While bombing may have slowed certain lethal aspects of the camps, starvation as a method of death would have continued and maybe even been accentuated by the bombing by destroying transport into the camps. I don't think that most camps were self-supporting in food production. Even if some or all of the food for the inmates was produced in the camps, the guards certainly ate better and if their outside food supplies were reduced, guess where the shortfall would be made up from?

Unfortunately the prisoners were in a no-win situation, but I don't feel that bombing the camps would help in the long run. You can bomb the camps all day long everyday, but never realistically reduce the enemy's ability to defend themselves unless you hit their production facilities. Eventually, the Germans would have done what they did with a lot of industrial production and scattered the camps about the countryside more than they already were. With arms production not reduced by the diversion of air assets from factories, it is likely that the rescuing Allied armies would be less likely to overrun the camps any sooner.

A larger portion of German war production was in the western half of the countinent and the 8th Air Force and Bomber Command paid a grievous price just trying to hit targets there. Can you imagine what it would have been like having to overfly almost all of Germany and parts of Poland to hit a target, that in the end, really did nothing to shorten the war? As it was, the USAAF and RAF strategic air forces were still losing about as many or more bombers per raid as in earlier in the war, but the percentages were acceptable because of the larger numbers committed to each raid. Losing 60 aircraft out of 1000 isn't nearly as bad as losing 60 out of 350, except for the crews in the lost aircraft and their friends and family.

The continued use of the Oil & Transportation Plans for strategic bombing, decided upon by the Allied leadership in 1944, were the best use of assets to help the political and ethnic prisoners and "inferior" PoWs in the long run. There is one caveat to this thought, though. Trains held up by damged infrastructure were often held in place for extended periods of time and the packed, confined boxcars held unfed, unwatered prisoners under horrific conditions. There are untold examples of this happening with the high resulting deaths. But on the plus side, delayed trains meant that prisoner could not be transported long distances as regularly and thus stayed in holding camps and ghettos longer where they stood a greater chance of living when compared to the death camps, such Dachau. At least, until late in the war when forced marches became common.

Finally bombing death camps would, IMHO, only serve to increase the prisoner death and suffering because Allied bombing wasn't anywhere nearly precise enough to actually hit the targets that they were aiming for, even late in the war. As late as July 1944 using H2S, Bomber Command was still was finding that only 50% of it's bombs landed within a mile of the intended target. Air Marshal Harris had to result to saturation bombing in the hopes that enough ordinance would land in target area to destroy it, often times resulting in multiple raids to destroy a target. Most camps did not have 2 mile dimensions, so large number of prisoner would have died by bombs not necessarily aimed at them.

I'm not picking on Bomber Command, just using them as an example. In 1943, the 8th and 15th Air Forces were not much better. The average error for US bombing accuracy was such that only about half of bombs dropped landed within quarter mile of the target and with bad weather, the error was 3 miles, resulting in "agricultural bombing"-the bombing of fields and pastures.

I am of the opinion that the bombing of death and concentration camps would hold no useful purpose in shortening the suffering of the inmates already there and the camps should not have been bombed unless there was an over-riding industrial target also there, such as missile or other arms production. It sounds harsh, but those already there were going to die and there was nothing we could do about it unless we could get ground forces on site. The best we could do was concentrate on taking out or impairing industry (and unfortunately the citizens around it) and shorten the war to help prevent others from arriving at the death camps.

Most data in this posting came from Brute Force by John Ellis, c 1990. Opinions offered are mine alone. Critiques encouraged.

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Best Regards,
JW