Auschwitz bombing debate

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This is one of a series of aerial reconnaissance photographs of the Auschwitz concentration camp taken between April 4, 1944 and January 14, 1945 by a de Havilland Mosquito photo-reconnaissance aircraft operated by the South African Air Force. This image of Auschwitz I was taken on April 4, 1944. From the National Archives, courtesy of the USHMM. More images are available from the Nizkor Project. [1]

The issue of why Auschwitz concentration camp was not bombed by the Allies during World War II continues to be explored by historians and Holocaust survivors. Michael Berenbaum has argued that it is not only a historical question, but "a moral question emblematic of the Allied response to the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust ..." ^[1]

David Wyman, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Massachusetts, has asked: "How could it be that the governments of the two great Western democracies knew that a place existed where 2,000 helpless human beings could be killed every 30 minutes, knew that such killings actually did occur over and over again, and yet did not feel driven to search for some way to wipe such a scourge from the earth?" ^[2] During his second visit to the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem on January 10 2008, U.S. President George W. Bush said to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, "We should have bombed it."^[3][4]

[edit] What the Allies knew

The Polish Army Captain Witold Pilecki was the only known person to volunteer to be imprisoned at Auschwitz concentration camp. He spent a total of 945 days at Auschwitz before his escape. From October 1940, he sent numerous reports about camp and genocide to Polish resistance Home Army Headquarters in Warsaw through the resistance network he organized in Auschwitz, and beginning with March 1941, Pilecki's reports were being forwarded via the Polish resistance to the British government in London. These reports were a principal source of intelligence on Auschwitz for the Western Allies. Pilecki hoped that either the Allies would drop arms or the Polish 1st Independent Parachute Brigade troops into the camp, or the Polish Home Army would organize an assault on it from outside. By 1943, however, he realized that no such plans existed. He escaped on the night of April 26–April 27, 1943^[5]. Pilecki's detailed report was sent to London, but the British authorities refused the Home Army air support for an operation to help the inmates escape. An air raid was considered too risky, and Home Army reports on Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz were deemed to be gross exaggerations. The Home Army in turn decided that it didn't have enough force to storm the camp by itself.

On April 7, 1944, two young Jewish inmates, Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler, had escaped from the camp with detailed information about the camp's geography, the gas chambers, and the numbers being killed. The information, later called the Vrba-Wetzler report, is believed to have reached the Jewish community in Budapest by April 27. Roswell McClelland, the U.S. War Refugee Board representative in Switzerland, is known to have received a copy by mid-June, and sent it to the board's executive director on June 16, according to Raul Hilberg.^[6] Information based on the report was broadcast on June 15 by the BBC and on June 20 by The New York Times. The full report was first published on November 25, 1944 by the U.S. War Refugee Board, the same day that the last 13 prisoners, all women, were killed in Auschwitz. The women were "unmittelbar getötet," leaving open whether they were gassed or otherwise disposed of.^[7]

[edit] Allied bombing and reconnaissance missions

From March 1944 onwards, the Allies were in control of the skies over Europe, according to David Wyman. He writes that the 15th U.S. Army Air Force, which was based in Italy, had the range and capability to strike Auschwitz from early May 1944. On July 7, shortly after the U.S. War Department refused requests from Jewish leaders to bomb the railway lines leading to the camps, a fleet of 452 15th Air Force bombers flew along and across the five deportation railway lines on their way to bomb oil refineries nearby.^[8] Several nearby military targets were also bombed, and one bomb fell into the camp grounds. Monowitz forced labor camp 5 kilometres (3 miles) from Auschwitz was bombed four times.^[9][10] On December 26, 1944, the U.S. 455th Bomb Squadron bombed Monowitz and targets near Birkenau. An SS military hospital was hit and five SS personnel were killed.^[11]

[edit] The Allies' considerations

The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, did not see bombing as a solution, given that bombers were inaccurate and would also kill prisoners on the ground. The land war would have to be won first. Bombers were used against German cities and to carpet-bomb the front lines. Concerning the concentration camps, he wrote to his Foreign Secretary on 11 July 1944: "... all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out these butcheries, should be put to death..." ^[12] The British Air Ministry was asked to examine the feasibility of bombing the camps and decided not to for "operational reasons", which were not specified in wartime. In August 1944, 60 tons of supplies were flown to assist the uprising in Warsaw and, considering the dropping accuracy at that time, were to be dropped "into the south-west quarter of Warsaw". For various reasons, only seven aircraft reached the city. ^[13]

While the analysts' focus has been on the choices available to the western allies, the Red Army had taken areas in eastern Poland from the German army in July 1944, such as the town of Kovel, 300 km (200 miles) east of Warsaw, much nearer to Auschwitz than the American and British airforce bases in England. Its leader Joseph Stalin also decided not to bomb the death camps; he gave priority to the land campaign on a front that was over 1,500 km long.

[edit] Suggestion to McCloy

In June 1944 John Pehle of the War Refugee Board and Benjamin Akzin, a Zionist activist in America, urged John McCloy to bomb the camps. McCloy is said to have told his assistant to "kill" the request, as the US airforce had decided in February 1944 not to bomb anything "for the purposes of rescuing victims of enemy oppression", but to concentrate on military targets.^[14]

[edit] See also

• History of the Jews in Hungary
• The Abandonment Of The Jews
• Franklin D. Roosevelt

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Berenbaum, Michael. "Why wasn't Auschwitz bombed?" Encyclopaedia Britannica.
• Churchill, Winston. Triumph and Tragedy. Penguin 2005.
• Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews, Yale University Press, 2003.
• Wyman, David S. "Why Auschwitz wasn't bombed," in Gutman, Yisrael & Berenbaum, Michael. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Indiana University Press, first published 1994; this edition 1998. ISBN 0-253-20884-X
• BBC comment 2005

[edit] Further reading

• Wyman, David S. The Abandonment Of The Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.