Why Auschwitz was Never Bombed

Auschwitz

In the Second World War, there was a day in the Pacific theater that, for Americans, shall forever live in ‘infamy.’ If that be so, there was a space of about four and a half years, in the European theater that, for all rational peoples of the Earth, shall forever live in the shock of horrific astonishment. That space of time, from 14 June 1940 to January 1945,[1] marks the period of operation of Nazi Germany’s most notorious extermination camp—Auschwitz. That which brought infamy, in the former instance, was ultimately buried underneath the radioactive rubble of two atomic bombs. In the latter, no bombs were dropped; not atomic ones, not conventional ones, not candy bombs, not even the first leaflet. No pilot flew over it to take pictures. The debate over whether to bomb Auschwitz—or at least the rail access to the camp—surfaced during the last months of the war and continues to this day. Why wasn’t it bombed? Should the Allies have done so? Though the issues are complicated, the possible answers can be summed up under three heads—those given strictly from the standpoint of military operations, those that stem from political considerations, and those that proceed from moral judgments.

As to the first, if we may skip straight to the bottom line, an Allied military strike upon Auschwitz was not an operational imperative. By the summer of 1944, quite a bit was known about German concentration camps, in general, and the Auschwitz camp, in particular. Reports on these camps had been carried in many western newspapers. Typical of these was an August 1944 London Times article concerning Oswiecim—the Polish version of the name Auschwitz.[2] Among the sources for Allied information was the Polish government in exile in London, which “had informed the Allied governments about the existence of Auschwitz as a concentration camp for Poles and about the executions that had taken place there in May 1941.”[3] Other significant information was obtained from a Polish agent in January 1944, much of whose report remains[4] classified,[5] part of which stated that—

“Children and women are put into cars and lorries and taken to the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau. There they are suffocated with the most horrible suffering lasting ten to fifteen minutes … ten thousand people daily … three large crematoria …”

This agent’s report also alleged that “nearly 650,000 Jews had already been murdered at the camp.[6]

All these were insufficient reasons for directing a military operation against the camp. The Allies “main task [in the war], as they saw it, [was to defeat] the Germans.” An operation aimed at taking out Auschwitz was never deemed essential to the accomplishment of that task. Indeed, such an operation was deemed “a distraction,”[7] petitions to the contrary notwithstanding. The Agudas Israel World Organization, for one, represented by a Mr. Jacob Rosenheim, petitioned the War Refugee Board in Washington in June 1944; his request was simple, that the Allies “bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz.[8] In turning down Mr. Rosenheim’s request, the U.S. Secretary of War justified his decision “both as impractical and because it would cause the diversion of bombers that were engaged in ‘decisive operations’ elsewhere.”[9] That same month, the World Jewish Congress asked the War Department to “bomb the gas chambers themselves.” This request, too, was rejected for the reasons already given.[10] The situation in Auschwitz, horrible as it was, posed no existential threat to any of the Allied nations, nor did it place in jeopardy any military operation underway aimed at defeating the war-making capabilities of the German forces.

In the 975-page account of General Eisenhower’s activities “at war,” written by his son, the Auschwitz tragedy received the attention of a mere twenty-two words—

“As word emerged of the German death camps uncovered by the Russians at Auschwitz and elsewhere, evidence of German crimes beyond imagination …”[11]

This clearly suggests that, even as the Allies continued to receive more information about Auschwitz over the last eight to ten months of the war, there weren’t enough hard details in that information for the possible destruction of it to enter into military planners’ operational thinking. Those hard details were not to be learned until the Soviets released them, and that was not to be until the war was over. The Red Army actually liberated the camp in January 1945, but the Soviets shared no information about it until after the signing of the Armistice on 8 May 1945.[12] The western Allies did not even have the benefit of an aerial reconnaissance of the camp, which had been suggested by U.S. General Spaatz (the general’s suggestion had been passed to the British Foreign Office who let the matter drop without explanation).[13] There simply was never a clear military reason to bomb the camp.

As to political considerations, the Foreign Office’s non-action on the Spaatz recommendation is revealing. Aerial reconnaissance of Auschwitz would have meant an Anglo-US military operation over Soviet-controlled territory. It would have overtly communicated western mistrust of the eastern member of the Allied coalition. Nothing about Nazi concentration camps had been discussed at any of the Allied conferences—presumably because it might have raised uncomfortable questions about Soviet concentration camps. It was a political fact of life that Churchill and Stalin were willing to overlook quite a bit for the sake of the coalition. The western powers needed the Soviets, not only in terms of how they might contribute to the destruction of the Third Reich militarily—their eastern front relieved pressure on the Allies’ invasion of Normandy—but the Allied view of post-war Europe was predicated upon the absolute surrender of Hitler’s Germany, something that probably could not have been achieved if the Soviets had quit the war early. A negotiated peace with Germany might have meant an even worse situation for East European Jews.

As to what should have been the course of action based upon moral considerations, enough has already been said to establish that some kind of intervention was warranted. As is usually the case, however, no single organization had a complete picture; not the human rights organizations who were interested primarily in the welfare of the unfortunate Jewish populations of those countries under Nazi rule; not the political organs of the western Allied powers, whose interest lay with general welfare of all peoples in the affected countries; and not the Allied military organizations charged with conducting operations that would lead to the defeat of the enemy who had caused these horrible conditions to prevail.

Our knowledge of Auschwitz—and hence, our disgust—comes almost entirely from what we were able to learn about it after the war ended. All these considerations, taken together, seem to reinforce the wisdom exhibited by the appropriate political authorities and the operational commanders during the conflict. In short, what they determined was that the best course of action to take to relieve the sufferings of the poor victims of Nazi war crimes was to win the war as quickly as possible.

Besides, as at least one historian has had the courage to note, “it took almost twenty-five years after the collapse of Nazism before the Jewish Holocaust became a focus of Western concern.”[14] Yet, when the west began to show that concern, it did so still choosing to ignore the atrocities that had taken place east of Auschwitz, in the Soviet Union, that had gone on for a much longer period of time, and were, in terms of their effect, much worse than the crimes of the Germans by several orders of magnitude.

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[1] Lawrence Rees, Auschwitz: A New History (London: BBC Books, 2005), ix.

[2] Gregor Dallas, 1945: The War that Never Ended (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 456.

[3] Rees, 241.

[4] At least as of 2005.

[5] Rees, 241.

[6] Rees, 241.

[7] Ibid., 242.

[8] Ibid, 243.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] David Eisenhower, Eisenhower: At War 1943-1945 (New York: Random House, 1986), 677.

[12] Gregor Dallas, 1945: The War that Never Ended (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 456.

[13] Rees, 244.

[14] Gregor Dallas, 1945: The War that Never Ended (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 459.