by Charles Ray

Created on: August 05, 2009

Auschwitz, near the village of Birkenau in Poland, was the largest of the Nazi concentration camps. A complex of three compounds (Auschwitz I, II, and III), it was built between 1940 and 1942 after the Nazi conquest of Poland and operated by the dreaded Nazi SS.

While accurate numbers are hard to determine, it is estimated that 1.3 million people died at Auschwitz, 90% of them Jews from all over Europe, as part of Hitler's "Final Solution."

In 1944, some Jewish activists began an unsuccessful campaign to get the Allies to bomb Auschwitz. The controversy over Allied refusal to do so is as strong today as it was in 1944. While we may never know the true reason for the Allied decision not to bomb Auschwitz, a look at the facts and events surrounding that decision is nonetheless worthwhile.

The first point to consider is whether or not the Allies knew about Auschwitz and its nature. Evidence indicates that they did, but refused to believe what they were told. Polish army captain Witold Pilecki, one of the prisoners to escape from Auschwitz (he had voluntarily been a prisoner from 1940 to 1943 in order to gather evidence of Nazi atrocities) reported on the mass killings, but the British treated his reports as exaggerations. In 1944, Allied air forces inadvertently took aerial photographs of Auschwitz which clearly showed the nature of the facility, even to the untrained eye.

Winston Churchill considered bombing Auschwitz in 1944, but was convinced that it was impractical. He was told that bombing the facility risked killing the prisoners without stopping the executions.

Auschwitz was in fact bombed accidentally, on one occasion when ordnance intended for nearby military targets fell on the compound, killing some prisoners.

Allied air planners also argued that bombing the railroads to stop the flow of prisoners into the camp was not technically feasible. This claim would appear to be refuted by the many feet of air camera footage from the war that shows Allied air strikes against Nazi supply trains and rail facilities after the Luftwaffe had been effectively grounded after the Normandy invasion.

Allied attempts to target the German heavy water facilities to stop the Nazis from obtaining an atomic bomb also seem to refute the claims that it would not be possible to target the crematoriums at Auschwitz.

Allied concerns that bombings at Auschwitz would kill prisoners ring hollow in the face of the massive daylight bombing raids on factories and other industrial complexes that undoubtedly killed thousands of workers, many of whom were slave laborers from concentration camps. A daylight raid on Auschwitz would probably have missed most of the prisoners (those considered healthy enough to work) who would have been away on slave labor details, leaving only the sick and infirm, who were slated for the ovens in any event.

Bombing Auschwitz would undoubtedly have killed many prisoners. But, it could also have saved many. It would have complicated Nazi plans for the methodical mass extermination of prisoners by destroying the infrastructure built for that purpose, and just might have hastened the liberation of the the millions who died between 1944 and the end of the war.

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