WHY DID THE ALLIES NOT BOMB AUSCHWITZ?

by David HOROWITZ

Fifty years after the liberation of the best-known of the Nazi death camps, it is almost accepted as an established fact that the Allies could and should have acted to stop the killing. But not only would a successful assault have been extremely complex, it would no doubt have cost more lives than it would have saved.

On September 13, 1944, a force of American bombers, pursuing the Allied strategy of attacking the oil-production installations on which the Nazi war effort rested, launched an assault on Monowitz, a synthetic-oil production facility that lay just four kilometers from the main Auschwitz camp, and less than eight kilometers from the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Flying under intense anti-aircraft fire, the bombers were able to inflict only light damage on the plant. Many of their bombs also missed their target.

A few, by accident, fell on Auschwitz, striking a clothing workshop in which 23 Jews and 17 other occupants were killed. They destroyed S.S. barracks — killing 15 members of the S.S., and wounding 28.

Other stray bombs struck Birkenau, which was nearby — killing 30 people in a bomb shelter, damaging a railway embankment and the siding that led to the crematoria.

Four and a half months later, on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops “liberated” the 7,500 survivors of Auschwitz — the last remnant of humanity in a camp where, over the course of the two and a half years that had just elapsed, millions of Jews and other victims had been systematically killed in the gas chambers. The estimate of the dead ranges from one to four million; the first commandant of the camp confessed that he himself “had personally organized the gassing of two million people between June–July 1941 and the end of 1943.”

Fifty years after the liberation of the camp, it is almost accepted as an established fact, by many historians of the Holocaust, analysts, and survivors, that the Allies could have put an end to the mass murder at Auschwitz and that a direct aerial assault could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

And in retrospect, such an assertion seems, prima facie, well founded. The accidental bombing raid of September 1944 might appear as the absolute proof that an aerial assault on Auschwitz was entirely within the Allies’ capabilities.

There is no doubt, “it was possible,” says Yaakov Silberklang, a historian supervising the current expansion project of the Holocaust Memorial at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. “It is obvious that the planes could have got there.”

It is equally obvious that if the Allies had the capacity, it ought to have been used. Thousands of people were being put to death each week. The moral imperative was to act. But however tempting it may be to look for scapegoats among the Allied military strategists, to attribute to antisemitism what would otherwise be an inexplicable indifference to the prayers of the victims of Auschwitz, an unprejudiced examination of the controversy reveals nonetheless that bombing the camp would have been a far more complex operation than many historians would have us believe.

In reality, the first Jewish requests for an Allied intervention came too late in the war to save the majority of the victims of Auschwitz. And what is more, a single raid carried out by heavy bombers might well have killed more Jews than it would have saved, while damaging the camp itself only superficially. While it is true that a sustained assault on Auschwitz could have put it out of action, a mission of that type would have constituted a major diversion from the Allied war effort — which consisted in dismantling the German war machine as rapidly as possible. Irving Uttal, a retired lieutenant colonel of the U.S. Air Force, who himself took part in bombing missions on Nazi targets during the Second World War, maintains that Auschwitz could not and should not have been targeted. He reasons from his personal experience to reaffirm that a successful bombing of small targets like the gas chambers of Birkenau, from an altitude of 25,000 feet, would have required several missions, and thousands of tons of bombs, dropped by dozens of aircraft. The losses would have been heavy.

The diversion of the main war effort would have delayed the end of the war, and would have cost still many more lives.

In his introduction to a compelling analysis of this question, published in the Journal of Military History, James H. Kitchens III, an archivist at the Historical Agency of the U.S. Air Force, sums up succinctly: “Operational constraints, in addition to prejudices, prevented the Allied authorities from bombing Auschwitz.” The Allied leaders made the mistakes that all humans make, he writes, “but clearly the non-bombing of the death camp cannot be attributed to prejudice.”

Outraged by “all the nonsensical things” that have been published over the past fifty years to the effect that it would have been simple to bomb Auschwitz, and that this would have saved so many Jewish lives, Richard H. Levy, a retired engineer from Seattle, has just completed a long research article entitled “The Bombing of Auschwitz Re-examined — A Critical Analysis,” to be published by St. Martin’s Press in New York. “The treatment of the operational aspects of this affair by the ‘Holocaust historians’ is appalling,” he writes angrily. “Many among them jump to the conclusion that the bombing could have been carried out easily, and pass directly from that assertion to the one that the failure to carry out this bombing was due to political motivations.”

The historians of Auschwitz are not always in agreement. But there is one question over which there is little conflict: that concerning the moment when detailed, credible news reached the Allies about what was happening in this camp.

It may be true that, from late 1942 to the spring of 1944, information reached the West according to which Jews were being put to death in this place. In a landmark study, “Auschwitz and the Allies,” the English historian Martin Gilbert details the rumors concerning “large concrete buildings” on the Russo-Polish border “where people are killed by gas and are burned”; he evokes the secondhand accounts of “masses of Jews” being exterminated “en masse”; the letter that spoke of “shootings and burning” at Auschwitz.

But it was not until late June or early July 1944, with the receipt of firsthand testimonies from escapees of Auschwitz, that the “unknown destination” toward which so many Jews were vanishing was revealed in all its horror. Urgent requests for intervention made by Jewish leaders to the Allies then began to multiply. And at that moment, the vast majority of the Jews who were to die at Auschwitz-Birkenau had already met their fate.

The gas chambers were still operating, however, and tens of thousands more Jews were annihilated before they were dismantled in November. The transports to Auschwitz during the late spring, during the summer, and the autumn brought Hungarian Jews by the tens of thousands; Jews from Corfu, from Athens, from Rhodes; from northern Italy; from Transylvania; from Paris, from Belgium, from Berlin, from Slovakia; Jews from other concentration camps that no longer served any purpose; the Jews of the Łódź ghetto…

The list of those who are ready to blame the Allies for their unacceptable inaction is long, and growing longer.

In “Auschwitz and the Allies,” Gilbert affirms unequivocally that when they were pressed to intervene, by the Orthodox and Zionist Jewish leaders in the late spring and early summer of 1944, the “Allies had the technical capacity to bomb both the railway lines leading to the camp and the gas chambers in the camp itself.” The oil-production installations in the Auschwitz area were, after all, bombed repeatedly by the Allies that year.

Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz, does not hesitate to direct blame at “a slow and insensitive bureaucracy” that did not have Auschwitz bombed.

Michael Berenbaum, in his book “The World Must Know — The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,” affirms that the U.S. Air Force had, from May 1944, the capacity to strike Auschwitz “at will.”

In a recently published book entitled “The Secret War Against the Jews,” John Loftus and Mark Aarons abruptly declare that “for the price of a few American bombs, the death camps stayed open.”

And David Wyman, author of another major American study, “The Abandonment of the Jews,” mocks the American War Department for having rejected urgent pleas to bomb, arguing the impossibility of carrying them out. For him, this argument was “nothing more than an excuse for inaction.”

Wyman affirms that the Allies had complete control of the skies over Europe — and therefore nothing to fear from German aviation; that their planes had the range necessary to reach their target; that aerial bombing could “with certainty” be precise enough to put the gas chambers out of action; and that even the weather was on the Allied side during the months of August and September 1944. Wyman, a professor of history whose biography mentions no military expertise, goes so far as to detail the type of aircraft that could have been used for the mission: heavy bombers; Mitchell bombers flying lower and therefore more precise; Lightning dive-bombers; or finally, British Mosquito fighter-bombers.

Both the military historian Kitchens and Lt. Col. Uttal, a veteran of 33 bombing missions over Germany during the Second World War, who is now retired and lives in California, systematically contest all of Wyman’s arguments.

Contradicting Wyman’s assertion that the Allies had mastery of the skies, Uttal notes that over the course of 1944, the Germans had concentrated many of their fighters to ensure the defense of oil installations such as those in the Auschwitz area. He cites an October bombing raid on the oil installations of Merseburg, in the course of which 400 Nazi fighters attacked the bombing force and shot down 26 aircraft.

Kitchens adds that the Monowitz oil installation was defended by 79 heavy guns. “Circling formations of heavy bombers over Birkenau could hardly have avoided this defensive umbrella.”

Uttal then details the enormous quantity of aircraft and bombs that would have been necessary to put out of action the partly underground gas-chamber installations of Auschwitz. By way of comparison, he notes that it took no fewer than 10 separate bombing raids, between July and November 1944, with fleets of 100 to 350 heavy bombers, for the Allies to manage to paralyze the Blechhammer oil installation, near Auschwitz.

Citing the authoritative study “The Army Air Forces in World War II,” he recalls that the bombers that attacked the oil refineries at Ploești required more than 6,000 sorties and 13,464 tons of bombs to accomplish their mission. Three hundred and fifty bombers were lost.

Uttal notes that the heavy bombers of the Second World War “hit their targets 3% of the time,” and stresses their difficulty in aiming at their targets when flying at 25,000 to 30,000 feet of altitude. And Kitchens affirms the impossibility of using the other aircraft suggested by Wyman. He acknowledges that the Mitchells could have reached Auschwitz, which lay at the limit of their range, but the necessity of flying in mass formations for protection would have made them lose all element of surprise and would have led to prohibitive losses. He notes that the Lightning dive-bombers were used only once, experimentally, in an attack in June 1944 on the Ploești refinery, an attack in the course of which 22 out of the 94 aircraft were lost.

The installation resumed its activity eight days later. He establishes that not a single Mosquito was stationed in the Mediterranean during the summer of 1944. Had they been, the chances of success of an operation at the limit of their range “would have been improbable,” given that they carried no defensive armament.

Professor Martin Van Creveld, a renowned military historian of the Hebrew University (of Jerusalem), affirms that repeated bombing raids would have been necessary for Auschwitz to be put out of commission for good. He says that the camp was comparable, as a target, to Peenemünde, an island near the Baltic coast, where the Germans assembled the V2 rockets. “The Allies carried out an aerial attack on it in 1942 or in 1943, and damaged it, but they did not succeed in closing it down definitively.”

Van Creveld adds that, if the Allies had decided to target Auschwitz repeatedly, the Germans would have struck back. “If the Germans knew they were coming, the bombers would have met opposition. In October 1943, the Allied bombers attacked the main Nazi center for the manufacture of ball bearings, at Schweinfurt. The first assault did not do much damage. When the Allies attacked a second time, 100 bombers were lost.”

For Uttal, Kitchens, and Van Creveld, these factors make it possible to defend the official Allied argument, put forward by the U.S. War Department in June 1944, but disdained and even mocked by so many historians, namely: “the suggested air operation is impracticable… and could be executed only by diverting considerable air support essential to the success of our forces engaged in decisive operations elsewhere… We consider that the most effective relief to the victims of enemy persecution is the rapid defeat of the Axis, an undertaking to which we must devote all the resources at our disposal.”

And a furious Uttal writes: “Gilbert, Wyman, and others speculate about what might have happened if missions had been diverted from the grand air plan for the bombing of Auschwitz. But the arguments in the opposite direction are facts — namely that, by sticking to our strategy, we defeated Germany sooner rather than later. The killing ceased in the camps and on the battlefields. And the Jews were saved from the countries occupied by the Nazis before they could be transported.”

This argument finds support in the postwar testimony of the German Minister of Armaments and War, Albert Speer, who told his Allied interrogators in July 1945 that the Allied strategy of attacking the German oil-production, refining, and storage installations had been devastatingly effective. By the winter of 1944, “As far as the army was concerned, the lack of liquid fuel became catastrophic.” As proof, Richard Levy cites the Nazi offensive in the Ardennes in December 1944, which nearly reached Antwerp and repeated the crushing Nazi victory of 1940. “An important factor was the enemy’s lack of fuel,” notes Levy. If the U.S. planes that had bombed the synthetic-fuel plants in the Auschwitz area had been diverted from the overall strategic plans, in order to bomb Birkenau instead, he simply affirms, “fuel would have been less scarce.”

Even if the bombing of Auschwitz does not appear as obvious as certain historians have suggested, one can affirm that such a mission ought at least to have been attempted. If the Allies could have bombed Auschwitz, and even if this represented a departure from the overall strategic objectives, then they ought to have done it.

“People were arriving, at a rate of 10,000 or 15,000 a day,” recalls Leo Laufer, a survivor who was at Birkenau from August 1943 to November 1944. “A few bombs on the sides of the railway lines, even if the damage had taken only a few weeks to be repaired, would have meant a hundred thousand people saved. The transports would have had to be diverted toward some other destination, and there were no replacement installations in which so many people could be eliminated.”

The fact is that, far from being very seriously examined, the idea of an attack had been quickly rejected in Great Britain as being beyond the power of the Royal Air Force, and had not been seriously evaluated by the military strategists in the USA. The pleas of the Jewish Agency had been supported in Great Britain by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, but the Air Minister was little disposed to act. In Washington, John J. McCloy, the Assistant Secretary of War, brusquely ordered his staff to “kill” the idea.

Hugo Gryn, now an important British rabbi, was an adolescent at Birkenau. Recalling the sound of the Allied bombers passing overhead to go and bomb other targets, he told Gilbert that “one of the most painful aspects of life in the camp was the sense of having been totally abandoned.”

But more important than the psychological support to the Jews of Auschwitz, the real question is whether the bombing of the camp would have saved lives. Wyman has no doubt on this score. He estimates that 150,000 Jews were gassed between the beginning of July, when the requests to bomb Auschwitz began to arrive in Washington, and the dismantling of the gas chambers in November. If the bombing raids had been immediately approved, he suggests, “the movement of the 437,000 Jews who were deported from Hungary to Auschwitz would very probably have been stopped.”

“No, that is not it,” Richard Levy contradicts him in his new study. The July appeals to bomb Auschwitz “coincided with the end of the mass deportation and murder from Hungary,” he affirms. “It was never possible,” he continues, “that bombings could have interrupted the large-scale murder of the Hungarian Jews.” And since the rhythm of the murders at Auschwitz “dropped sharply after mid-July, it is much less likely that a raid would have seriously disrupted the murder operations,” he concludes.

Uttal maintains, moreover, that the Nazis would quickly have recovered even after a highly successful raid that had caused extensive damage. He cites the German Minister of Armaments, Speer, remarking, with regard to the raids on oil-production installations, “it was possible to get an installation running again within six to eight weeks after an attack, thanks to our repair measures.”

Moreover, with a population greater than 100,000 “residing” at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, an imprecise bombing could have meant more lives lost than saved. Wiesel himself wrote that “if a bomb had fallen on the blocks” where the Jews were housed at Auschwitz, “it would itself have made hundreds of victims on the very spot.”

The Air Force historian, James Kitchens, is unequivocal: the B-17 and B-24 heavy bombers, he simply affirms, “were designed to bomb from (an altitude of) 15,000 to 30,000 feet. Unfortunately, hitting, from that height, chosen buildings without causing human casualties was an utterly impossible mission.” He cites Air Force studies to show that “under optimal conditions” at least half of the bombs dropped would have fallen at least 500 feet from their target, and then he soberly notes that two of the gas chambers of Birkenau were located exactly 300 feet from the camp’s housing. A 1983 study carried out by Pierre Sprey, a weapons analyst from the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, estimated that if heavy bombers had attacked Auschwitz, a third of the bombs would have struck the area of the prisoners’ barracks. The Hebrew University professor Van Creveld affirms that, if the Allies had used a few dozen of their heavy bombers, which lacked precision, for a single raid on Auschwitz, the Jews would have been the principal victims. “We have all seen the photographs of the long lines of Jews at Auschwitz guarded by three German officers and a dog,” he says. “Such was the reality.” A minuscule number of Germans and masses of prisoners. A single heavy bombing would simply have made the Germans’ work easier. Ninety percent of those killed would have been Jews. And the camp would not have been permanently destroyed. The Nazis could have rebuilt it quite quickly.

In August and September 1944, the Allies departed from their general objective of finishing the war as quickly as possible; they overcame the technical difficulties, and sent dozens of aircraft on dozens of missions to drop arms and supplies to the Poles who were fighting against the Germans in Warsaw. The losses were heavy, and the greater part of the equipment did not reach the Polish Home Army.

“Despite the actual cost, which far exceeded the tangible results obtained,” a report of the U.S. strategic air forces explained, “this mission was amply justified… America kept its promises to its ally.”

For Wyman, the fact that the Allies were prepared to divert a considerable part of their air power for such a mission, but not for a similar task consisting in bombing Auschwitz, amounts to the clearest proof that “for the American military, the Jews of Europe represented an external problem and an unwanted burden.”

For Uttal, who notes “we never parachuted food to the millions of Soviet troops dying of hunger in the Nazi prisoner-of-war camps, nor tried to help the American or British soldiers locked up in the German or Japanese prisoner-of-war camps,” the supplies dropped on Warsaw were an “unfortunate exception” to the rule that “all humanitarian departures [from the defined strategy] were subordinated to military needs.”

Gilbert situates himself midway between these positions, suggesting in his book that “the story of the Allies’ negative response to the Jewish requests for help was one of a lack of understanding and imagination, in the face of the unbelievable.” He notes that, after all, many Jews found the scale of the massacre difficult to grasp.

Indeed, in the half-century that has just passed, many people seem to have forgotten that the Jewish appeals to bomb Auschwitz were not convincingly supported; they were not even widely supported. “Informed Jewish opinion,” says Levy, “was on the whole against the operation.” A figure as well known as Leon Kubowitzki, head of the rescue department of the World Jewish Congress, publicly opposed the bombing, affirming in his letter to the War Refugee Board that “the first victims would be Jews,” and that an Allied raid might serve as “a welcome pretext for the Germans to assert that their Jewish victims had been massacred not by their murderers but by the Allied bombers.”

The Rescue Committee of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem voted against the very idea of demanding a bombing. And whereas the representatives of the Jewish Agency had pleaded for a bombing during a meeting with Anthony Eden, they then drafted a document affirming that it would have had no practical effects. “No one produced a coherent argument at the moment when the bombing of Auschwitz was feasible and possible,” Levy affirms. “No one submitted the project directly to the American President Roosevelt, who was the only person who could have given the order to carry out the operation.”

Another crucial consideration, easy to overlook 50 years on, is that, whereas today we can see that an Allied victory was virtually unshakable in 1944, the military strategists of the time did not have that assurance. Every bombing was potentially crucial, every departure from the principal strategic aims was catastrophic. Here is one reason cited by Levy to show the urgency that was felt: “The Allies never knew with certainty how much progress the Germans had made on their atomic-bomb project.”

It is easy, from an armchair of history, to point accusing fingers, to blame, to mock the resolute Allied commitment to the swiftest possible crushing of the German war machine. Fifty years later, asked Uttal, “Is it not time to have done with the slander?”

(Used with the kind permission of The Jerusalem Report. Copyright The Jerusalem Report 1995)