Editing Bombing of Dresden (section)

===Kurt Vonnegut===
[[Kurt Vonnegut]]'s novel ''[[Slaughterhouse-Five|Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death]]'' (1969) used some elements from his experiences as a [[prisoner of war]] at Dresden during the bombing. The death toll of 135,000 given by Vonnegut was taken from ''[[The Destruction of Dresden]]'', a 1963 book by [[David Irving|Holocaust denier David Irving]]. In a 1965 letter to ''[[The Guardian]]'', Irving later adjusted his estimates even higher, "almost certainly between 100,000 and 250,000", but these figures were inflated; Irving finally published a correction in ''The Times'' in a 1966 letter to the editor<ref>{{Cite web |title=Letter to the editor, Thursday, July 7th, 1966 |url=http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/General/Dresden/TheTimes070766.html |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170509060100/http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/General/Dresden/TheTimes070766.html |archive-date=9 May 2017}}</ref> lowering it to 25,000, in line with subsequent scholarship. Despite Irving's eventual much lower numbers, and later accusations of generally poor scholarship, the figure popularised by Vonnegut remains in general circulation.

In a 2006 ''Rolling Stone'' article, Vonnegut is quoted recalling "utter destruction" and "carnage unfathomable". The Germans put him and other POWs to work gathering bodies for mass burial. "But there were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Nazis sent in troops with [[flamethrower]]s. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes."<ref name="rolling">{{Cite magazine|first=Douglas|last=Brinkley|title=Vonnegut's Apocalypse|magazine=[[Rolling Stone]]|url=https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11123162/kurt_vonnegut_says_this_is_the_end_of_the_world|date=24 August 2006|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070416061205/http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11123162/kurt_vonnegut_says_this_is_the_end_of_the_world|archive-date=16 April 2007}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |title=No Touch Monkey! |url=https://capnmarrrrk.blogspot.com/2006/09/vonneguts-apocalypse.html |access-date=2023-03-18 |website=capnmarrrrk.blogspot.com |archive-date=18 March 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230318191015/https://capnmarrrrk.blogspot.com/2006/09/vonneguts-apocalypse.html |url-status=dead }}</ref>

In the special introduction to the 1976 [[The Franklin Mint#The Franklin Library|Franklin Library]] edition of the novel, he wrote:
{{blockquote|The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in.<ref>{{cite book|first=Kurt|last=Vonnegut|title=Palm Sunday|publisher=Delacorte Press|location=New York|year=1981|page=302|title-link=Palm Sunday (book)}}</ref>}}

The firebombing of Dresden was depicted in [[George Roy Hill]]'s 1972 [[Slaughterhouse-Five (film)|movie adaptation of Vonnegut's novel]].

Vonnegut's experiences in Dresden were also used in several of his other books and are included in his posthumously published writings in ''[[Armageddon in Retrospect]]''.<ref name="rolling" /> In one of those essays, Vonnegut paraphrased leaflets dropped by the Allies in the days after the bombings as saying: <blockquote>To the people of Dresden: We were forced to bomb your city because of the heavy military traffic your railroad facilities have been carrying.  We realize that we haven't always hit our objectives.  Destruction of anything other than military objectives was unintentional, unavoidable fortunes of war.</blockquote>  Vonnegut notes that many of those railroad facilities were not actually bombed, and those that were hit were restored to operation within several days.<ref>[[Kurt Vonnegut|Vonnegut, Kurt]] (ndg) "Wailing Shall be in All Streets" in (2009) ''[[Armageddon in Retrospect]]'' pp.41–42. London: Vintage Books {{isbn|978-0-099-52408-3}}</ref>

[[Freeman Dyson]], a British-American physicist who had worked as a young man with [[RAF Bomber Command]] from July 1943 to the end of the war,{{sfn|Dyson|2006}} wrote in later years (1979):

{{blockquote|For many years I had intended to write a book on the bombing. Now I do not need to write it, because Vonnegut has written it much better than I could. He was in Dresden at the time and saw what happened. His book is not only good literature. It is also truthful. The only inaccuracy that I found in it is that it does not say that the night attack which produced the holocaust was a British affair. The Americans only came the following day to plow over the rubble. Vonnegut, being American, did not want to write his account in such a way that the whole thing could be blamed on the British. Apart from that, everything he says is true.{{sfn|Dyson|1979|pages=28–29}}}}

In 1995, Vonnegut recalled having discussed the bombing with Dyson, and quotes Dyson as attributing the decision to bomb Dresden to "bureaucratic momentum".<ref>{{Cite web |date=1995 |title=Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller discuss World War II + Q&A (1995) – YouTube |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWXXpMWqG9Q&t=2408s |access-date=18 March 2023 |publisher=C-SPAN}}</ref>