“In Dresden or Darfur, the numbers are important” (but not in Auschwitz )
- March 21st, 2010
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Before David Irving’s failed libel case against author Deborah Lipstadt a decade ago – she accused him of Holocaust denial – Raul Hilberg, Holocaust scholar and author of The Destruction of the European Jews, was asked by DD Guttenplan why the arithmetic of mass murder remains so important.
“There is,” said Hilberg, “if you don’t want to surrender to nihilism entirely, the matter of a record. Does the record matter? In my judgment it is not discussable, it is not arguable.”
I mention Hilberg because of the final unravelling of another of Irving’s poisonous “facts”: the claim in Irving’s 1963 book The Destruction of Dresden that 135,000 people died in the firebombing of the German city.
In truth, Irving’s Dresden numbers have long been under assault. They were challenged at the Lipstadt trial by the historian Richard Evans, who later accused Irving of “consistent” and “deliberate” falsification. Other historians have concluded over the years that the death toll was much lower.
Now, in what seems likely to be the last word on the matter, a German historical commission set up to examine the precise numbers of those who died has reported. After five years’ work it has established that the toll was around 25,000… a shocking number, but – without diminishing the scale of the death – of quite a different order.
Why this matters so long after the event is not simply because it undermines those on the far right who seek to establish a moral equality between the crimes of Nazi Germany and “Allied crimes”, but also because of Hilberg’s wider point over the “sanctity of facts”. Because the numbers really do matter.
Holocaust deniers like to play with the numbers. Those who seek to deny the genocidal massacre at Srebrenica during the Bosnian war also seek to diminish both the absolute total or redefine the nature of those killed to combatants from civilian men and boys. A similar process has been attempted over Rwandan genocide. And the number who died during the war in Iraq has been one of the fiercest areas of contention. Indeed, it remains disgraceful that we have no accurate count of Iraqi casualties, while we have recorded every dead and injured US and British soldier.
And why this matters is because an accurate accounting – whether of the deaths in Darfur, Dresden or Dachau – supplies real meaning to the narrative of memory and history. It allows us to accurately define events; make comparative judgments both morally and politically, to understand the intention behind acts and the weight of suffering.
None of which means that Dresden was not a terrible act in a terrible war. It does not even mean that it was not a crime, although that remains the subject of continuing historical dispute. But if it was a crime, it was one on a far smaller scale than claimed by the likes of Irving. The truth, to paraphrase, will always set us free.
