...A commission of historians confirmed earlier findings that up to 25,000 people died in the firestorm unleashed by British and US bombers on February 13-15, 1945.

The study was meant to resolve a dispute that has raged in Germany for decades, with far-right groups claiming that up to 500,000 people were killed in the attack. Critics of the raids have sought to have them classified as a war crime, arguing that they were strategically unnecessary because Germany was already on its knees, and that they targeted civilians rather than military objectives.

In recent years a consensus has emerged among most historians that between 25,000 and 40,000 were killed in the bombing of one of the most beautiful Baroque cities in Europe. However, the reaction to yesterday's exhaustively researched figure suggested that many in Germany still believe that the death toll was significantly higher...

...During five years of research the Dresden Historians' Commission reviewed records from city archives, cemeteries, official registries and courts and checked them against published reports and witness accounts. The figure of 25,000 matches conclusions reached by local authorities immediately after the war, in 1945 and 1946...

...The inflated death toll was partly the work of the far-right historian David Irving, who in his 1963 book The Destruction of Dresden called the bombing a deliberate war crime. He based his figures on a Nazi document that reported 202,400 dead: the historian Frederick Taylor said the document had been faked by the Nazis, who had simply added a nought to each total...