their value as a source is immense -- nothing here has been written
just for post-war window-dressing (as some 1944 and 1945 documents
clearly have been): nobody guessed that we would ever be reading these
secret code messages.
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Over 2,000 Pages On Dresden
Back at the Public Record Office I continue to turn the pages of
the immense volumes of decoded SS and police messages, released from
top secret files only a few years ago. I have now read nearly fifty
volumes and I have reached the year 1945. This particular volume has
over 2,000 pages of flimsy paper.
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Hanns Voigt Was Dresden Chief Of Missing Persons
AS THE day draws on I come across a document which I only
half-suspected I might ever find. In 1961, when I was writing my first
book "The
Destruction of Dresden", I was confidentially approached by
a German schoolteacher, Hanns Voigt; he said that after the horrific
British air raid, he was put in charge of Dresden's Missing Persons
Bureau, Abteilung Tote - the Deceased Section. He built an
immense card index, and he kept a diary; and he estimated for me that
the final death toll in Dresden would have reached 135,000.
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Dresden Officials
Other city officials gave the same kind of estimates.
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A New Breed Of Historians
Pictured here is Jakob Levy interviewing Stella Pinski,
a Holocaust survivor.
Only last year a German Government commission
consisting of, not just conformist but kow-towing,
line-toeing, bowing-and-scraping historians and
Nickeseln, agreed that the death roll in the 1945
holocaust in Dresden was far lower, "only 25,000" (or, if
possible, even less).
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Germany's High Council Of Jews And Other Historians Are
Angry
Voigt's estimate was a thorn in the side of both German
Governments -- both east and west. They had always played down,
even trivialised, the air raid casualty figures caused by the
British saturation bombing.
Without doing any in-depth research -- such scholars are far
too important for that -- they relied on the police chief's early
March 1945 report (which in fact I was the first to find), because
it indicated lower figures than Hanns Voigt's for dead and
missing.
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Famous Jewish Historian
Professor Richard "Skunky" Evans
vilified Voigt; he implied that Voigt was a liar, he
questioned whether the Missing Persons bureau had ever
existed, and he called him a Nazi with an agenda.
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Early Official Report
Re: Missing Persons Situation in Dresden Air Raid
Defence region.
The Lord Mayor of Dresden City has established (a) a
Central Bureau for Missing Persons and nine Missing
Persons registries;
(b)
eighty- to one-hundred thousand missing-person
notifications are estimated to have been registered so
far;
(c) 9,720 missing-person notifications have been confirmed
as fatalities; (d) to date, information on twenty thousand
missing person cases has been given out; (e) accurate
statistical data possibly only later.
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So Voigt was telling
the truth.
Even the "hundred thousand" figure for those
reported missing must be an under-estimate. There
were over half a million homeless refugees in the
streets of Dresden, fleeing the Red Army siege of
Breslau to the East. Whole refugee families must have
been engulfed by the Dresden holocaust, with nobody
surviving to report them as "missing".
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There Was No Way To Identify The Bodies
Another thing seems brutally clear: those
listed as "missing" -- in addition to those bodies
formally identified and buried or incinerated by
this date -- were never going to return. To use
the words of the telegram I found yesterday (see
above) they were dead, "carbonised," and
unidentifiable.
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