It's a highly controversial topic... There were of course practical problems, there was a military and political well-defined strategy, and maybe some indolent anti-semitism in Allied forces, who tended to minimize the dimension of the Holocaust as it happened?

It has been said that a bombing would have been a risky business and not very efficient. Firstly it would certainly have killed innocent people, but of course far less than the chambers. But even if these would have been bombed, they would have been rebuilt within days and it would not have stopped the murders for long. A less offcial reason may have been the fact that his was not a strategical target and that bombing the camps would delay other bombings such as weapon factories etc.. I don't think these priorities were instigated by antisemtism, but the first goal was to win the war. The end of the war would stop the killings, bombing the camps would not.

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This is an emotive subject but in this case I think that the Allies were right - the main goal was to end the war and eradicate Nazism in order to prevent these things happening. I honestly do not believe that anti-semitism was a factor.

On a practical level, Auschwitz would have been a 'deep-penetration' raid and would have had to overfly the whole of Germany, or go via the Baltic and then a long way down into Poland leaving the bomber stream vulnerable to night-fighter attack. 'One-off' raids could be costly and only partially successful ( eg Peenemunde , Mailly-le-Camp ).

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"Stand by to pull me out of the seat if I get hit" - Guy Gibson

Yes, besides there were several other death camps and I don't think it would have been possible to neutralize all of them by sending bombers. The faster the infantry would reach them (in this case the Soviets) the better. Another aspect has to be taken into account that pleads the cause of the allies: many prisonners were not jewish, as people from all religions were killed for other reasons, political, etc... ( the coloured triangles )

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From a Jewish point of view I remember on a documentary a Jewish survivor passed the remark it would have been better if we were bombed by the Allies and I can understand why that remark was made. But on the scale of war industrial targets would be top of the list followed by disrupting the enemy's transport.

We can only hope the lesson of letting Hitler rise to power has now sunk in and we never let this happen again in Europe.

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Regards, Richard

Imagine the briefing : how could a commander possibly ask his men to bomb innocents just by saying they would suffer less? It would have affected the morale for the crews involved for the next missions.

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What about the bombing of city's carried out by both sides? In the case of Germany not all of the civilians were Nazis.

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Regards, Richard

true, but at least the targets had (mostly) a strategical use and I assume that bombing German civilians would have been easier for allied crews if they remembered, Rotterdam,Coventry and others. Of course bombing occupied countries was a different matter, but civilians were not the actual target.

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I'd like to mention a couple points:

The IG Farben Buna at Auschwitz-Monowitz was bombed, though. It was only 3 km from Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The morale of the prissoners was crashed, after they saw hundreds of bombers pass by.

Bombing the railroads, the krematoria or the gas chambers could have stopped operating for days, maybe even weeks. And let's not be light about this: in March 1944, when the deportation of Hungarian Jews was at its height, 12.000 people were being killed everyday. No railroads for 10 days: 120.000 lives.

I do understand the Allies' strategy: destroy the German war machine and the Holocaust would stop. Yes, but I think it's precise to notice that 1.300.000 people were killed at Auschwitz, many, many more than the British, Commonwealth and American total war casualties combined. Also, anti-semitism can be traced to several episodes involving the Allies in those times. Light antisemitism or indiference, maybe, but it cost lives as well. What about the liner St. Louis, by example?

It's possible, but then the raid should have been planned at the perfect moment and I doubt that the allies knew how many people were killed every day.

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But surely, all the camps would have had to be destroyed ? I assume that the Germans wouldn't simply have 'freed' the unforunates who were due to be 'processsed' : they'd have been sent somewhere else ( Treblinka, Sobibor, etc ) ......

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"Stand by to pull me out of the seat if I get hit" - Guy Gibson

That's what I meant. When the allies bombed the factories , the Nazis built new facilities , they would have done the same with death camps and they might even have used have used human shields too.

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It's also quite flattering to Bomber Command to assume that they could hit the crematoria or railroads by night in late '43/early '44.

Only one precision night-time attack against a small target was carried out in the second half of WWII - Peenemunde. Despite being the clearest possible target ( a peninsula ) the attack had to take place on a moonlit night. 1,800 tons of bombs were dropped and many, if not most, of the key target buildings escaped destruction. Ironically, a large number of bombs dropped on a forced-workers camp nearly two miles away. The raid could only be judged a success because accomodation buildings were hit, killing a number of key German personnel. 40 four-engined bombers failed to return.

Aircrew morale was even a factor in this raid. 'Peenemunde ? Never heard of it !' was the main reaction amongst aircrew, who were briefed that the installation was developing a new kind of anti-bomber radar.

Agreed, by early 1945 Bomber Command would have had the operational capability to 'do a Dresden' on Auschwitz, but would it have been worth it by that stage ?

Or could the hardly anti-Semitic 8th Air Force have carried out a precision raid by daylight ?

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"Stand by to pull me out of the seat if I get hit" - Guy Gibson

Well, the British certainly knew... British Intelligence in the Middle East were in contact with Rudolf Kastner, the head of the Aid and Rescue Comettee, in 1944. He very well knew the number of people being deported every day from Hungary.

Well, maybe not all the camps... Some had been already dismantled, like Chelmno. But Auschwitz was by far the largest (in every aspect) and the most visible, since it was not hidden in the woods.

Yes, but it may have had an impact. The Final Solution was not going as planne: it was not working as rapidly as it should have, and the Germans were facing growing numerous practical problems about it. The amount of improvisation and test/error methods they were implementing was huge. A severe disruption of the Birkenau complex could have temporarily stopped deportations from Hungary, by example.

Who said by night? The Buna at Monowitz was bombed by the USAF in day-light. There is even a photograph, taken during the mission by a B-17, of Birkenau: you can bloody see the crematoria's chimenney, for God's sake!

No, since Auschwitz was 'shut down' on December and liberated by the Red Army on January 27th.

Hmmmm.....did the chimney have 'CREMATORIA' on it ? After all, every complex of industrial buildings in the 1940s seemed to be surrounded by large chimneys with various functions so I doubt the 15th AF or their photographic interpreters may have realised the significance of this one.....

Monowitz was not bombed until Autumn '44 and the gas chambers at Auschwitz were last used on November 8th, so a large-scale attack at that stage would have been more of a 'gesture' than a serious method of preventing the Holocaust. 1943 would have been the optimum time, surely....?

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"Stand by to pull me out of the seat if I get hit" - Guy Gibson

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,
Not Slipdigit

I do understand all the tactical and practical reasons of why it wasn't done. I agree with all of what's been stated above.

However, have you ever listened to any Auschwitz survivour? Watching those B-17s go by was the last of many signs that no one cared. Neglected by their home countries, by their neighbours, by the Allies, by God Himself...

Tokio was bombed in a highly risky operation in 1942, for symbolic reasons... Shouldn't also solidarity be a strategic reason as well?

An example: the Aid and Rescue Comittee, headed by Rudolph Kastner, who travelled to neutral Turkey and then to the Middle East, in 1944, to negotiate with the Zionists and the Allies some bizarre Eichmann exchange proposal: 1.000.000 Jews for 10.000 lorries.

Obviously, the Allies rejected such proposal. Not only it would have been morally wrong to bargain with Nazi Germany over mass murder, but it could have also prolongued the war, the suffering and increase Allied casualties. However, the reasons the British Foreign Office and the US Department of State argued to reject the proposal were that 'such trade would provide us with an even greater of Jews than we already have'.

That's my point.

Friedrich,

I understand what you are saying, Friedrich, but I see no alternative to what was done. It may have been disheartening to those in the camps, but what else could the Allies do? The inmates had to have known that those huge numbers of bombers were doing something to get them free, other than just flying over.

I acknowledge that there was anti-semitism in all countries and also understand that it was not just Jews who were killed in the systematic manner proscribed by the Nazis. Just look at the voyage of the SS St. Louis in 1939. That was a crime of great proportion.

I am a Southerner and outside people have an automatic idea that Klan is prevalent in this area. They would be wrong. Personally, I don't antagonize in any way God's chosen people, the Sons of Isaac, for religous reasons and I am one those evil southern Protestants who are supposed to persecute them.

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Best Regards,
Not Slipdigit

I really don't believe in a huge anti-semitic conspiracy preventing the bombing of Auschwitz.

Two of Churchill's key advisers on strategic bombing ( one of whom was the principal architect of 'area bombing' ) were professors Solly Zuckerman and Frederick Lindemann......

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"Stand by to pull me out of the seat if I get hit" - Guy Gibson