Editing Bombing of Dresden (section)

===German===
Development of a German political response to the raid took several turns. Initially, some of the leadership, especially [[Robert Ley]] and [[Joseph Goebbels]], wanted to use the raid as a pretext for abandonment of the [[Geneva Conventions]] on the [[Western Front (World War II)|Western Front]]. In the end, the only political action the German government took was to exploit the bombing for propaganda purposes.{{sfn|Taylor|2005|pp=420–6}} Goebbels is reported to have wept with rage for twenty minutes after he heard the news of the catastrophe, before launching into a bitter attack on [[Hermann Göring]], the commander of the Luftwaffe: "If I had the power I would drag this cowardly good-for-nothing, this Reich marshal, before a court. ... How much guilt does this parasite not bear for all this, which we owe to his indolence and love of his own comforts.{{nbsp}}...".<ref>Victor Reimann (1979) ''Joseph Goebbels: The Man Who Created Hitler''. London, Sphere: 382–3</ref> On 16 February, the [[Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda|Propaganda Ministry]] issued a press release that claimed that Dresden had no war industries; it was a city of culture.{{sfn|Taylor|2005|pp=421–422}} On 25 February, a new leaflet with photographs of two burned children was released under the title "Dresden—Massacre of Refugees", stating that 200,000 had died. Since no official estimate had been developed, the numbers were speculative, but newspapers such as the [[Stockholm]] ''Svenska Morgonbladet'' used phrases such as "privately from Berlin", to explain where they had obtained the figures.{{sfn|Taylor|2005|p=423}} Frederick Taylor states that "there is good reason to believe that later in March copies of—or extracts from—[an official police report] were leaked to the neutral press by Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry ... doctored with an extra zero to increase [the total dead from the raid] to 202,040".{{sfn|Taylor|2004|p=370}} On 4 March, ''[[Das Reich (newspaper)|Das Reich]]'', a weekly newspaper founded by Goebbels, published a lengthy article emphasising the suffering and destruction of a cultural icon, without mentioning damage to the German war effort.{{sfn|Taylor|2005|p=424}}<ref>Evans, Richard. ''Telling Lies about Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial'' p. 165.</ref>

Taylor writes that this propaganda was effective, as it not only influenced attitudes in neutral countries at the time, but also reached the [[House of Commons of the United Kingdom|House of Commons]], when [[Richard Stokes (politician)|Richard Stokes]], a [[Labour Party (UK)|Labour]] [[Member of Parliament (United Kingdom)|Member of Parliament]], and a long term opponent of area-bombing,<ref>Max Hastings (1980) ''Bomber Command'': 171–2</ref> quoted information from the German Press Agency (controlled by the Propaganda Ministry). It was Stokes's questions in the House of Commons that were in large part responsible for the shift in British opinion against this type of raid. Taylor suggests that, although the destruction of Dresden would have affected people's support for the Allies regardless of German propaganda, at least some of the outrage did depend on Goebbels' falsification of the casualty figures.{{sfn|Taylor|2005|p=426}}