Bombing of Auschwitz

And relevance of your quotes (I checked them, they all have their contexts somewhat blown out of proportion ) to the thread's topic?

For further discussion on this subject please refer to the gentleman in my avatar

 

Nor do I. ANd I'm not pointing at anybody. But we've got to accept that many people amongst the Western Allies were either anti-semitic or indifferent for the Jews' fate. Otherwise, how can the Saint Louis, the emigration restrictions, the deafening silences can be explaines?

I'll simply will not read biblical quotes in a context that has no use for them... I'm somewhat of a theologian, but we're talking history here...

 

Pardon my ignorance, but what is the Saint Louis that has been already mentioned more than once?

 

A ship, main character of one of the most shameful actions (or omissions) made by the Allies during the Holocaust: SS St. Louis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Ah, you bet me to it, SLip!

 

A story of tragedy and utter shame. Thank you both.

 

People tend to forget that you don't kill thousands people a day just by gathering the victims in some place and beat them to death or let them starve.

It takes a very strong industrial and logistical process to reach such yield, unless you commit very large numbers of personal to this task (for example the Rwanda genocide), and I don't mean white collar killers, I mean people who don't care ending their working day covered with blood and flesh of men, women and children.

In the case of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, the destruction of the gas chambers and railways would have stalled the process big time (for example, during my visit to Auschwitz, I learnt that the crematoriums were not even able to keep the pace with the gas chambers).

Of course, this would not have stopped the genocide, but the nazis would have had no way to murder people nearly as fast without the gas chambers.

I don't know if this is the result of a mild antisemitism or indifference on the US or UK side, I lack elements to answer such a serious and critical question.

But I know the allies were over-estimating the impact their bombings had onto the shortening of the war.

Maybe if they knew the truth about the moderate efficiency of their bombings on industrial or civil targets, they would have been less reluctant to divert some of their air power to take out death camps.

 

But the critical target you identify, the gas chambers and crematoria were only very small targets within a huge area. If they were actually targetted how many impacts would they really take and how big would collateral damage (i.e., inmates) be? The only certain thing about these bombardments was that the bombs would all hit the ground, the target is another story.

 

As a matter of fact, who in the Allies knew that there was a Holocaust going on, and if so where that was, and when did they become aware of it?

That there were prisioner and concentration camps would be easy to deduce, but that industrial scale extermination was going on, is it a different matter?

 

It seems pretty obvious that, given the inaccuracy of the allied bombers, they could not seriously expect to aim at the gas chambers.

I can tell you that the gas chambers in the Auschwitz part of the camp were rather small buildings, very small compared to the size of the camp.

That's the reason why I talk about taking out the death camp, not only the gas chambers, which means plundering the whole Auschwitz Birkenau complex and most probably killing many if not the majority of inmates.

In the last part of the war, late 43 for example, I don't think that Germany would have been able to fastly rebuild such a murderous industrial tool, nor the railways leading to it, because this was not as "vital" (stange word association...) for them than war industries, and most of all : they were trying to keep the extermination process as much secret as possible and I really doubt they would have built hundreds of mini-Auschwtiz !!!

But of course, this would mean the Allies took the decision to destroy it along with most of the inmates, which is weird and would today be discussed as we discuss now about the fact they did not bombed Auschwitz

P.S. : If you now Auschwitz (I'm talking about the main Auschwitz-Birkenau), you know how to spot exactly the gas chambers : a shivering detail which proves this camp was thought as a mass murdering machine.

The railroad was in fact entering the camp, went all the way through it and ended right next to the main gas chamber, the goal was to quickly exterminate half of the people right after they got out of the train...

Someone knowing this would have been able to easily spot the gas chambers (just follow the railway).

You can easily see this on the linked aerial picture, which was taken in spring 1944 by the RAF. (gas chambers are located near the end of the camp internal railway, at the bottom left part of the picture)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Ausschwitz_aerial_view_RAF.jpg

By this time, the Allies knew pretty much everything about the way Auschwitz worked, thanks to the Vrba-Wetzler report. US and UK medias made the first references to Auschwitz gas chambers at the time of the D-Day.

But still, they would not have been able to aim at it, the option was doing nothing or destroying the whole thing including the inmates.

 

Why on Earth would anyone, especially a Jew , make a remark as absurd as that ? You say that you can understand it - please explain.

 

Maybe because this would have put an end to the hell on earth they were living in.

 

Killing people is easy, if it's not by gassing you always resort the the tried beforehand methods of lining a few hundred at a time and machine gunning them, or go one by one with a pistol, that's the Babi-Yar approach.

Crematoria were to get get rid of the bodies. Or at least compact them enough, as I can't really see how one hides all those tons of human ashes with half burnt bones emerging.

 

Slipdigit, I think you are really mistaking on the subject : the German policy was to concentrate efficient murder factories in scarse places, and bring all the Jews they could to these places.

Widepread small industrial extermination units goes against all the moves they made during the war.

You mention the small Auschwitz satellites : none of them had integrated gas chamber / crematory installation, and the fact that, from 1942 on, the majority of the gazing occuring at Auschwitz I were transferred to big gas/crematory facilities located in Auschwitz II, because only these big facilities could provide the murder yield they wanted.

As per Dachau, you are confusing the concentration camps : Dachau / Oranienburg / Flossenbürg / Buchenwald / Auschwitz / Gross-Rosen / Stutthof / Neuengamme / Ravensbrück / Sachsenhausen / Bergen-Belsen / Mauthausen / Maïdanek / Dora / Natzwiller-Struthof

Almost none of them had gas chambers that were used during the war

And the extermination camps : Belzec Maïdanek Treblinka Sobibor Auschwitz II - Birkenau Chelmno equipped with mas murder gas/crematory complexes (Auschwitz was both a concentration and an extermination camp).

So widespreads small gas/crematory complexes theory realy goes against the way the whole murder machine was thought at the time, not even speaking of the logistical mess it would have been to connect railroads to a myriad of small camps, divide the captured Jews between them etc etc.
I just don't buy this.

I think the material issue was the Allies were far from being able to do surgical strikes at the time and hit the gas/crematory complex without blowing up the whole camps.

It might also be a mild antisemitism or indifference but I've got no elements to back up such a serious accusation, so I won't step further in this direction, even if it's a very interesting question.

 

Anti-semitism would be blasting away some thousands of half-starved Jewish (etc) prisoners in the hope of hitting a gas chamber that could be rebuilt in three days. No way!

 

The official version is that, after being aware of what was exactly going on in Auschwitz in mid 1944 (see my post above), Churchill ordered the preparation of a bomb raid, but finaly cancelled it when the deportation from Hungaria ceased.

The risk of multiplication of gas chambers like syphillis in the clergy or killing inmates never weighted in the debate.

Anyway, as i posted above, if the Allies had bombed Auschwitz there would be as much debate about why they did as there are debate now about why they didn't