The point I'm trying to make is that the actual number is irrelevant; at some point an atrocity becomes so large, of such a magnitude of cruelty, that the numbers of dead just becomes statistics. That's what you're arguing: Statistics. Not the fact that those statistics represent the deliberate burning of men, women and children, machine-gunning civilians en masse, and destroying an entire city of little or no military value.
I conceded that it was a tragedy right off the bat. What you seem unwilling to concede is that your source apparently saw a need to inflate numbers or even invent 'facts' (or repeat invented claims). For instance, the strafing incident:
"Strafing of civilians has become a traditional part of the oral history of the raids since a March 1945 article in the Nazi-run weekly newspaper Das Reich claimed that this had occurred.[63] For example, British historian Alexander McKee in Dresden 1945 (1982) quotes eyewitnesses who state that strafing did occur.[64] According to an RAF webpage on the history of RAF Bomber Command, "[p]art of the American Mustang-fighter escort was ordered to strafe traffic on the roads around Dresden to increase the chaos and disruption to the important transportation network in the region."[65] (see also Yeager's description of similar Second World War missions)
Historian Götz Bergander, who was himself an eyewitness of the raids, found no reports on strafing for 13–15 February, neither by any of the pilots nor by the German military and police. He asserted in Dresden im Luftkrieg (1977) that only a few tales of civilians being strafed were reliable in details, and all were related to the daylight attack on 14 February. He concluded that some memory of eyewitnesses was real, but that it had misinterpreted the firing in an airfight as being deliberately aimed at people on the ground.[66] Historian Helmut Schnatz found, in 2000, that there was an explicit order to RAF pilots not to strafe civilians on the way back home from Dresden. He also reconstructed timelines with the result that strafing would have been almost impossible due to lack of time and fuel.[67] Frederick Taylor in Dresden (2004), basing most of his analysis on the work of Bergander and Schnatz, concludes that no strafing took place, although some stray bullets from an aerial dog fight may have hit the ground and been mistaken for strafing by those in the vicinity.[68] The official historical commission collected 103 detailed eyewitness accounts and let the local bomb disposal services search according to their assertions: They did not find any bullets or fragments thereof which would have been used by planes of the Dresden raids.[69]"
^ Götz Bergander: Dresden im Luftkrieg, 1998, p. 204-209
^ Helmut Schnatz, Tiefflieger über Dresden? Legenden und Wirklichkeit (Böhlau, 2000, ISBN 3-412-13699-9), pp. 96 and 99
^ Taylor 2005, Appendix A. "The Massacre at Elbe Meadows".
^ Neutzner 2010, pp. 71-80.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_IIYou say that it's up to me to prove your un-sourced article wrong. Why isn't it up to you to back your article and prove it right .... without the 'well, the details don't really matter' bit?
Having said that, if the details don't matter then why does the article go to great ends to manipulate them?
Where is this article from? Who wrote it?
