No

by Lesley Mason

Created on: November 10, 2007

Sometimes a question is asked that leaves you floundering between wondering whether to dignify it with a response and the worse notion of letting the idea stand unchallenged.

Whether Auschwitz should have been bombed is just such a question.

The notion that perhaps it should have been is derived from the fact that in April/May 1944 escapers from the camp provided detailed reports of conditions and activities within it. By the summer Jewish groups were demanding action from the Allies, specifically approaching the US President and British Prime Minister.

However, it should be clear that these groups were not suggesting that the camp itself be bombed, rather that the supply lines: the railways, the gas pipes etc be put out of action.

Bombing the camp would simply have done the Nazi's job for them, and exonerated them from culpability in the process. If it was ever considered as a realistic proposition, then the alleged dismissive' nature of the response in the official record is probably the correct one. We need to remember that wars are about politics and propaganda, as well as weapons and tactics.

Would the less-direct attack have achieved the desired aims of those requesting it? Cutting off the gas would have prevented one means of mass murder cutting off the supply lines would not only have created (or at least exacerbated) another: slow starvation. At the same time, it would give the Nazi's a get-out, when the camp was finally liberated, by allowing them the fiction that all was well at the camp until the allies stopped them getting food and medical supplies into it.

Records suggest that the killing at Auschwitz stopped in November 1944 in any event. How quickly the Allies could have mounted a precision attack, and how many months earlier, that would have been as a result, is open to question.

There are other imponderables:

How quickly could the Nazis have responded by simply sending their prisoners to other camps, or would they simply have shunted them into sidings and left them to rot?

How big a deployment (in planning as well as actual attack manpower, weaponry etc - terms) would have had to have been diverted to the Auschwitz issue and what impact would that have had on the primary aim of defeating the Nazis entirely?

Would the possible prolongation of the war on all fronts have caused more suffering overall i.e. would the deaths and traumas elsewhere outweigh' those lessened at Auschwitz. That may seem like a callous calculation to those directly impacted by events at that camp, but it is the kind of consideration that leaders are faced with. It is not a question of balancing Jewish lives against non-Jewish ones; it is simply a matter of total numbers of people affected (irrespective of race or creed). Winning the war as quickly as possible had to be the allies' prime objective in everybody's interest, including those in the camps.

If the rail lines had been bombed and it is not disputed that heavy bombers regularly over-flew them is there any guarantee that this would not have led directly to the death of those concurrently being routed along them?

We should also remember that the eventual liberation of the camps wasn't the end of the suffering for the now-technically-free d prisoners. Conditions were atrocious and the logistics of getting medical supplies, personnel and appropriate nutrition to them were phenomenal many more were yet to die in the aftermath. That situation would have been infinitely worse if the allies had shot themselves in the foot by cutting off what were to become their own supply lines. One of the rules of warfare is one now oft-quoted in management-speak: begin with the end in mind. The current situation in Iraq shows what happens when you forget that lesson. Defeating the enemy is always the prime objective, but good leaders will also be considering what then?'.

It is not clear exactly how much was known, and believed, about the death camps by the summer of 1944. Official archive photographs suggest that much of the truth was known or could be deduced at high governmental level. Accounts from those personally involved in the liberation and subsequent work suggest that the reality was much worse. Even so, rational planners would have known that doing anything that could worsen the situation on the ground, would be playing into the enemy's hands in giving them plausible deniability and also making their own future rescue and reconstruction far more difficult.

Cutting the supply routes, then, could have saved some from the gas chambers would that number have been outweighed by the increased number of those who subsequently died from cholera or malnutrition?

We don't know, obviously. On the balance of probabilities however, I submit that the right choices were made in 1944.

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As a footnote, however, I would add this should not be seen to give the Allies a clean pair of hands' so far as the overall impact of the Nazi's is concerned. This is merely an examination of the one particular issue. Political and military intervention was indicated far earlier than it was actually undertakento really prevent what happened, the Allies should have engaged' far more positively and decisively long before war was declared by Britain in 1939 possibly as early as 1933. That however is another debate for another time.

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