Auschwitz Angst
ASHKINAZE, CAROLE
Auschwitz Angst Allies Have Attempted It? Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum, editors New York: St. Martin's Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2000,...
...Carole Ashkinaze is the former assistant editor of MOMENT...
...press to report the persecution of the Jews between 1933 and 1945, weighs in with a plausible theory...
...It would have saved lives and "provided a precedent for even stronger actions against future barbarism in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia," writes Richard G. Davis, a civilian historian with the U.S...
...Martin's Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2000, 350 pp., hardcover $29.95 REVIEWED BY CAROLE ASHKINAZE This book is not so much about whether the Allies should have bombed Auschwitz out of existence, in the summer of 1944, as about Americans' enduring (and sometimes ill-informed) fascination with their failure to do so...
...Or to be more realistic, one-half of one percent...
...asks historian Walter Laqueur...
...What if, for argument's sake, one percent of the Allied war effort in 1944 had been devoted to this end...
...Though editors Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum warn against overreliance on hindsight, and one of them (Neufeld) concludes that the bombing would have been "a failure under any circumstances," they seem persuaded, along with David S.Wyman (The Abandonment of the Jews, 1978) that the bombing of Auschwitz was not seriously considered...
...Yes, of course, Auschwitz should have been bombed...
...The Bombing of Auschwitz reviews and updates the historical record, with aerial photographs and documents suggesting that bombing Auschwitz could have put it out of the killing business by September 1944...
...Roosevelt "died before the question arose," we're told...
...But what if they had...
...The word "Holocaust" did not even enter the popular lexicon until the 1960s...
...Air Force, and one of 15 contributors to this ambitious collection of essays, rebuttals, maps, aerial photographs, and other documents...
...As an essentially stalemated joint symposium of the U.S...
...But the reader should understand that, in the minds of many Allied decisionmakers, the urgency of combating the Holocaust was subsumed in the larger hope that victory was in the offing...
...Air Force in July and August alone...
...Perhaps the debate about others' failure to intervene for the Jews helps to "assuage any discomfort we have about being bystanders" ourselves to genocide in Rwanda or former Yugoslavia today...
...We have been bystanders to so many subsequent atrocities, she points out...
...Was it a question of military preparedness, indifference, anti-Semitism, or the fact that a Jewish state with the clout to influence world affairs did not yet exist...
...The complete destruction of the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz- Birkenau was a "limited and attainable task," according to Davis, who calculates that it could have been accomplished in four heavy bomber missions of 75 sorties each in the summer of 1944—300 sorties out of more than 21,420 sorties flown by the 15th U.S...
...And the questions they raise are explosive, focusing on pitting Jewish lives against other WW II-era priorities...
...The failure to bomb Birkenau (the killing section of Auschwitz), "the site of mankind's greatest abomination, [was] a missed opportunity of monumental proportions," according to Stewart G. Erdheim, another contributor, who is working on a documentary film on the subject...
...Saving Jewish lives was not the reason Britain and the United States entered the war, the editors grimly remind us...
...Or was it...
...Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum demonstrated in 1993, and as this book reminds us again, almost 60 years later, historians, ethicists, and military experts continue to lock horns...
...Deflecting one-half of one percent would not have fatally undermined the Allied war effort," he says, but it could have saved "people from certain death...
...and Churchill was, apparently, never asked...
...It wasn't high on the Allies' agenda, despite German propaganda to the contrary...
...Deborah Lipstadt, author of an important book (Beyond Belief, 1993) about the reluctance of the U.S...
...All of which gives "the lie to the endless stories about the alleged power of Jews in the world," according to coeditor Michael J . Neufeld: "In the hour of supreme agony, all the Jewish organizations on earth could not get one country to send one plane to drop one bomb...
Vol. 26 • October 2001 • No. 5
