The Allies and Auschwitz

...Though Wyman himself (for unexplained reasons) declined to contribute, the volume includes over a dozen eminent scholars, including Martin Gilbert, Gerhard L. Weinberg, Walter Laquer, and Deborah E. Lipstadt...

...Airpower was further stretched by the constant attacks on enemy oil supplies in Romania—attacks the Luftwaffe was forced to answer by diverting German fighters from France...

...After 1942, Auschwitz itself functioned mainly as a transitional camp...

...As for bombing Auschwitz itself, heavy bombers flying at high altitude were regarded as unfit for the task because they couldn't provide the accuracy required and would be more likely to slaughter prisoners than to destroy the gas chambers and crematoria...

...the possibility that even a successful raid would fail to save lives...

...On both sides of the Atlantic, officials rejected the idea in nearly identical language: "impracticable," "of very doubtful feasibility," "costly and dangerous," "unacceptable from a military standpoint," and so on...

...One might argue that Auschwitz, the ultimate symbol of Nazi evil and perhaps the ultimate icon of collective evil, needed to be attacked directly...

...In the end, as Richard H. Levy writes, there was "no shortage of people who could have placed the bombing question before Roosevelt, but not one, Jew or non-Jew, civilian or military, believed in the proposed operation with sufficient conviction to see that it was in fact considered by the president...

...moreover, to achieve accuracy they would have to fly low in broad daylight, dramatically increasing their exposure to antiaircraft...

...The final moral judgment must be: it should have been unbearable...

...On both sides, the arguments—over capabilities of aircraft, meteorological factors, accuracy of maps and reconnaissance photos, German defenses, and so on—are interesting, if arcane...

...And so Jewish leaders and organizations, feeling a special urgency because of imminent deportations from Hungary (the last surviving Jewish community in occupied Europe), made their proposal...

...Jewish leaders were divided among themselves—and even within themselves...

...their refusal to bomb the extermination complex at Auschwitz-Birkenau...

...The president, by that time, was trying to ease the Jewish plight (or at least appear to), while the prime minister was eager to execute a feasible rescue plan...

...Timidity and moral cowardice among Jewish leaders was not the problem...

...and the likely costs of an attempted mission...

...Most of Auschwitz's victims were dispatched in mass-production style—herded into large "shower rooms," then sprayed with deadly Zyklon-B gas, and, finally, transferred to crematoria for incineration...

...Wyman and the bombing advocates emphasize the burden that losing an efficient killing factory would have imposed on Nazi genocide...

...In a now-famous memorandum of July 4, 1944, John J. McCloy, U.S...

...Any general distribution of blame, the 'we are all guilty' syndrome, only serves to exculpate the truly guilty...

...In August 1944, for example, Allied air forces dropped supplies into Warsaw to aid the Polish underground rise against the Nazis...

...new prisoners were brought there until they could be reassigned to nearby satellites—to Auschwitz II at Birkenau to be gassed, or to Auschwitz III at Monowitz to work as slave laborers at an I.G...

...Marshalling considerable data on World War II aircraft, he sketched a number of raid scenarios...

...The logistical problem was overcome in 1944, however, when the Allied air forces established bases in Italy...

...Historian David Wyman, author of "Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed" (in the May 1978 issue of Commentary) and The Abandonment of the Jews (1984), has argued that such an operation was well within Allied capabil-ities—and that the failure to bomb constituted passive complicity with genocide...

...But a fair review of the facts does not support the accusatory tone exhibited by Wyman and others...

...Perhaps the strongest case for it hinges not on technical analysis or counterfactual history so much as symbolism...

...Even the proponents of bombing hedged their proposals with such expressions as, "might appreciably slow down the slaughter, at least temporarily" and "not clear that it would really help the victims...

...In recent decades, historians of the Holocaust have debated whether the Allies could have done more to rescue Europe's Jews from the Nazi death machine—with special attention to Matthew Berke is managing editor of First Things...

...and many of the surviving camp inmates had been so weakened by hunger and disease that thousands more died even after liberation...

...It is the killers, whether in an office, a murder squad, or a killing center, who bear the central responsibility for their deeds...

...In either case, would a successful bombing actually have saved Jewish lives...

...As coeditor Michael Berenbaum writes, even if those opposed to the bombing were right, "they impoverish our collective future...

...The idea of bombing Auschwitz—or, as was initially suggested, bombing the rail lines leading to it—did not actually arise until fairly late in the war, the spring of 1944, by which time 95 percent of Holocaust victims were already dead...

...The logistics of this case were different from the proposed bombing of Auschwitz, but what is similar is that military officials opposed the operation as unfeasible and were overridden by a political decision at the highest level...

...And those were not to be found among the Allies...

...Reading the various Allied responses more than thirty years later, Wyman saw bureaucratic disingenuousness and indifference, sometimes tinged with anti-Semitism...

...The essays in the book set the decision not to bomb within its military and political contexts, and consider three issues: the technical feasibility of an attack on Auschwitz...

...Light and medium bombers, it was said, could not carry both sufficient fuel and an adequate bomb load over such distance...

...Richard Davis provides a bridge position when he concludes that, yes, Auschwitz could have been put out of commission, but only through repeated attacks—a kind of mini-campaign rather than a single raid...

...By contrast, those opposed to the bombing stress the point (made by Allied officials at the time) that the Nazis were fanatically determined to kill as many Jews as possible, by any means and at virtually any cost—whether by mass shootings (the primary method of extermination in the early days of the Final Solution) or by long death marches (which they employed toward the end of the war...

...While Wyman and other advocates see the diversion of Allied airpower as minuscule, opponents stress the need for every last plane during the late spring and summer of 1944: for D-Day operations and the subsequent Allied struggle to break out of Normandy...

...doubtful efficacy...

...In this connection, it might be worthwhile to consider how many more Jews would have survived had the war ended even a week or ten days earlier—and conversely, how many more would have died had the war lasted an additional week or ten days...

...Attacking Auschwitz was always a high-risk, low-probability idea...

...Most readers will come away with a sense that bombing Auschwitz, if not impossible, would have been difficult...

...The Bombing of Auschwitz, a new anthology, is in effect a series of responses to the Wyman thesis...

...In a November memo, McCloy summarized the consensus in both America and Britain: "The positive solution to this problem [i.e., the Holocaust] is the earliest possible victory over Germany, to which end we should exert our entire means," employing "strategic air forces . . . in the destruction of industrial target systems vital to the dwindling potential of the enemy...

...At peak operation the Nazis disposed of perhaps ten or twelve thousand people a day in this manner...

...The Bombing of Auschwitz contains criticisms of Wyman's analysis by James H. Kitchens and Richard H. Levy, as well as essays in support of bombing by Stuart G. Erdheim, Rondall R. Rice, and Richard G. Davis...

...Many could not accept the idea of killing Jewish prisoners, even if most were already doomed, based on mere conjecture that it might save others later on...

...assistant secretary of war, insisted that an air operation "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...

...Overall, the opponents of bombing seem to make the stronger case...

...As Gerhard Weinberg notes, "The shadow of doubt that enough was not done will always remain, even if there were really not many things that could have been done...

...Gerhard Weinberg argues that this policy probably saved more Jewish lives than bombing Auschwitz would have: There were, as is well known, thousands of deaths every day into the final days of the war...

...Almost immediately after the onset of Hitler's Final Solution in 1941, Jewish leaders and organizations began proposing schemes (most of them unrealistic) for the Allied governments to rescue Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe...

...Then there is the issue of opportunity cost: Bombing Auschwitz would have meant not bombing other targets...

...The essays here are all excellent...

...If they were wrong, they were wrong...

...BY MATTHEW BERKE Of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, nearly a million perished at Auschwitz, an extermination camp located near the Polish town of Oswiecim...

...Why, then, didn't Jewish leaders try to circumvent the bureaucratic process and appeal directly to Roosevelt and Churchill to make Auschwitz a priority...

...Nor was it a matter of access...

...Farben factory...

...Any examination of the failure to do more must, however, carefully avoid a most dangerous shift in the apportioning of responsibility...

...Before that, Nazi targets in Eastern Europe had been beyond the reach of Allied bombers based in England...

...Indeed, in every war, there are some actions that defy simple calculation, because the thought of not taking them is unbearable...

...The operation was a disaster: Many planes were lost and 90 percent of the supplies fell into German hands...

...Over the longer term, the anti-oil campaign did in fact shorten the war by bleeding Germany of fuel...

...Attacking the rail lines was immediately ruled out, since tracks could be quickly repaired and trains rerouted...