In the decades since the war, large variations in the claimed death toll have fuelled the controversy, though the numbers themselves are no longer a major point of contention among historians. In March 1945, the German government ordered its press to publish a falsified casualty figure of 200,000 for the Dresden raids, and death tolls as high as 500,000 have been claimed. The city authorities at the time estimated up to 25,000 victims, a figure that subsequent investigations supported, including a 2010 study commissioned by the city council. One of the main authors responsible for inflated figures being disseminated in the West was Holocaust denier David Irving, who subsequently announced that he had discovered that the documentation he had worked from had been forged, and the real figures supported the 25,000 number.