The main topic of this thread is was Dresden justified. I mentioned above about a new book on Dresden by Frederick Taylor
based on information obtained out of East Germany since the reunification. I have done a bit more digging about and he maintains the following:
(This is a big post please, please, please read it all; it might change your whole view on Dresden!)
Taylor maintains Dresden was a legitimate military target because:-
1)It was a Nazi stronghold
On Jan. 1, 1945, unknown to the people of Dresden, their city had been secretly classified (by the Nazis) as a military strongpoint, a 'defensive' area (Verteidigungsbereich). So declared by none other than the Army Chief of Staff, General Heinz Guderian.
2)It had over 120
war machine factories making aircraft engines, bomb sights, fuses, radios and vast quantities of bullets.
As the 1942 Dresdner Jahrbuch (Dresden Yearbook) boasted: Anyone who knows Dresden only as a cultural city, with its immortal architectural monuments and unique landscape environment, would rightly be very surprised to be made aware of the extensive and versatile industrial activity, with all its varied ramifications, that make Dresden... one of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich.
3)The Russians knew of its importance as a military target and requested its bombing specifically.
4)It was a communications bottleneck for moving troops from the Western to the Eastern fronts (and vice versa). It had many Wehrmacht troops in it at any one time
The importance of Dresden as a transit point for military traffic can be seen from the figures for October 1944, when the Western Allies' advance from Normandy was starting to slow down, but the fronts in the east and southeast were coming perilously close, and east-west movements of forces were heavy. A total of twenty-eight military trains, altogether carrying almost twenty thousand officers and men, were in transit through Dresden-Neustadt each day.
...After the war, an American former prisoner of war wrote:
The night before the RAF/USAAF raids on February 13.14, we were shunted into the Dresden marshaling yard, where for nearly twelve hours German troops and equipment rolled into and out of Dresden. I saw with my own eyes that Dresden was an armed camp: thousands of German troops, tanks and artillery and miles of freight cars loaded with supplies supporting and transporting German logistics towards the east to meet the Russians.
Propaganda by the Nazis
Goebbals immediately put it about that 350,000 to 400,000 people had died. Taylor has determined that the figure is much nearer 25,000 to 40,000.
This is still a lot of course but some of the reasons for this were: a)The Nazis had just moved much of the air defence east to help fight the Russians. b)Virtually no underground shelters had been built for the people (only a few for the Nazis themselves). c)The weather was, unfortunately for Dresden, perfect at the time.
The Nazis maintained there were up to 2 million refugees in the city at the time. More bunkum there was only a few tens of thousands says Taylor.
And finally, for those people who insist on making out Dresden was so much worse than anything else in the war:
It is rarely mentioned that almost exactly the same number of Soviet citizens died as a result of bombing during the Second World War as Germans: around half a million. Why are there no shelves of books emotively recalling the fate of the forty thousand human beings- many of them women and children and refugees- who died in the Luftwaffe's systematic bombing of Stalingrad, which began with a thousand-bomber raid and lasted over four days in August 1942, even before the siege had begun? Or in the bombing of Minsk, which included the central hospital? Was it morally right for eight hundred thousand Russians, again mostly civilians, to die by bombing, shelling, and starvation in the German siege of Leningrad? The conventions of war allow almost any tactic of destruction against a defended fortress town and the people within it once it has refused to surrender. But is such a thing, on such a scale, more or less moral compared with the bombing of Dresden?
.. just once again to remind you that 2/3 of the German people DID NOT vote for Hitler.
... 
