I can concede a mistake when I make one, this was just a brain fart (which no one called me out about until Stubble said something) that wood was not used. It clearly was used from the pictures
But how much?
this is from HC Blog, quoting historians
The main external combustion agent at Dresden was gasoline, as described by David Irving[176] (emphases added by author):
The Steel girders had been winched out of the ruins of the Renner department store on the Altmarkt and these had been laid across crudely collected piles of sandstone blocks. A gigantic grill over twenty-feet long was being erected. Under the steel girders and bars were poked bundles of wood and straw. On top of the grill were heaped the corpses, four or five hundred at a time, with more straw between each layer. The soldiers trampled up and down on top of this rotting heap, straightening the victims, trying to make room for more, and carefully building the stack. […] Finally gallons of gasoline, sorely needed though it was throughout the whole Reich, were poured over the stacks of victims. A senior officer cleared the Altmarkt square of all unnecessary by-standers, and set a match to the heap.
The procedure was successful in reducing the corpses to ashes, as described by British historian Frederick Taylor (emphases added by author):
Corpses were shipped in and laid out ready for registration and, if possible, identification. Searching for ways of keeping them off the ground – and allowing a draft under the planned funeral pyres – workers found a solution in the wreck of a nearby department store, where massive window shutters had survived the bombing. They carried them from the ruins and set them down on the ground, making, as a contemporary grimly expressed it, "huge grill racks." Large amounts of gasoline were trucked into the sealed city center. Teams poured petrol over the bodies as they lay piled on the shutters. Then the dead were burned at the rate of one pyre per day, with around five hundred corpses per pyre. The task was efficiently done. To reduce that number of human remains to fine ash without access to a purpose-built crematorium is a technically problematic process. It was carried out under the supervision of outside SS experts. They were said to be former staff from the notorious extermination camp at Treblinka. Between February 21 and March 5, when the last pyre was lit, 6,865 bodies were burned on the Altmarkt. Afterward, when the fire cooled down, it was estimated that between eight and ten cubic meters of ash covered the cobbled surface of the medieval square. The SS in charge of the burning had intended to transport the ashes out to the Heath Cemetery in boxes and sacks and bury them containers and all, but municipal parsimony triumphed. In the end the ashes were simply emptied out of their containers and into the prepared pits, thus enabling the valuable sacks and boxes to be reused. [177]
Then there's this primary source , which confirms that the bodies were cremated enough to be called "ash" and boxed or sacked:
The document StAD, Marstall- und Bestattungsamt, Nachtrag I - Schreiben, 4.3.1945, referred to in Matthias Neutzner, Martha Heinrich Acht, pp. 91, 93 and 221, partially quoted in the excerpt from Martha Heinrich Acht transcribed and translated here (emphasis added):
Thousands of corpses still had to be retrieved and buried. A task that the available forces were not up to: thus, after Gauleiter and city administration had agreed, corpses were collected on the sealed-off Altmarkt, registered and finally burned. This happened »in consideration of the quickly progressing decomposition and the existing extraordinary difficulties in retrieving [the corpses] as well as the lack of suitable vehicles for transportation to cemeteries«, was stated in the Order Police's final report. For two weeks the old market place in the city center became a crematorium. On 5 March the corpses collected in the streets had been retrieved, the pyres gone out. »By my estimate, 8 - 10 cubic meters of ash lay on the Altmarkt«, was reported to the city administration the day before. »The Brigadeführer wished that this ash be loaded into recipients (boxes or sacks) and transported to the Heidefriedhof, where it is to be sunk into the earth at the place marked in lead on the map. It is not necessary to leave the boxes or sacks in the soil. You shall thus pour the ash from the transport recipients into the soil, so that the recipients can be reused several times. Transport should start on Tuesday.«
Irving's description implies gasoline was significant here, more so , than wood and straw. I don't see much wood or straw in the photos. I don't see any "cords" or huge piles of wood anywhere around that revisionists would deem necessary. The wood underneath the pyres seems to be planked, etc, meaning it just came from wreckage.
