Sorry the 20 figure threw me as it's the figure generally associated with Stalin. Of the Russian civilians, up to 2.5m were Jewish and are often counted twice in Holocaust and total figures. The military figures also include soldiers who never returned home, shipped by Stalin to Siberia, running into millions.
Whilst that is true..in the case of WW2..the history books were written more accurately than any war before(and possibly since)and whilst atrocities were not only committed by the Nazis,they pale into insignificance in comparison to Hitlers fascists,the bigger crime would have been not being prepared to consider any means to stop the Nazis winning the war.
I don't think anyone is arguing against the ends, but plenty of historians have questioned both the military strategy and morality of the post mid-1943 bombing of civilian targets in Germany
True that some modern writers argue that,with hindsight it's easy to say,especially to sell a book..there's not a lot of point in just rehashing the generally acknowledged view,that might be a cynical view,but some writers revel in revisionism..no matter how ludicrous..Wiki David Irving..a holocaust denier who was probably(to my knowledge at least) the first to suggest the area bombing of Germany was a war crime.It's easy to suggest that the war was over in mid 43,but in actual fact allied troops didn't land in France for another year,and were bogged down in a bloody campaign in Italy,all this time was used by the Nazis to butcher the decent people of Europe,whether the last raids of the war were militarily justified I'm not sure,but certainly the survivors of the death camps were delighted to see the campaign going on from behind the wire,right up until the end.
Good points, and I've agreed with others who have made them elsewhere. But it is staggering that the Blitz is so scarred on our national consciousness, yet when put in to context we killed nearly as many German civilians in one week in only one city as were killed in Britain during the entirety of the war.
The only reason being though that the Nazis never developed the military hardware to do it,had they had that..and not taken on Russia in the meantime,I'm sure they would have bombed us as flat as we did them,but I agree a lot of facts are missed..one fact (I certainly think I read somewhere)was that the most bombed City in Britain was Hull,apparently it suffered much greater damage in percentage terms than did London,but the papers just reported an 'East Coast town was bombed again'
At the end of the day though, war is war and either side will do anything to gain the upper hand. If that means carpet bombing civilians then that's what either side will do. The Nazis had to be stopped at that is what it took. Might not be right or fair, but neither is life. Even more so in wartime.