Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death is a 1969 novel by best-selling author Kurt Vonnegut. His most popular work and widely regarded as a classic, it combines science fiction elements with an analysis of the human condition from an uncommon perspective, using time travel as a plot device and the bombing of Dresden in World War II, which Vonnegut witnessed, as a starting point.

"Reporting" aspects

Vonnegut's likened the post-bombing Dresden to the surface of the moon. The Dresden casualty statistics cited in the book were drawn from David Irving's book The Destruction of Dresden, a bestseller in its time, which has since been discredited due to Irving's activities as a well known Holocaust denier.

Related Topics:
David Irving - Holocaust denier

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However since the total amount of high explosive dropped was several times greater than the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb, and since target photographs also showed the destruction of 90% of the city, there is no reason to doubt Vonnegut's account of the destruction of Dresden, of which he claims, personally, to have been a witness (as an American prisoner of war in that city).

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Slaughterhouse-Five also mentioned in passing that homosexual men were among the people targeted for death in the Nazi Holocaust, something that was also not widely known at the time.

Related Topics:
Homosexual - Holocaust

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