The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe 1940-1945

by Richard Overy

The general of technical troops, Erich Hampe, was sent from Berlin on the morning of February 14 to supervise the reestablishment of rail communications over the surviving railway bridge. He found the burnt-out area of Dresden utterly deserted, except for a llama escaped from the Dresden zoo. Within only two days an emergency rail service had been set up and the wounded could be moved to hospitals in nearby cities.283 Altogether 2,212 were severely wounded and 13,718 lightly, but the death toll was much higher. By mid-March the police president reported that 18,375 dead had been accounted for, but estimated the final figure as likely to be 25,000, the number recently agreed as the upper limit by a historical commission set up by the mayor of Dresden in 2004. The bodies were collected in large pyres and those not already incinerated were burned quickly to avoid a health crisis.284 Out of 220,000 homes in Dresden, 75,000 were totally destroyed and 18,500 severely damaged; there were 18 million cubic meters of rubble. By the end of February, Dresden, a city formerly of 600,000, housing an unknown number of refugees from the east, had only 369,000 inhabitants left.