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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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