Auschwitz bombing debate
The issue of why the Allies did not act on early reports of atrocities in the Auschwitz concentration camp by destroying it or its railways by air during World War II has been a subject of controversy since the late 1970s. Brought to public attention by a 1978 article from historian David Wyman, it has been descried by Michael Berenbaum as "a moral question emblematic of the Allied response to the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust", and whether or not the Allies had the requisite knowledge and the technical capability to act continues to be explored by historians.
Background
The Holocaust: what the Allies knew
The Polish government-in-exile in London first reported crimes in the Auschwitz complex to the western public in 1941. Information about tortures inside this camp was published in the same year in New York in a government report from occupied Poland titled The Polish White Book The Auschwitz camp was also noted in The Black Book of Poland a 750-page report published in 1942 in New York by the Ministry of Information of the Polish government-in-exile, describing atrocities committed by Germany in occupied Poland in twenty-two months between the invasion of Poland in September 1939, and the end of June 1941. Both were printed in New York by The Greystone Press and G.P. Putnam's SonsIn 1942, Lieutenant Jan Karski reported to the Polish, British and U.S. governments on the situation in occupied Poland, especially the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto and the general systematic extermination of the Poles and Jews nationally. He did not know about the murder by gas, repeating the common belief at the time that deported Jews were being exterminated with electricity. Karski met with the Polish government-in-exile, including the Prime Minister, Władysław Sikorski, as well as with members of political parties such as the Socialist Party, National Party, Labor Party, People's Party, Jewish Labour Bund and Zionist Party. He also spoke to Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, and included a detailed statement on what he had seen in Warsaw and in Bełżec. In 1943 in London he met the author and journalist Arthur Koestler. He then traveled to the United States and reported to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR reacted to Karski's report by inquiring jokingly into animal rights abuses. His report was a major source of information for the Allies.
Karski met also with many other government and civic leaders in the United States, including Felix Frankfurter, Cordell Hull, William Joseph Donovan, and Stephen Wise. Karski presented his report to media, to bishops of various denominations, to members of the Hollywood film industry and artists, but without success. Many of those he spoke to did not believe him, or judged his testimony much exaggerated or saw it as propaganda from the Polish government in exile.
In 1942 members of the Polish government in exile launched an official protest against systematic murders of Poles and Jews in occupied Poland, based on Karski's report. The Poles addressed their protest to the 26 Allies who had signed the Declaration by United Nations on 1 January 1942.
In response, the Allied Powers issued an official statement on December 17, 1942, condemning the known German atrocities. The statement was read to the British House of Commons in a debate led by the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, and published on the front page of The New York Times and by many other newspapers such as The Times. At the end of the debate the House of Commons stood for a minute in silence, a custom reserved for the death of the Monarch, and therefore a sign that the British establishment was united in expecting retribution. Eden commented that:
On 13 December 1942, the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom Joseph Hertz, ordained a day of mourning to mark the suffering of "the numberless victims of the Satanic carnage". William Temple Archbishop of Canterbury wrote a letter to the Times to condemn ".. a horror beyond what imagination can grasp". These were mentioned in BBC Radio broadcasts to Europe in several languages that were made on 17 December.
In 1942, Szmul Zygielbojm, a Jewish-Polish socialist politician, leader of the General Jewish Labor Bund in Poland, and member of the National Council of the Polish government in exile, wrote in English a booklet titled Stop Them Now. German Mass Murder of Jews in Poland, with a foreword by Lord Wedgwood.
From April 19, 1943, through April 30, 1943, during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 19 April to 16 May, representatives of the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States held an international conference at Hamilton, Bermuda. They discussed the question of Jewish refugees who had been liberated by Allied forces and of those who still remained in Nazi-occupied Europe. The only agreement made was that the war against the Nazis must be won. The US did not raise its immigration quotas and the British prohibition on Jewish refugees seeking refuge in the British Mandate of Palestine remained in place until mid-1943. A week later, the American Zionist Committee for a Jewish Army ran an advertisement in The New York Times condemning the United States efforts at Bermuda as a mockery of past promises to the Jewish people and of Jewish suffering under German Nazi occupation. Szmul Zygielbojm, a member of the Jewish advisory body to the Polish government-in-exile, committed suicide in protest.
Auschwitz: what the Allies knew
From April 1942 to February 1943, British Intelligence intercepted and decoded radio messages sent by the "German Order Police", which included daily prisoner returns and death tolls for ten concentration camps, including Auschwitz.The United States Office of Strategic Services received reports about Auschwitz during 1942.
Auschwitz prisoners reports
The Polish underground reports
At the beginning of Operation Reinhard, the principal source of intelligence for the Western Allies about the existence of Auschwitz was the Witold's Report, forwarded via the Polish resistance to the British government in London. It was written by the Polish Army Captain Witold Pilecki who spent a total of 945 days at the camp – the only known person to volunteer to be imprisoned at Auschwitz. He forwarded his report about the camp to Polish resistance headquarters in Warsaw through the underground network known as Związek Organizacji Wojskowej which he organized inside Auschwitz. Pilecki hoped that either the Allies would drop weapons for the Armia Krajowa to organize an assault on the camp from the outside, or bring in the Polish 1st Independent Parachute Brigade troops to liberate it. A spectacular escape took place on 20 June 1942, when Kazimierz Piechowski organized a daring passing through the camp's gate along with three friends and co-conspirators, Stanisław Gustaw Jaster, Józef Lempart and Eugeniusz Bendera. The escapees were dressed in stolen uniforms as members of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, fully armed and in an SS staff car. They drove out the main gate in a stolen Steyr 220 with a smuggled first report from Witold Pilecki to Polish resistance. The Germans never recaptured any of them. By 1943 however, Pilecki realized that no rescue plans existed in the West. He escaped from the camp on the night of April 26–27, 1943.The first written accounts of Auschwitz concentration camp were published in 1940/41 in the Polish underground newspapers "Polska żyje" and "Biuletyn Informacyjny". From 1942 members of the Bureau of Information and Propaganda of the Warsaw Area Home Army also began to publish short booklets based on the experiences of escapees. The first was the fictional "Auschwitz. Memories of a prisoner" written by Halina Krahelska and published in April 1942 in Warsaw The second publication was also produced in 1942 in the PPS WRN book "Obóz śmierci" written by Natalia Zarembina. In the summer of 1942 a book about Auschwitz titled "W piekle" was written by the Polish writer, social activist and founder of Żegota, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka
Polish reports about Auschwitz were also published in English versions. A booklet titled Zarembina was translated into English and published by the Polish Labor Group in New York in March 1944 with the title "Oswiecim, Camp of Death " with a foreword by Florence Jaffray Harriman. In this report from 1942, the gassing of prisoners was described.
Auschwitz site plans, originating from the Polish government, were passed on to the British Foreign Office on 18 August 1944.
Władysław Bartoszewski, himself a former Auschwitz inmate, said in a speech: "The Polish resistance movement kept informing and alerting the free world to the situation. In the last quarter of 1942, thanks to the Polish emissary Jan Karski and his mission, and also by other means, the Governments of the United Kingdom and of the United States were well informed about what was going on in Auschwitz-Birkenau."
The Jewish escapees reports
On April 7, 1944, two young Jewish inmates, Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler, had escaped from the Auschwitz 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. 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.Allied reconnaissance and bombing missions
Auschwitz was first overflown by an Allied reconnaissance aircraft on April 4, 1944, in a mission to photograph the synthetic oil plant at Monowitz forced labor camp.On 26 June, 71 B-17 heavy bombers on another bombing run had flown above or close to three railway lines to Auschwitz.
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 force of 452 Fifteenth Air Force bombers flew along and across the five deportation railway lines on their way to bomb Blechhammer oil refineries nearby.
Buna-Werke, the I.G. Farben industrial complex located adjacent to the Monowitz forced labor camp located from the Auschwitz I camp was bombed four times, starting at 20 August 1944 until 26 December 1944. On December 26, 1944, the U.S. 455th Bomb Group bombed Monowitz and targets near Birkenau ; an SS military hospital was hit and five SS personnel were killed.
The Auschwitz complex was photographed accidentally several times during missions aimed at nearby military targets. However, the photo-analysts knew nothing of Auschwitz, and the political and military hierarchy didn't know that photos of Auschwitz existed. For this reason, the photos played no part in the decision whether or not to bomb Auschwitz. Photo-interpretation expert Dino Brugioni believes that analysts could have easily identified the important buildings in the complex if they had been asked to look.
Bombing Auschwitz: technical considerations
The issue of bombing Auschwitz-Birkenau first attracted wide public attention in May 1978 with the publication in Commentary of the article "Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed," by historian David S. Wyman. Since then, several studies have explored the question of whether the Allies had the requisite knowledge and technical capability to bomb the killing facilities at Auschwitz-Birkenau.In 2000, the edited collection The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? appeared. In the introduction, editor Michael Neufeld wrote: "As David Wyman was able to show at the outset, it is impossible to claim that Auschwitz-Birkenau could not have been bombed. In fact, the Fifteenth Air Force did drop bombs on it by accident on 13 September 1944, when SS barracks were hit by bombs falling short of their intended industrial targets. The question rather becomes one of the likelihood of hitting the four main gas chamber/crematoria complexes along the west side of Birkenau, and the likelihood that bombs would have fallen in profusion on the rows and rows of adjacent prisoner barracks. Accuracy is thus the central issue…"
Submitted proposals to bomb Auschwitz and reactions
The first proposal to bomb Auschwitz was made on 16 May 1944 by a Slovak rabbi, Michael Dov Weissmandl, a leader in an underground Slovak organization known as the Working Group to the Jewish Agency. According to Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, Weissmandl's proposal is the basis of subsequent proposals. At about the same time, two officials of the Jewish Agency in Palestine separately made similar suggestions. Yitzhak Gruenbaum made his to the U.S. Consul-General in Jerusalem, Lowell C. Pinkerton, and Moshe Shertok made his to George Hall, the British under secretary of state for foreign affairs. However, the idea was promptly squashed by the Executive Board of the Jewish Agency. On 11 June 1944, the Executive of the Jewish Agency considered the proposal, with David Ben-Gurion in the chair, and it specifically opposed the bombing of Auschwitz. Ben Gurion summed up the results of the discussion: "The view of the board is that we should not ask the Allies to bomb places where there are Jews."In the meantime, George Mantello distributed the Auschwitz Protocols and triggered a significant grass roots protest in Switzerland, including Sunday masses, street protests and the Swiss Press Campaign. On 19 June 1944 the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem received the reports summary. David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency had reversed its opposition immediately upon learning that Auschwitz was indeed a death camp, and urged U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to bomb the camp and the train tracks leading to the camp.
Shortly thereafter, Benjamin Akzin, a junior official on the War Refugee Board staff made a similar recommendation. It was put in writing in an inter-office memorandum dated June 29 to his superior, a senior staff member, Lawrence S. Lesser. These recommendations were totally rejected by leading Jewish organizations. On June 28, Lesser met with A. Leon Kubowitzki, the head of the Rescue Department of the World Jewish Congress, who flatly opposed the idea. On July 1, Kubowitzki followed up with a letter to War Refugee Board Director John W. Pehle, recalling his conversation with Lesser and stating:
The destruction of the death installations can not be done by bombing from the air, as the first victims would be the Jews who are gathered in these camps, and such a bombing would be a welcome pretext for the Germans to assert that their Jewish victims have been massacred not by their killers, but by the Allied bombers.
The American reactions
In June 1944, John Pehle of the War Refugee Board and Benjamin Akzin, a Zionist activist in America, urged the United States Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy to bomb the camps. McCloy told his assistant to "kill" the request, as the United States Army Air Forces had decided in February 1944 not to bomb anything "for the purposes of rescuing victims of enemy oppression", but to concentrate on military targets. However, Rubinstein says that Akzin was not involved in discussions between Pehle and McCloy, and that Pehle specifically told McCloy that he was transmitting an idea proposed by others, that he had "several doubts about the matter," and that he was not "at this point at least, requesting the War Department to take any action on this proposal other than to appropriately explore it."On August 2, General Carl Andrew Spaatz, commander of the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe, expressed sympathy for the idea of bombing Auschwitz. Several times thereafter, in the summer and early autumn of 1944, the War Refugee Board relayed to the War Department suggestions by others that Auschwitz and/or the rail lines could be bombed. It repeatedly noted that it was not endorsing anything. On October 4, 1944, the War Department sent a rescue-oriented bombing proposal to General Spaatz in England for consideration. Although Spaatz's officers had read Mann's message reporting acceleration of extermination activities in the camps in Poland, they could perceive no advantage to the victims in smashing the killing machinery, and decided not to bomb Auschwitz. Nor did they seem to understand, despite Mann's statement that "the Germans are increasing their extermination activities," that wholesale massacres had already been perpetrated.
Finally, on November 8, 1944, having half-heartedly changed sides, Pehle ordered McCloy to bomb the camp. He said it could help some of the inmates to escape and would be good for the "morale of underground groups." According to Kai Bird, Nahum Goldmann apparently also changed his mind. Sometime in the autumn of 1944, Goldmann went to see McCloy in his Pentagon office and personally raised the bombing issue with him. However, by November 1944, Auschwitz was more or less completely shut down.