by Heather Voight

Created on: March 05, 2010

In the summer of 1944, the British Foreign Office suggested that since the Hungarian deportations had ended, Jewish agencies should withdraw their requests for the bombing of Auschwitz and other death camps. Joseph Linton, the secretary of the Jewish Agency in London, replied, “The reasons which were advanced for the bombing of the death-camps are still valid. There are still many Jews in the hands of the Germans who can be sent to these camps to their doom…in the situation in which the Germans find themselves today, it will be more difficult for them to construct new camps.”

The Germans at this point were losing the war. They were not losing interest in exterminating Jews, however. The gassing at Auschwitz continued despite the halt in Hungarian deportations. Trains arrived from several Silesian and Polish labor camps, from Berlin, Paris, Trieste and from the concentration camp at Majdanek. Enough was known about the continued deportations for the World Jewish Congress to plead for the bombing of gas chambers and railways leading to Auschwitz. U.S. Secretary of War John McCloy rejected this appeal (and previous others), claiming that the bombing would divert essential air support needed for the war. He added that bombings might be ineffective. Interestingly, the allies had little trouble diverting air support to bomb a synthetic oil and rubber plant located two miles east of the center of Auschwitz. As for the effectiveness of Allied bombing efforts, bombing raids on the oil and rubber plant were so effective that the production of synthetic oil dropped dramatically.

If the Allies had bothered to target Auschwitz on one of these missions, which was only a couple of miles away, the extermination of some Jews could have been prevented. Since the Allies were also bombing other factories successfully, German resources were depleted.  Also, supplies and manpower were down because the Germans were already losing the war. It would have been tough for them to replace new extermination centers under these conditions.

Benjamin Akzin of the U.S. War Refugee Board argued in favor of bombing the camps because it would constitute “the most tangible—and perhaps the only tangible—evidence of the indignation aroused by the existence of these charnel-houses.”  Bombing Auschwitz would have put teeth into the words of the Allies when they said they disapproved of what the Nazis were doing. The process of bombing the camps would carry the risk that some Jews might be killed, but as we have seen, the Germans were continuing this process anyway. Jews who saw the factories bombed actually felt hope, not despair at the thought of the Allies dropping bombs over their heads. A slave laborer at the oil and rubber factory said “How beautiful it was to see squadron after squadron burst from the sky, drop bombs, destroy buildings, and kill also members of the Herrenvolk. Those bombardments elevated our morale and, paradoxically, awakened probably some hopes of surviving, of escaping from this hell.” For those trapped in Auschwitz, however, there was no hope because the Allies never came to drop bombs on the camp.

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