Why wasn't Auschwitz bombed?
Williams, Roger M.
AN AMERICAN MORAL TRAGEDY Why wasn't Auschwitz bombed? ROGER M. WILLIAMS IN THE SPRING and summer of 1944, the United States had its last major opportunity to act forcefully against Adolph...
...Although the death camp itself was almost certainly not defended (the.Germans had no reason to expect that it would be bombed) a separate, special raid on it would have needlessly endangered the lives of American airmen...
...The cable from Bern was forwarded to the War Department's John McCloy by the WRB's John Pehle, bringing together the two government officials around whom the bombing controversy would revolve...
...bombing the camps, and this time there was a change in tone: ' 'I strongly recommend that the War Department give serious consideration to the possibility of destroying the execution chambers and crematories in Birkenau [the extermination section of Auschwitz] through direct bombing action...
...Had Auschwitz's victims been predominantly Englishmen, and probably if they'd been gentiles of any nationality, powerful Americans would have urged bombing—and the government would have taken heed...
...24 November 1978: 747 Approximately 12,000 Jews a day, jammed into sealed freight cars, were dispatched to Auschwitz...
...One cable, of unspecified origin, repeated a request made to the American and British legations for the bombardment of the Kashau-Pressov rail hub and added,' 'The whole relief action, commissars, pity, etc., are useless unless decisive steps are being undertaken...
...IN THE United States, few informed citizens were unaware of the deportations or the fate of the deportees...
...During the last half of 1944, the bombers made a regular tour of targets in that area: Odertal, Blecham-1 mer North, Blechammer South, and Oswiecim...
...It is often said that bombing would have been futile because In the end, Roosevelt did nothing, the War Department did nothing, and the Final Solution proceeded with no outside hindrances...
...despite uneven results, the Army Air Force continued bombing rail facilities right through the summer and fall of 1944...
...and a few bombs dropped in the right places had had demonstrably devastating effects...
...Nahum Goldmann, a prominent Zionist...
...as late as November 1943, he had condemned Axis "atrocities" without specifically Commonweal: 746 mentioning the Jews...
...A sense of patriotism kept most questions of this kind from being asked, and the standard comeback "don't you know there's a war on?'' was sure to stifle the rest...
...Ironically, Budapest and Auschwitz, the key points in Hungary's Final Solution, were about to become Allied air targets—military targets, in the escalating war against Axis oil production...
...Birkenau, the extermination center...
...These actions, as well as those involving bombing, were urged on the British and Russian governments as well as the Roosevelt administration...
...Most of them were addressed to the War Refugee Board, but several went straight to the War Department...
...That attitude soon enough became evident...
...Under the influence of the anti-Semitic and xenophobic Breckenridge Long, Assistant Secretary of State for Special Problems, the department had consistently dragged its heels on proposals involving U.S...
...Some claimed that incessant attacks on rail centers would immobilize the German war machine...
...By 1944, strategic bombing had become the Allies' principal weapon against Germany...
...But by the spring of 1944, the U.S...
...That would seem to be a logical procedure, but it was never followed...
...It could be executed only by the diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations and would in any case be of such very doubtful efficacy that it would not amount to a practical project.'' No reasons for these judgments were offered, and Pehle let the matter drop...
...THE war Department was never challenged on any of its assertions...
...among the latter were telegrams from two American rabbis and a telegram, a letter, and a personal visit from A. Leon Kubowitzki of the World Jewish Congress's New York office...
...I've got a deal with Churchill to let the Jews enter Palestine.' He was simply trying to put me off...
...After the war, if not during it, impassioned commentators urged reprisals against German-Americans and the parachuting of weapons into the camps...
...On inspection, it turns out to have been misleading, perhaps deliberately so, a bitterly ironic finale to America's dismal performance on the Holocaust issue...
...so many Jews arrived that the camp commandant complained to Eichmann that the crematoria could not accommodate them...
...The groups would furnish maps of the camps, in case the Army did not already have them...
...In any event, this policy set the standard against which future requests for military intervention would be judged...
...Depending on how quickly the bombing was done, the lives of between 50,000 and 450,000 Jews might have been saved...
...Further, the missions in question were not wholly unescorted, as McCloy's letter made them out to be...
...And had Auschwitz been bombed in early October, when that was first proposed, somewhere around 50,000 could have been saved...
...The most selective American bombers of the day were P-38 Lightnings, which could carry a 1,000-pound bomb under each wing...
...undercut their arguments...
...AT least in retrospect, the reasons for American inaction are readily apparent, although hardly acceptable...
...So the proposals died quietly, along with the victims they were intended to save...
...On May 15, the mass deportations began, with the Carpatho-Ukranians the first passengers...
...Birkenau covered about two square kilometers, and according to a map drawn by inmates, its crematoria and gas chambers stood approximately 1,000 feet from one end of a long row of barracks that housed the condemned...
...That was the last official word on the subject of bombing in 24 November 1978: 749 behalf of the Jews...
...McCloy's reply, which simply passed along a memo prepared for him by the office of the Chief of Staff, gave two reasons for rejecting the bombing proposal...
...The terrible realities of death camp operations had been unfolding for two years, and Hitler's takeover was prompted chiefly by his determination that Hungarian Jews should not escape the fate of their brethren elsewhere...
...During the Thirties and on into the war years, the U.S...
...Had Budapest's railroad marshaling yards been bombed in the spring, the mass deportations of Hungarian Jews might never have taken place...
...Germany's highly efficient railway system transported more than 2Yi million people to their deaths between October 1941 and October 1944...
...Some five million Jews, as well as hundreds of thousands of other captives, had already been killed in pursuit of the Final Solution...
...Roosevelt himself, by the spring of 1944, had been issuing tepid statements on the refugee problem and on the destruction of the Jews in general...
...In an executive order, the President announced the administration's intention "to take all measures within its power to rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death and otherwise afford such victims all possible relief and assistance consistent with successful prosecution of the war...
...Morgenthau requested that the text of his memo be sent to appropriate theater commanders...
...the Eighth's route would take its planes over Poland...
...And although the WRB, during its brief life span, helped many thousands of Jews escape the Nazis, it considered military-related matters beyond its competence...
...On the paratroop question, John Pehle recalls, "our ambassador [to the USSR] told me, 'For God's sake, don't ask me to intervene...
...Meanwhile work continued night and day on the construction of railway lines...
...But the leadership was divided and little interested in military aspects of rescue...
...Of those, says Professor Randolph Braham, an authority on the Holocaust in Hungary, "about ten percent were selected for labor...
...aid for Hitler's Jewish victims...
...An unescorted 2,000-mile round trip over enemy territory does indeed sound hazardous—except that American bombers already were making that very trip to attack oil refineries in southern Poland...
...Waves of B-24's had flown the famed (and, to som&i ill-fated) 1943 raid on the Ploesti, Rumania, oil refineries...
...had acquired the ability to prevent their deaths there...
...That was Franklin Roosevelt...
...It also forfeited, yet again, this country's chance to stand as the conscience of the world in the face of unprecedented mass murder...
...One million Hungarian Jews were doomed and Jews in other satellite nations imperiled, he explained, unless drastic measures were taken...
...Former Representative Emanuel Celler, referring to the President's celebrated New Deal program, said recently: "Roosevelt was afraid of a 'Jew Deal.' During the war, when I brought up rescuing the Jews to him, he said, 'Don't make issues, Manny, leave it alone...
...and when Dr...
...Considering them briefly, rail facilities first, then the camp: Allied strategists in World War II argued long and hard about the efficacy of bombing rail targets...
...Meanwhile, he had consistently failed to lend effective support to efforts to admit Jewish refugees to the United States...
...Besides, Allied air forces already were killing untold thousands of other innocents— slave laborers in German plants—without any apparent qualm...
...McCloy sent the rail-line bombing request to the office of ¦ the Chief of Staff, where it was dealt with by the Civil Affairs and Operations divisions...
...The past several years have seen the arguments for bombing asserted, sometimes passionately, in articles, in academic seminars, and in portions of books devoted to the American response to Hitler's long persecution of the Jews...
...The Thirties fostered in this country a pervasive anti-Semitism that gave rise to Father Coughlin, the German-American Bund, and many more genteel forms of Jew-baiting...
...Then, on July 4, McCloy wrote to Pehle that, in the department's opinion "the suggested air operation is impracticable...
...McCloy and Pehle, however, believed they were addressing a still-current situation, and the War Department's anti-bombing rationale must therefore be taken at face value...
...Had the city itself been severely bombed, as the Jewish Forum suggested, the Hungarian puppet government might well have canceled the deportations long before it did...
...The State Department's general position on rescue has already been amply documented...
...McCloy explained recently: ' 'A group of rabbis had been over to the White House, and the bombing issue carrfe up...
...Even the White House was stirred into action...
...and Buna, home of the slave labor that worked in the nearby oil and rubber plants...
...McCloy, after all, was at the nerve center of the war effort, while Pehle was on the fringe...
...Those who argued for bombing the camp obviously thought the answer to be yes, and I agree with them...
...steadfastly refused to admit any appreciable numbers of Jewish refugees...
...Had the rail lines leading to Auschwitz been bombed in late June, when that step was first proposed, roughly one-seventh of the Hungarian victims-more than 60,000 persons—could have been saved...
...Far better to have had them bomb the camp while they were bombing the adjacent military targets...
...throughout that time," notes an authority on the German system...
...Public opinion polls cited in Charles Herbert Stember's Jews in the Mind of America indicate that in 1938 one half of the American public believed the persecution of Jews to be "partly" their own fault and that four years later, at the height of the war, Americans asked to rate Jews, Germans and Japanese as a "menace" to the nation named Jews four times as often as Germans and almost three times as often as Japanese...
...According to published analyses, the proposals drew nothing but disinterest from decision-makers in the Churchill government...
...Thus bombs dropped with the average accuracy mentioned by General Hansell would have exploded within a pattern that just missed the barracks and blanketed the target...
...even Budapest itself, home of a frightened regime reluctantly doing the Nazis' bidding...
...Even with the Norden bombsight and reasonable visibility, says Hay wood Hansell, retired Air Force general and author of a study of strategic bombing in the European theater, the Eighth Air Force's range of error was about 850 feet...
...If the War Department thought railway bombing "of very doubtful efficacy," as McCloy wrote to Pehle, its field operations did not reflect that judgment...
...What appears beyond argument, a third of a century after those cataclysmic events, is that the bombing should have been done for larger symbolic reasons...
...Hungarian agents, directed by the notorious Adolf Eichmann, began a dragnet in the farthest reaches of the country, pulling the Jews toward the staging area in Budapest...
...On October 3, a more radical proposal was forwarded by Pehle: Bomb the death camps themselves...
...What it lacked was the will—more basically, the^con-cern...
...Lucy Davidowicz, the historian, notes that the Allies also turned their backs on the Jews who revolted in the Warsaw ghetto, and she concludes soberly: "Helping Jews wasn't going to change anything with regard to the war...
...B-17's, bombing from high altitude, could have attacked with some, though not great, selectivity...
...Thus Pehle's covering note, on June 29, was brief and noncommittal...
...Less than two weeks after the Morgenthau memo, the War Department, ostensibly replying to a British government request for clarification, established the following policy: "It is not contemplated that units or individuals of the armed forces will be employed for the purpose of rescuing victims of enemy oppression unless such rescues are the direct result of military operations conducted with the objective of defeating the armed forces of the enemy...
...In April, a few weeks after the Nazis occupied Hungary, Auschwitz was made ready to receive its cargo of Jews...
...By July 7, when Admiral Miklos Horthy, Regent of Hungary, called a halt to the deportations, 434,000 Hungarian Jews had been sent to Auschwitz...
...In the end, Roosevelt did nothing, the War Department did nothing, and the Final Solution proceeded with no outside hindrances...
...And nobody was willing to make it a 'Jewish war.' So they gave military excuses for what were really political reasons.'' American Jewish leaders, had they shouted with one impassioned voice on the subject, might have brought military intervention...
...In January 1944, however, Roosevelt did establish a War Refugee Board, an agency that would become, however tentatively, the only administration advocate of bombing in behalf of the Jews...
...There was one other bombing possibility—the use of B-24's at very low levels...
...although there are no conclusive indications, the President's visitors probably included Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, head of the American Jewish Congress, and Dr...
...The first discernible American demand for bombing, spurred by events in Hungary, came in the magazine Jewish Forum...
...Obliterating Budapest would be "a clear indication that the United Nations are concerned for the lives of Jews and will remove the impression among the enemy that Jewish lives have no value...
...they had been sent to Washington by the WRB representative in Bern...
...On April 27 and 28, trial runs of the loading and shipping process were made...
...Newspapers reported the roundup of the Hungarian Jews (as well as of Slovakians and Rumanians), and Jewish organizations and publications issued repeated calls for rescue...
...By the time Hitler took direct control over Hungary, in March 1944, his plans for its Jewish population were clear to anyone who cared to see them...
...But thirty years later, it is increasingly clear that the symbol of that time and of ours is not Remagen, not Normandy Beach, but Auschwitz...
...on the day the first Jewish cargoes left Budapest, the Nuncio observed, "The whole world knows what the deportations mean in practice...
...My letter to McCloy was an act of desperation...
...The War Department delayed its response a few days in order to settle on proper wording...
...It is hard to imagine what good weapons would have done the starved, unorganized captives, and the call for reprisals summons specters of the Nisei internment...
...According to McCloy's recent recollections, a number of Jewish leaders also took the issue to Franklin Roosevelt...
...The rabbis think this will be spectacular, that it'll make front page headlines that will help the Jews, but we're not sure.' Hopkins and the President were worried about the reaction in Germany, whether bombing would stimulate even worse treatment of the Jews, with the Nazis simply murdering them out of hand...
...The crematoria were renovated," wrote the inmate-authors of The Death Factory, "the chimneys strengthened with iron bands . . . large pits [for mass cremations] were dug behind the buildings...
...The gas chambers had been in effective use since 1942, when the Germans discovered the potency of Zyklon B gas...
...I don't think it fanciful to suggest that their deaths would at least have had some purpose had they occurred as the mass extermination machinery was being destroyed...
...Even the Papal Nuncio, spokesman for a Vatican that was continuing to ignore the Holocaust, realized what was coming...
...John W. Pehle, then executive director of the War Refugee Board, the agency whose work would be most affected by the By failing to intervene with bombs, rather than words, the United States sealed the fate of many thousands of innocent people...
...A month later, Pehle again wrote to McCloy concerning Had Auschwitz's victims been predominantly Englishmen, and probably if they'd been gentiles of any nationality, powerful Americans would have urged bombing—and the government would have taken heed...
...At Auschwitz alone, almost half a million Jews died after the U.S...
...It is urged by all sources of this information in Slovakia and Hungary," this cable continued, "that vital sections of these lines, especially bridges along one, be bombed as the only possible means of slowing down or stopping future deportations...
...24 November 1978: 751...
...There were, in fact, American air attacks on Budapest that spring, including a major raid on June 2, but they were aimed only at military targets...
...Precision" bombing in 1944 was hardly that...
...that is why the gas chamber-crematoria combination so pleased Hitler and his deputy for death, Eichmann...
...Yet although McCloy had periodic contacts with the WRB, he and Pehle were not personal friends...
...At least four missions were flown against these targets, and two of them were in the late summer, when the Auschwitz crematoria were operating full blast in a final frenzy of extermination...
...Now, as Hitler moved in on Hungary, sending train-load after trainload of its Jews to their deaths in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, the United States again watched...
...But Russian military men insisted on retaining absolute control over targets bombed from their bases...
...the Polish name for Auschwitz...
...The others were more or less immediately gassed...
...Auschwitz's machinery of death was scuttled by the Germans themselves—ironically, shortly before John Pehle made his anguished plea...
...the Nazis would have killed the captive Jews some other way...
...Apparently he was: British-ruled Palestine remained essentially closed to refugees until it was too late to matter...
...they blamed lower-ranking officials for the inaction...
...Harry Hopkins [Roosevelt's chief presidential assistant] came to me and said, 'What can you do about that...
...And since at least some of the lines leading northward to Auschwitz carried military personnel and supplies, it is difficult to understand why they weren't made targets on that basis alone...
...Startling as it may seem today, this anti-Semitism thrived during a war against an enemy sworn to crush the Jewish people...
...By failing to intervene with bombs, rather than words, it sealed the fate of many thousands of innocent people...
...according to sources in the European underground, that was the camp population at the time...
...Through the summer and early fall, requests for bombing or other military action were continually made...
...American Jews devoted far more attention to trying to save the victims by non-military means, and to arguing over such then-current political issues as Zionism and the future of Palestine...
...But Roosevelt bore the burden of the total war effort, and he lived in political fear of the' Jew Deal.' In addition, he had the advice of his War Department that bombing in behalf of the Jews was "impracticable" and "of very doubtful feasibility...
...others, that broken track could be repaired Commonweal: 750 quickly and with relative ease and that such targets as oil refineries and armament factories therefore deserved priority...
...In the War Department, this proposal went no farther than the one to bomb rail lines...
...and would, in any case, be '' impracticable...
...A second held that neither precision bombing nor dive bombing would be able to accomplish the task—because medium and dive bombers were based beyond range of the camp, while heavy ("precision") bombers would have to fly a 2,000-mile round trip, unescorted by fighter planes, over enemy territory...
...The American planes were virtually flying over it to bomb synthetic oil and rubber plants several miles from the camp...
...Fifteenth Air Force had established bases in southern Italy that were within bomber range of Auschwitz...
...Faced with the gigantic, systematic eradication of an entire people, the United States had a transcending moral obligation to act, and to act in a way that would be felt by the oppressor and honored by history...
...The reasons are not hard to determine...
...Budapest itself was easily reachable...
...That point can be argued eternally...
...The Russians definitely were approached about using paratroops and bombers against the death camps...
...The Hungarian Jews were the last major grouping in Europe to be assaulted by the Nazis, and the assault was timed to the improvement in Auschwitz's capacity to dispatch great numbers of victims...
...unfortunately, under so much weight, the P-38 was unable to get to Auschwitz and back...
...Both the Fifteenth and the Eighth Air Force, operating from England, had been bombing Poland intermittently for several months...
...Inmates of the Birkenau section, which would have been the prime target, were doomed in any event...
...The advocates tend to be more righteous than reasoned and to ignore facts that Roger m. Williams is Senior Editor of Saturday Review...
...In fact, Auschwitz was quite a large target...
...American forces in Europe, in early 1944, were just gaining positions from which attacks could be launched against the machinery and routes being utilized for the Final Solution...
...Public opinion remained somnolent throughout...
...the Budapest railroad yards, where the victims were marshaled for the trip to the gas chambers...
...Roosevelt issued widely disseminated warnings to Hungarian officials not to collaborate with the Nazis against the Jews, and he appealed to the Hungarian people to help Jews escape and to "record the evidence" for later retribution...
...Further, the U.S...
...It's beyond the pale.'" The Russians might have held the key to effective bombing, because their westernmost airfields were in dive-bomber range of the camps...
...By 1944 the second problem—how to dispose of the bodies—had been alleviated by the invention of intensely heated crematoria...
...Whether those deaths would have been justifiable in the process of rendering Auschwitz inoperable poses a difficult ethical question...
...I guess we felt that if we wiped out the crematoria, it would take a while to rebuild them—at a time when the Germans weren't in a position to devote great amounts of men and materiel to that...
...Three decades later, with memories of the Holocaust un-dimmed and researchers looking more critically at the evidence, the bombing issue burns with surprising intensity...
...One was the familiar unwillingness to "divert" military resources in order to attack non-military.targets...
...However, in March 1978, British historian Bernard Wasserstein wrote to Lucy Davidowicz, American chronicler of the Holocaust, that, according to recently declassified British documents, both Churchill and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden favored military effort in behalf of the Jews...
...The Polish government-in-exile and unnamed rescue groups, Pehle noted, wanted to bomb " the extermination chambers [gas chambers and crematoria] and German barracks . . . which they say, are subject to precision bombing since they are sufficiently detached from the concentration camps...
...The Allied air bases were too distant from the camps and most of their supporting rail facilities...
...Decisions on requests to bomb the death camps and their rail facilities were made wholly within the confines of the Pentagon...
...Calling for bombing were a relatively small number of Jewish leaders, most of them rabbis, and a few civilian government officials who had no power to turn their views into policy and who were, in any event, not inclined to buck the dominant military apparatus...
...Yet their central contention is damn-ingly correct...
...Whatever Franklin Roosevelt's humanitarian impulses, he felt he could not afford—for the war effort or his own political future—to allow the Allied cause to become identified as a war for Jews...
...Clear, too, was the decade-long American record of inaction in behalf of the prime targets of Nazi tyranny...
...Just because Auschwitz and the rail facilities supporting it could easily have been bombed does not necessarily mean they should have been...
...Judging by the available records, this decision was made principally, if not solely, by military men, although it obviously had profound political and humanitarian implications...
...Against the first two air attacks on Auschwitz-area targets, German defenses had ranged from mildly to highly effective...
...A much longer cable from the American legation in Bern reported large-scale deportations along five specified rail routes, noting that "many thousands of [German] troops" also were transported along one of them...
...The matter of air bombardment as a means of combating the Final Solution seems never to have been discussed prior to the events in Hungary...
...Joint Chiefs of Staff, for warning the Germans that poison gas would be used against them unless they stopped using it against the Jews...
...Formation of the WRB seemed to signal a major change in administration attitudes toward the Final Solution...
...Jewish leader Chaim Weizmann and various resistance movements, particularly the Polish, pressed the British...
...They quickly decided to disapprove the requests, citing in internal memoranda the early-1944 decisions not to make special efforts to use' 'units of the armed forces . . .for the purpose of rescuing victims of enemy oppression...
...The United States had the capability to put Auschwitz out of business, with miniscule damage to the war effort...
...no Jew was left alive for lack of transport...
...The two had much in common...
...The first raid, on August 20, involved 127 Flying Fortresses (B-24's)^ (Stray bombs from the September raid actually struck the Auschwitz complex...
...International conferences at Evian-les-Bains and later Bermuda produced only pious proclamations of concern for refugees...
...As historian Henry Feingold says, ' 'World War II could never have been made a war to save the Jews...
...Unloading several of those tons on the adjacent camp would have been, in the context of wartime expenditure, an undetectable loss...
...In John McCloy's recollection, Roosevelt had still another substantial question about the proposed action: "What would its psychological effect on the Germans be...
...As FOR Auschwitz, did American bombers have the capability to attack the camp at all selectively, in order to kill German soldiers rather than Jewish civilians...
...Without question there would have been inmate deaths, perhaps dozens of them...
...Another retired general, Laurence Kuter, notes that precision bombing was accurate enough to "destroy synthetic oil plants, which aren't a very large target...
...At first disbelieving, then aghast but still largely indifferent, Americans and their government had watched the Final Solution unfold...
...Six days later, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who had convinced Roosevelt to form the WRB, sought to underscore the new policy to one of the departments that could be expected to play a major role in implementing it...
...The worst sin was to do nothing but talk, because talk was powerless against the madness of the Final Solution...
...three bombers were lost in the August raid, twenty in the September raid...
...There was a proposal, which reached the U.S...
...when Admiral Horthy did cancel them, it was less than a week after the largest of the air raids on Budapest military targets...
...Bombing in behalf of Jews, the Department of War said curtly, would divert men and materiel needed to defeat the Axis...
...would needlessly risk American lives...
...Among the few people distressed by the anti-bombing decisions, none knew enough to challenge them...
...According to the official Army Air Force history, the raids together dropped 235 tons of bombs...
...Air bombardment was the method of intervention most often proposed...
...Indeed, Hitler's fanaticism in pursuit of the Final Solution can hardly be overestimated...
...According to a local newspaper, some 15 German soldiers and several dozen inmates and "civilian workers" were killed...
...But the War Department's attitude had yet to be determined...
...Yet it is far from certain, given his increasing difficulties in mid-1944, that Hitler would have committed the resources needed to keep in working order rail lines and marshaling yards far from either the Eastern or Western fronts...
...In the May 1944 issue, using the form of an open letter to the President, editor Isaac Rosengarten wrote, "Air squadrons must be sent to Budapest until it is wiped off the face of the earth...
...There was a proposal for dropping Jewish paratroops, recruited in Palestine, on the death camps or into Hungary, and another for having the Polish Home Army (underground) attack the camps...
...A strong case can be made for the feasibility and effectiveness of bombing several targets connected with the Hungarian episode of the Final Solution: Auschwitz, the most destructive of the death camps, and the rail lines leading to it...
...Thus no appreciable "diversion" of military resources would have been needed to attack the Nazis' most destructive death camp...
...stricken by fears of postwar retribution, the killers shipped their remaining prisoners westward and tried to dismantle the entire camp...
...What about losses among the inmate population—killing the very people you were trying to save...
...One man, of course, could have singlehandedly brought bombs down on the death camps and their rail facilities...
...I N late June, the bombing issue reached the War Department in the form of cables sent from Europe to the War Refugee Board...
...Then and subsequently, in the United States and in Europe, various schemes were advanced for military intervention in behalf of the Jews...
...They could have done the same against Auschwitz, presumably with greater accuracy than from a high altitude and certainly with less enemy resistance than at fiercely defended Ploesti...
...ROGER M. WILLIAMS IN THE SPRING and summer of 1944, the United States had its last major opportunity to act forcefully against Adolph Hitler's extermination of European Jews...
...Few leading Jews ever appealed for bombing, and at least one, A. Leon Kubowitzki, actively opposed bombing the camps themselves (on the ground that "the first victims would be the Jews...
...It seems fair to assume that, if any of the suggested targets had been bombed, some and perhaps many lives would ultimately have been saved...
...It is, again, bitterly ironic that he, so castigated by his enemies as a friend of Jews, should have spurned the Jews in their time of greatest need...
...Several other factors, some already mentioned and most involving the question of bombing accuracy, added complications...
...Both were young, highly capable Eastern-college graduates with important positions in the wartime bureaucracy...
...Starting with Hitler's first persecutions of German Jews, in the early 1930s, neither the American public nor the administration of Franklin Roosevelt had shown much concern for their plight...
...Even a 1939 bill aimed at admitting 20,000 refugee children under the age of 14 could not get through Congress...
...Fighters accommodated the bomber squadrons for several hundred miles before their small fuel storage capacities forced them to turn back...
...The Nazis had become impatient with their earlier forms of slaughter, like the forest massacre...
...But with Auschwitz inoperable and the war turning decidedly against him, the Fuhrer might have neglected to take alternative steps needed to get the killing done...
...What moved Pehle, a mild-mannered man deferential to the military in time of war, to "strongly recommend" was reading two eyewitness descriptions of the Birkenau killing process...
...It was divided into three sections: the main section, which included the guard and Gestapo barracks, armament factories, and one crematorium...
...On the other hand, bombing had proved—and would continue to prove—unable to shut down German war production or to destroy the morale of the German people...
...Pehle even pointed out to McCloy military advantages to such an attack: a chance to bomb German armament and synthetic rubber factories...
...Weizmann tried through the British to get the camps approved as targets, he received a/iote from Churchill: "We have discussed this matter with the Soviets, and that's all...
...In a way," Pehle now recalls, "these were the first real verifications we'd had about what was going on in those camps...
...was about to persuade the Russians to cooperate on "shuttle runs" that would enable American bombers to fly round-trip missions from Italy or England to Russia and back...
...decision, said recently he has "no recollection" of having been informed of it...
...The issue aroused pitifully little interest at the time...
...The Final Solution machinery worked with stunning speed and efficiency...
...In a lengthy memo to the Assistant Secretary of War, John J. McCloy, Morgenthau declared, "The President stated . . . that the existing facilities of the State, Treasury and War Departments would be employed to furnish aid to Axis victims to the fullest extent possible...
Vol. 105 • November 1978 • No. 23
