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Should the allies have bombed Auschwitz in world war 2?

They knew about it, and they knew that people were going there to die, maybe they did not know its true horror, but they had a pretty good idea, so why didn't they do something about it?

You have to remember the Auschwitz was deep inside of German controlled territory. The allies were looking at a nearby factory to bomb but not the actual site of Auschwitz.

There were two methods of bombing. one was a precision bomb, this was dropped from a smaller aircraft, it was relatively precise (for the 1940s at least) but it had to be dropped by a small aircraft, these aircrafts did not have much of a range. flying one all the way into Poland to drop a bomb was a risky venture.

The other method was carpet bombing, this was done usually by a fleet of B-17s or some similar plane, they dropped hundreds of bombs in the hopes that some would hit the target. these planes had a long enough range to reach Auschwitz, but their precision was laughable. They could have bombed Auschwitz this way, but they likely would have killed all of the prisoners there as well as the Nazis. This would defeat the whole purpose of bombing Auschwitz in the first place.

They could have bombed the rail lines going to the camp, but those could be replaced quickly and would not have been a very good solution. with no trains then the Nazis might have just made the prisoners walk to the camps, no matter the distance.

So the options were rather grim, any bombing raid onto Auschwitz was likely to fail or cause more harm than good.

As far as I am concerned the allies did what was right, they realized that the best way to shut down Auschwitz was to defeat the Nazis.

it is interesting to note that Auschwitz was bombed by accident. when the allies bombed a nearby factory a few bombs went astray and hit parts of Auschwitz, more Jews were killed than Nazis. i think this is indicative of any bombing campaign against Auschwitz.

Something else to think about is, what if the allies had bombed Auschwitz and wiped it off of the map, killing almost everyone in it. Then we would be sitting here talking about how awful of a thing it was that they would bomb a camp like that where innocent people were being kept.

For the most part it was a lose/lose situation, i think that the allies did the right thing though.

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