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| Yes | 32% | 250 votes | Total: 786 votes | |
| No | 68% | 536 votes |
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Add to FavoritesYes, the Allied Powers should have done all they could to decimate the areas around the camp as opposed to bombing the camp directly. If I understand correctly, the argument really is, should the Allied powers have bombed the railroad lines leading to the camps so that transportation of the Jewish populations as well as the gypsies, the homosexuals, the "lunatics" and thousands and thousands of Christians would not have reached their "final destination."
The allies most likely had the knowledge of what was going on in the death camps but were doing practically, if anything about it. They did have their hands tied in getting to the camps so that they would eventually be liberated, but they also had the means to destroy the train tracks through the use of partisan groups as well as flyovers. Granted, this may have meant that those being transported could have been shot dead where they stood waiting for trains to come and collect them. This happened as well anyway.
I really do believe that the camps were in a position where they could have been bombed. The condition of the people in the camps was so horrific, the bombings would probably not have done much harm to them. Better yet, the bombings would have taken them out of their misery. I am saying this as an individual who lost a good portion of his family in the death camps. What is nice is that most of the camps, including Auschwitz, there were uprisings by the people in the camps at different times. Many Nazis met their fate at the hands of those who were eventually going to meet their untimely deaths, so it is good to say that once the Jews and all of the others knew that they were not going to the camps to assist in the Nazi war effort, they did not completely lie down and die without a fight.
By truly bombing the camps directly, many Nazis would have died. Unfortunately, so would have many of the occupants, but again, this would have been a blessing for them considering they were dying anyway at the hands of butchers.
The way that the situation with the camps initially came to a conclusion with their liberations probably was the overall best solution. The Nazis eventually knew that when the war was going sour for them, they began to abandon the camps, yet still left the dying to fend for themselves. Many of them went into the woods to escape the memories of what they had gone through and still the crematories continued to emit the smoke and the stench from burning and rotten flesh.
The Holocaust is not over. It lives in all of our memories and it continues to haunt us to this day. This means that we must not forget what happened during the Reign of the Third Reich or it shall happen again.
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No
Auschwitz: the very word conjures grisily images of starved bodies and cruel minds. The kind of imagery the Holocaust presents no doubt disturbs and angers us all, and we have to wonder did we take the right path? Could we have perhaps ended world war two earlier and prevented thousands from being gassed?
Perhaps there is a way we could have, but bombing Auschwitz is not the answer. To take such an action would punish the guards and soldiers of the Nazi regime, but at a terrible cost. We would have to sacrifice thousands of human beings, who through no fault of their own found themselves hunted down, and systematically tortured and killed. The Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and other "undersirables" deserved more than a grisly death of fire and brimstone. They deserved to be led away from their hellish enclosure with the hope that they could someday put their lives back together again. They deserved to be given a chance.
Besides the obvious irreverance for the innocent implied by such a military action, we would also have lost a huge part of history. The accounts of Allied soldiers as they explored the cold, empty barracks of the concentration camps have lent us a better understanding of why the Holocaust happened the way it did. And while it is hard to comprehend such an extreme point of view as that taken by Nazi Germany on the subject of the Jews and other "undesirables," these pieces of macabre history have helped us to understand how it came to be. This knowledge is essential to the prevention of similar atrocities happening again, and must be looked at. To bomb Auschwitz would have destroyed many of the vital clues we now have to the mindset and infrastructure of the third Reich. While Auschwitz alone being destoryed might not have doomed us to repeat the past, and as the saying goes, it would definitely have left us with a less complete picture of the Nazis than we have today.
Could we have prevented Allied casualities by bombing Auschwitz? Probably. Would it have been easier? Almost certainly so, but the action lacks a certain humanity that made the Allied future the beacon of hope that they were. War is not efficient, it is bloody and it is cruel, and sometimes that's the way it must be if we wish to act with wisdom and morality. But we will always have these choices to make, and as long as we look at all the pieces we should be okay, at least we can hope.
Learn more about this author, Alexandra Pollard.
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