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

by Richard Overy

In 1956, Hans Sperling published in the German official statistical journal Wirtschaft und Statistik (Economy and Statistics) a detailed account of his reconstruction of the dead from bombing. His total of civilians killed came to 570,000 for the wartime German area. Together with 23,000 uniformed dead and an estimated 32,000 POWs and foreign workers, his sum reached 625,000, the figure commonly quoted today for the total killed in Germany by Allied bombing.262 Sperling’s figures rested on speculations about the number of German civilians and foreign workers who died in the last four months of war, and in particular on the number of refugees fleeing westward into the path of the raids. He guessed that 111,000 of them died between January 1945 and the end of the war, including the greatly inflated figure of 60,000 dead in Dresden. This would mean that around 300,000 people were killed in Germany in the final flourish of bombing, a statistic that has no supporting evidence. In 1990 the East German historian Olaf Groehler published revised figures. Although acknowledging the speculative nature of some of his own calculations, particularly for those who died in 1945, Groehler suggested a much lower figure of 420,000 for all categories of victim and for the enlarged German wartime area.