The Dresden Pyres

What is causing all of the smoke/steam here?

DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN [pgs 227, 228 and 239]

... within barely two months the arrival of warmer weather had thrown the salvage work and identification procedures into confusion. A new urgency hastened the steps of the salvage gangs: the real danger of a typhus epidemic.

People searched for many days for missing relatives so that they could be spared the indignity of mass burial in a common grave. But while they departed to search for wheel barrows or carts to remove the bodies to a cemetery to bury them themselves, all too often the tidy-minded SHD squads had already dragged the bodies away and they were already lying stacked onto a jolting cart under a pile of thirty other decaying bodies making its way in procession along the Grossenhainer Strasse to the pine forests north of the city. Who was right? The relatives who wanted a decent burial, or the authorities whose duty it was to avoid epidemics and try to speed up the identification work at the cemeteries? Many of those who saw the endless caravans of horse-drawn carts and trucks trundling northwards out of the city must have silently vowed that they would never let their relatives be carried to their last resting place like that. 
 
‘On Markgraf-Heinrich Strasse three men spoke to me,’ recalled an evacuee from Cologne who was in the city. ‘They were carrying between them a black overcoat on which lay a body. One of them asked me what kind of building that used to be? I told them it used to be a school but it was converted to a military hospital before the raids.
All he could say then was, “I have to bury my wife. I might as well do it here. Later on I saw them hollowing out a shallow grave. There weren’t any coffins, and the man seemed to be a stranger to the city.”’

Some people would not realise, complained the harassed Hanns Voigt, director of the dead persons’ section of the VNZ, that they did not have a personal right to the bodies of their next of kin. In some cases the relatives dug up the corpses from the mass graves, and took them away to family tombs. Thus the statistical position was con- fused still further.

One man provides another instance of the prevailing desire not to let the recovery squads get hold of the remains of next of kin. ‘In order to spare her parents a mass-burial my sister-in-law first of all took her father out of the city on a wheelbarrow to bury him and then returned for her mother. But in the meantime a recovery gang had taken her away. Thus most of the people who died were spirited away and their death certificates read, like that of her two parents, ’Deceased in Dresden. February 13th 1945’.

Some parents cracked under the strain of looking for lost children or husbands. One mother had lost her whole family on this one night, and spent weeks outside her ruined house asking passers-by if they had seen any trace of her two young children or her husband: the eight year old boy, she said, had been wearing a cowboy suit and the girl was dressed as an Indian squaw; both were on their way home from a carnival party.

Such was the effect of the triple blow on Dresden in terms of human suffering.

———————

...Years later, a one-page document of unknown provenance surfaced in west and east Germany, purporting to be the typescript copy of an extract from the police chief’s report on the Dresden raids.
It was dated ‘March 20th, 1955’ and headed ‘Order of the Day No 47’.

Most likely it had been drafted for certain Berlin officials who could be relied on not to keep their tongues still. Not so far [in 1995] found in the original, and bearing no authenticating stamps or signatures, this document gave the death roll in Dresden as 202,040.
‘In order to combat the wild rumours the following is a brief extract from the final report of the police chief of Dresden on the four raids of February 13, 14, and 15, 1945.’
It concluded:
...I.e., precisely ten times the ‘6,895’ cremated according to the March 15th, 1945 document found in east Germany in 1965.

Then we have the problem of why the photographer took photos of the pile of cadavers but why didn't he photograph the supposed cremains? Why are we left with nothing but speculations when a photographer was on site to record what actually happened?