AUSCHWITZ

Should the Allies have bombed therailroad facilities and crematoriums atAuschwitz and other death camps?

Viewpoint: Yes, the Allies should have bombed the death camps and moreaggressively opposed the Holocaust in order to save lives and send a mes-sage of condemnation to the Nazis.

Viewpoint: No, Allied bombing raids on the death camps would have beendifficult without inflicting heavy losses on the inmates and would have slowedthe war effort by diverting airplanes needed for military targets.

The failure of the Allies to bomb the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentrationcamp is one of the central issues of the Holocaust. Such attacks, howeverimpossible as they were in the early years of World War II, certainly seemedfeasible by mid 1944. In particular, U.S. heavy bombers based in Italy regu-larly struck targets in the same region. Two areas of analysis shape currentdiscussion. One addresses technicalities: could in fact heavy bombers havehit targets within the camps, as opposed to making area attacks that wouldhave caused heavy casualties among the inmates? Did the Allies possessadequate intelligence to plan a raid, or series of raids, in which the potentialfor success was balanced by the losses inflicted by German air defenses?More fundamentally, what would have defined success: a mass breakout,destruction of camp infrastructure, or disruption of camp routines? Or werelives to be risked and lost making what amounted to a "feel-good" gesture?

The other level of interpretation addresses the question of will. How widewas the knowledge and how deep the understanding of what was being doneat Auschwitz? Is the moral and cultural centrality of that particular site a post-war construction, that contemporaries cannot be expected to have shared?Was the effort and risk of bombing regarded as too great on a basis of ratio-nal calculation, or was it that the Jews were so marginalized and powerlessthat their fate simply did not register with Allied decision makers?

Somewhat outside the main framework of this discussion, but no lesssignificant for that, is a strain of analysis that focuses on the Nazis. Giventheir determination to fight to the finish and their commitment to destroying asmany Jews as possible, the specific targeting of Auschwitz, or the railroadsleading to it was unlikely to have had significant effect. The only consequentaction that would save even a remnant of Europe's Jews was to end thewar—and as quickly as possible.

Yet, when all is said and done, the fact remains that sometimes ges-tures—symbolic actions—have an importance that transcends their immedi-ate consequences. A policy statement on the mass murder of Jews, madewith even a few tons of bombs on Auschwitz, would have been difficult forboth victims and executioners to misunderstand. The absence of such astatement speaks for itself.

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Viewpoint:Yes, the Allies should have bombedthe death camps and moreaggressively opposed theHolocaust in order to save lives andsend a message of condemnation tothe Nazis.

By the summer of 1943 many in the Alliedhigh command were aware of the Final Solution,the German operation to eliminate Jews fromEurope. Eyewitnesses to activities in the concentra-tion camps, several of them carrying film, had man-aged to reach the safety of Allied lines. Jewishorganizations based out of Palestine and Londonhad accumulated significant evidence and passed iton to British and American intelligence operatives.As Russia went on the offensive, German POWsand civilians who had lived under the oppressiveNazi yoke corroborated reports of death-campoperations. By the autumn of 1944, Soviet forcesoverran several death-camp and massacre sites, suchas Babi Yar, and opened them to the world forinspection. Intelligence operatives inside occupiedEurope filed alarming reports of mass deportationsand railroad cattle cars loaded with the con-demned, which received the highest shipping prior-ities. Polish freedom fighters hiding in Warsawreported the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto,after the valiant but vain uprising of Jews in thattormented city during April and May of 1944, andprovided, as well, the names of infamous deathcamps: Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald.Even the Catholic Church, which failed to launchany type of active, vigorous response to the Holo-caust, secretly passed reports through its networkof priests and nuns that not just concentrationcamps, but camps specifically designed for extermi-nation, were in operation.

The only postwar defense that has anyshred of credibility regarding the total lack ofresponse by the Allies to this atrocity is thatthey were not fully aware of the horrifyingextent of the operation. Even that defense ishollow, especially for the highest levels of com-mand in the English government. One Britishofficial even stated that Adolf Hitler was actu-ally doing the world a favor by ridding Europeof Jews, a comment that in and of itself is evi-dence enough of just how much was known.His punishment was exile to a remote foreignposting.

The question of exactly "who knew what andwhen did they know it?" still needs extensive study.It is impossible to conceive that the U. S. presidentor British prime minister were not fully briefedabout the Holocaust by early 1944. If informationwas indeed reaching Allied lines and top elected

officials were not aware of it, then where did it stopand why?

Throughout the war, but particularly in 1944-1945, when the Holocaust neared its ghastly con-clusion, repeated appeals were made by a variety ofgroups to launch some sort of "special" operation.Several plans were put forward, originating fromspecial-operations units, Zionist groups, and repre-sentatives of resistance movements. The most radi-cal was a suggestion to drop weapons andpersonnel directly into a camp with the intent oftriggering a rebellion. The gesture would have beensuicidal for those involved on the ground, but itmight have at least afforded the opportunity for thecondemned to go down fighting. It was rejectedout of hand by British Bomber Command with thestatement that no air crew would ever be sent on aone-way mission, or transport personnel on such amission.

Less-radical proposals included the strafingand bombing of camp perimeters to take down thebarbed-wire fences and guard posts, combined withweapons drops and destruction of rail lines leadingto the camps. Again Bomber Command refused allsuch operations on the grounds that such a gesturewas futile and would divert precious equipmentfrom the far more important objective of destroy-ing the German capacity to wage war, claiming thatending the war sooner promised to save more ofthose condemned.

The Churchill government refused to directlysupport such operations, as did the Rooseveltadministration. The only direct efforts in relationto prisoners held in German-occupied territory wasthe airdropping of supplies on Allied prisoner-of-war camps in the final days of the war. A couple ofspecialized missions were initiated but wereextremely limited in scope, the most famous beinga strike launched against a Gestapo headquarters inFrance where prisoners from the Resistance facedtorture and execution. Not one mission, not onebomb, not one volunteer commando, however, wasdropped on a German death camp.

Such a glaring refusal to directly attack theGerman death camps begs for an answer. The claimof ignorance is false: postwar analysis of data indi-cates a clear knowledge by the last year and a half ofthe war that something sinister was taking place inrelationship to the Jews inside occupied Europe.Nearly all of Europe, as far east as the old Sovietfrontier, had been meticulously photographedfrom the air. The vast Auschwitz compound, withits twin sites of industrial complexes and the nearbydeath camp, were repeatedly photographed andanalyzed.

The argument that precious war assets couldnot be diverted to an attack on death-camp rail-roads might in some small way be valid, especiallyduring the brutal period of struggle for air suprem-acy over Germany in late 1943 through the spring

HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 5: WORLD WAR II, 1943-1945 57

HAYING THEKNOWLEDGE

On $ August 1342, Dr. Gwhart Rlegner, the Work) Jewish Congress rep-resentative in Bern, Switzerland, sent a secret telegram to the U.S. StateDepartment and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of New York. Wise was a leaderof ifle il&fcish oWirftiinity in America as well as a friend of PresidentFrankiinD,fia6s6y$tt. The Riegner cable asserted that:

There has tseen and Is being considered in Hitler'sheadquarters £ plan to exterminate all Jews from Ger-many and Gterwan controlled areas in Europe after theyhave been concentrated tn the east. The numberinvolved is said to be between three and a half and fourmillions aftd t̂he object to permanently settle the Jewishquestion in Europe.

The US- State Department, however, delayed giving this message toWise because it tva^s considered to have unsubstantiated information. Infact, the government actively attempted to stop any similar future mes-sages offafnatirtg ftim private sources. In a communique dated 10 Feb-ruary 1943, UfMjersecretaty of State Sumner Wells informed Americanconsulates inneooat countries of the new official policy:

In the future we would suggest that you do notaccept reports submitted to you to be transmitted to pri-vate persons In the United States unless such action isadvisable because of extraordinary circumstances. Suchprivate messages circumvent neutral countries' censor-ship and it is felt that by sending them we risk the possi-bility that steps would necessarily be taken by the neutralcountries to curtail or forbid our means of communicationfor confidential official matter.

Source: Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The Historyof the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust MemorialMuseum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), pp. 161-162.

of 1944. An argument can even be made that thedemands of supporting Operation Overlord, theAllied invasion of Normandy in June 1944,required full commitment of all air assets up to themiddle of the summer of 1944. After air superior-ity had clearly been won, however, and long-rangefighter protection ranged clear into Poland, it wasincreasingly evident that the nature of the war hadchanged. An effort could have been made againstthe camps. It was no longer a desperate defensivestruggle for survival. Even the most secret ofdreaded fears—that the Nazis were on the verge ofdeploying an atomic weapon—was realized to behollow by the end of 1944. This overarching con-cern, known only to the highest circles, that everyday was crucial and nothing could divert the Alliesfrom the effort to beat the Axis to the bomb nolonger held. The war at this point was simply a mat-ter of driving a stake through the heart of Nazismwhile saving as many lives as possible.

Air strikes on the rail lines to the death camps,as well as against the fences and guard boxes, andeven dropping weapons into the compoundswould have served several purposes. First and fore-most, it would have afforded a chance, no matterhow slim, for some inmates to survive and fightback. The argument that these actions would havetriggered a blood purge belies the fact that in thefinal weeks of the war Schutzstoffeln (SS) criminalsmurdered hundreds of thousands in a final orgy ofkilling in order to "cover their tracks," and evenmore perversely, to fulfill their mission to "de-Jew"Europe, even as the Reich went down to defeat.Bombing would have seriously disrupted the preci-sion machine-like manufacturing of death—a meretwo or three days interruption of crucial railwaynetworks to the death camps would have meantpossible salvation for thousands. Perhaps mostimportant, it would have served clear notice to theNazi hierarchy that the Allies were fully aware oftheir crimes and would take whatever steps neces-sary to stop them.

Another disturbing mystery was the completelack of clear communication to the Nazis that theAllies knew of their crimes. This lack of open out-rage and direct challenge was seen by some withinthe Nazi high command as a tacit message of con-currence with their Final Solution. Given the pow-erful system of propaganda available to the Allies,such as the legendary BBC broadcasts that tens ofmillions listened to, the silence on this front is deaf-ening. A nightly reading of a list of death campsand a description of what was being done therecould have had a shattering effect. The naming oftowns adjoining the camps, informing citizens ofwhat was being done nearby, would have destroyedtheir defense that they knew nothing, in spite ofthe stench, smoke, and rain of human ashes.

A direct challenge to the German peopleshould have been offered, clearly informing themwhat their government was doing, rather thanallowing them to hide behind the veil of silence.The Nazi regime was, in fact, sensitive to publicopinion. When word leaked out about the firstFinal Solution, the liquidation of the mentally andphysically handicapped within their own country,some courageous individuals protested and thegovernment was forced to stop, though it resumedthe program later with greater secrecy. The farwider outrage of mass exterminations acrossEurope, if publicly revealed, surely would havedrawn a response.

Would such messages have made a differenceto the victims sent to the camps? Yes, because theentire German system was built on a cynical cultiva-tion of hope, right down to the packing of luggageand sending of postcards to perpetuate the myththat victims were simply being sent to live in otherareas. The horror had to be kept hidden until thatfinal second when the showerheads proved false,

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the airtight doors locked, and the gas pellets fell.This subterfuge was maintained so that the victimsnever had a chance to resist, for they outnumberedeach of their murderers by the hundreds. Onemight argue that the victims were powerless andprior knowledge would have been needlessly cruel.Rather, had they known their fate, some mighthave chosen to flee or fight back rather than to goquietly to the grave or ovens.

Could the Holocaust have continued if allEurope, Gentile and Jew, knew that this was notrelocation, but genocide? One of the truly greatfears of the Schutzstaffeln (SS) was that wordwould indeed leak out and that every Jew, and pos-sibly even some of their Gentile neighbors, ratherthan following a false hope would meet theirenemy instead with a knife or gun.

A one-day diversion of several bomber groupsmight have saved many doomed lives in the Ger-man death camps. Air strikes on the fences andparachute bundles laden with weapons of ven-geance might have seemed like a message of salva-tion to the condemned. To the murderers it wouldhave sent a message of damnation, an acknowledg-ment that the secret was out and even if they sur-vived that day they would know that the Allieswere coming for them. A week of radio broadcastsabout the Holocaust might have done more to set

Europe ablaze than all the years of coded messagesto the few thousand resistance fighters in France.Many who died in the camps must have wonderedif the world had forgotten them. The question stilllingers.

-WILLIAM R. FORSTCHEN,MONTREAT COLLEGE

Viewpoint:No, Allied bombing raids on thedeath camps would have beendifficult without inflicting heavylosses on the inmates and wouldhave slowed the war effort bydiverting airplanes needed formilitary targets.

The question of Allied indifference to theHolocaust during World War II has increasinglycome down to the subject of launching air raidsagainst the concentration camps. It is generallyrecognized that ground operations, even on thelevel of commando raids, were for practical pur-

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poses impossible against facilities located deep inthe political/geographic heart of the ThirdReich. It requires, moreover, little technicalknowledge to see that at the height of the exter-mination campaign, in 1942-1943, the Britishand Americans had no aircraft with the rangeand survivability to hit targets deep in Polandand return to any existing bases. Shuttle bomb-ing too was impossible when the front line of theRusso-German War was on the Volga River.

What about 1944 and 1945, when the Allieshad airfields in Italy, when the CombinedBomber Offensive was running out of strategictargets, when the P-51 Mustang could escortheavy bombers the length and breadth of theReich? The work camps of Auschwitz-Birkenauin particular were running at full capacity. TheReich's railway lines still scheduled trainloads ofJews from the west and south—in particular fromHungary, which only fell under full Nazi controlin 1944. The abortive Warsaw Easing of the Pol-ish Home Army in 1944 was supported by airstrikes. Surely a few planes might have beenspared for an alternate target that cost no fewerlives in the same period. U.S. heavy bombersflew strikes against chemical plants only a fewmiles away from Auschwitz. Could not one ortwo of those missions have been redirected?Arguments that such attacks might have costthousands of prisoners' lives are answered—oftenby camp survivors—that the dying would haveblessed the names of the men striking at theirmurderers. At the end of the day, the field seemsmastered by the argument, expressed in manyvariations, that "it should have been tried."

Looking at the other side of the question,however, three elements stand out in support ofan Allied decision that considered in isolationseems callous at best, anti-Semitic at worst. Thefirst is on the technical/institutional level: howbest could such missions have been undertaken?A favorite scenario involves using Royal AirForce (RAF) Mosquitoes in the low-level role.These planes demolished Gestapo headquartersin Oslo and Copenhagen. They blew in the wallsof the Amiens prison. Could they not replicatethose performances in Poland? The best answerinvolves complex analyses of ranges to the tar-gets, and the nature of the objectives themselves,and indicates that the Mosquito was no super-weapon able to destroy gas chambers mostly con-structed below ground. What about U.S.medium and heavy bombers? Even if their accu-racy was not as great as claimed, surely theycould hit something the size of the Auschwitzmurder facilities. In an excellently reasoned essayin War in History (1999), Rondall Rice, a servingofficer of the U.S. Air Force, makes a strong casethat a daylight raid conducted by a single groupof heavy bombers in the late summer of 1944

stood a good chance of destroying the Birkenaukilling facilities—without either a hecatomb ofcamp inmates or heavy losses to the bombers.

That last point is important. The U.S. ArmyAir Force prided itself on never turning backfrom a mission, but it took as much pride in notrisking or sacrificing its air crews unnecessarily."Sideshows," missions not perceived as having adirect positive effect on the war's outcome, wereseldom approved, particularly in the war's lateryears. It is irrelevant that an attack on Auschwitzmight well have produced more than enough vol-unteers—by no means all of them Jewish—to crewtwice the number of aircraft needed. Rice makesthe point that an operation such as attackingAuschwitz was "outside the box" of thought anddoctrine in the U.S. Strategic Air Forces. It waswithin their capacities—but not to the extent thatit would be considered routine. It would requiresuperior orders, that is, high-level military and/or political intervention.

Such intervention was not forthcoming—not least because even as late as 1944, if the out-come of the war in Europe may have been cer-tain, the path to victory was not. Allied air forcesdid not achieve clear superiority over the Luft-waffe (German Air Force) until the summer of1944—and the timing is much clearer in hind-sight than it appeared to the generals orderingthe missions. Allied air power, moreover, wasengaged in campaigns against German transpor-tation networks, oil refineries, and flying-bombsites. The latter were significant for their impacton the morale of a war-weary Britain—and evenmore so for their implied threat of worse to fol-low. It is clear in hindsight that Nazi boasts of"wonder weapons" were hollow. In the fall of1944, few in responsible leadership positionswere willing to take such a gamble.

It is worth noting as well that the "trans-portation campaign" remained subject wellafter D-Day to harsh criticism for generatingsmall results at a high price in collateral dam-age to France and Belgium. That the generalswould have directed any significant number ofstrikes against secondary lines leading fromBudapest to nowhere more important thansouthern Poland is correspondingly unlikely.That their superiors would have made it anorder is even less plausible.

This line of reasoning leads to a third gov-erning factor. The argument that the best way tosave Jewish lives was to end the war has beenheld up to ridicule through statistics. Since wellbefore V-E Day the vast majority of Jews underNazi control were dead, the case is consideredmoot. Yet, at the same time it is increasingly clearthat nothing short of final, annihilating defeatcould have deterred either the direct perpetratorsof the Final Solution or their ideologically

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driven masters. The kinds of damage even asuccessful raid, such as those postulated byRice, could inflict were well within the capac-ity and will of those German officials on thespot to repair—and to keep repairing if thebombers returned. Given the fact, recentlyhighlighted by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen inHitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Ger-mans and the Holocaust (1996), that thousandsof Jews died during the war's final weeks inrandom marches across a shrinking Reich asthe camps closed down, was the risk of even afew days' prolongation of the war a worth-while exchange for a symbolic gesture?

Since 1945 analysis, myth, and plain sec-ond-guessing increasingly overshadow the experi-ences of World War II. In evaluating the Alliedfailure to strike Hitler's concentration campsfrom the air once that became technically—andtheoretically—feasible, it must be rememberedthat modern war is not a postmodern experi-ence. It is not a sequence of constructions—and itoffers few second chances.

-DENNIS SHOWALTER,COLORADO COLLEGE

References

Stuart G. Erdheim, "Could the Allies HaveBombed Auschwitz-Birkenau?" Holocaustand Genocide Studies (Fall 1997): 129-170;

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Execu-tioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust(New York: Knopf, 1996);

Jeffrey Gurock, ed., America, American Jews, andthe Holocaust (New York: Routledge, 1998);

James H. Kitchens III, "The Bombing ofAuschwitz Reexamined," Journal of MilitaryHistory, 58 (April 1994): 233-266;

Richard H. Levy, "The Bombing of AuschwitzRevisited: A Critical Analysis," Holocaustand Genocide Studies (Winter 1996): 267-298;

Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Birenbaum,eds., The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should theAllies Have Attempted It? (New York: St.Martin's Press, 1999);

Verne W. Newton, ed., FDR and the Holocaust(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996);

Rondall Rice, "Bombing Auschwitz: U.S. 15thAir Force and the Military Aspects of a Sur-prise Attack," War in History, 6 (1999):205-229;

William D. Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue: Whythe Democracies Could Not Have Saved MoreJews from the Nazis (London & New York:Routledge, 1997);

William Temple, Nazi Massacre of the Jews & Oth-ers: Some Practical proposals for immediate Res-cue Made By the Archbishop Of Canterburyand Lord Rochester in Speeches on March 23rdin the House of Lords (London: Gollancz,1943);

David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews:America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (NewYork: Pantheon, 1984).

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