Huge snakes slithered between the feet of the fleeing. Hospital trains, still filled with wounded soldiers from the front, were burning and tried to pull out, in the process severing limps from young children who had sought cover from the bombs underneath. Those few who managed to escape the air attack were hounded later from the air by diving planes to kill off any fleeing survivors. When all was said and done, the column of smoke could be seen 50 miles away and stood 15,000 feet high. More than three-fifths of Dresden was destroyed by bombing raids lasting more than 14 hours.
Nobody knows for sure.
Most honest estimates range from 350,000 to 500,000 dead - many of whom were liquefied into a yellied mass that melted into the asphalt of the roads or were left in piles of ashes amid a city almost totally in ashes and ruins. Just think of Hiroshima. That city's atom casualties were 71,879. During the entire war, England suffered less than 50,000 casualties from bombings. The clean-up crews flowing in after the Allied murderers were gone could not bury all of the dead.