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I listened to the Mark Vonnegut segment and was surprised to hear both you and him make reference to a death toll in Dresden of 140 thousand. This ia a vast exaggeration. According to the very careful analysis done by the Nazi era Dresden police the number was in the vicinity of 25-30 thousand.

That, of course, is not small sum and a terrible tragedy but it is quite far from 140 thousand.

The number has been inflated by Holocaust denier David Irving in order to draw false analogies with the death tolls of Jews at the hands of the Germans. It is part of the denial technique that I call "immoral equivalencies," i.e. the Nazis may have done bad things but the Allies did even worse things.

[BTW, Vonnegut used Irving's book as a resource when writing Slaughter House 5 and, consequently, much of Irving's other shading of truth -- read lies -- have crept into Vonnegut's rendition of the bombing.]

This issue figured prominently in the libel suit David Irving brought against me in London. I discuss it in my book, History on Trial and information on it is available the expert report prepared for the court by Cambridge Professor Richard Evans and can be found at http://www.hdot.org/trial/defense/evans/5.2

Mark - I am my friends and family loooooooooved your father and read all his earlier books in one summer. I wonder if he ever understood the impact of his work on a whole generation. My cousin even put "Bokononist" as her religion on her hospital forms when she had one of her babies

I think I saw Mark Vonnegut on a show on the history channel about Hippies the other day.