The 2,680 tons of bombs dropped laid waste to over 13 square miles of the city, and many of those killed were women, children, the old and some of the several hundred thousand refugees fleeing from the Red Army, which was only 60 miles to the east. ‘They were . . . suffocated, burnt, baked or boiled,’ writes the military historian Allan Mallinson.61 Nor was ‘boiled’ an exaggeration: piles of corpses had to be pulled out of a giant fire-service water tank where people had jumped to escape the flames but instead were boiled alive.
