Auschwitz (41 page)

There was another consequence resulting from detailed information about the true nature of Auschwitz reaching the West, a controversial question that still simmers on in debate today—the call for the bombing of the camp. In June 1944, the War Refugee Board in Washington received a plea from Jacob Rosenheim of the Agudas Israel World Organization that the Allies bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. This request was forwarded six days later by John Pehle, head of the War Refugee Board, to the Assistant Secretary of War, John McCloy, although Pehle added that he had “several doubts”
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about the feasibility of this idea. The suggestion was rejected by McCloy on June 26, both as impractical and because it would cause the diversion of bombers that were engaged in “decisive operations”
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elsewhere.

Another telegram had arrived in Washington on June 24, this one from
the World Jewish Congress in Geneva via the War Refugee Board in Switzerland. It called for, among other measures, the bombing of the gas chambers themselves. On July 4, this plea too was rejected by McCloy, who cited the same reasons he had outlined in his June 26 letter. Significantly, an inter-office memorandum at this time addressed to McCloy from a member of his staff, Colonel Gerhardt, contains the phrase: “I know you told me to ‘kill' this ...”
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suggesting, at the very least, that the idea of bombing was dismissed without considered judgment.

Requests to bomb Auschwitz were also reaching London. When Churchill heard about them on July 7, he wrote to his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, saying—now famously—“Get anything out of the Air Force you can and invoke me if necessary.”
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The Air Ministry examined the various possibilities and Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Secretary of State for Air, replied on July 15 in a broadly negative manner. He pointed out to Eden that it was impossible for British Bomber Command to cover such a great distance during one night—and the British specialized in night-time bombing. Only the Americans bombed by day, and so he proposed laying the matter before them. He did suggest that one way forward might be for the Americans to drop weapons at the same time as they attempted to bomb the killing installations, in the hope of instigating a mass breakout.

In any event, as his letter makes clear, he was passing responsibility for the whole business over to the U.S. Air Force. American General Spaatz was questioned about the proposal when he visited the Air Ministry shortly afterwards. He suggested aerial reconnaissance of the camp as a possible way forward and the request was passed on to the Foreign Office, where it never surfaced again.

The overall question of bombing Auschwitz rumbled on through the summer, with John McCloy in the U.S. War Department in August dismissing further pleas for action from the World Jewish Congress. In Britain, a Foreign Office official suggested in an internal memorandum that, regardless of any practical difficulties, there were also “political”
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reasons not to pursue the bombing—almost certainly the “flood” of displaced Jews that would after the war seek sanctuary in Palestine, a territory currently governed by the British.

So, on both sides of the Atlantic, the decision was made not to bomb
Auschwitz. But, crucially, the decision was also made not even to
consider
the bombing of Auschwitz. No proper aerial reconnaissance of the camp was undertaken, no feasibility study drawn up, no detailed attempt of any sort made to evaluate the various options. The overwhelming sense is of both governments' attention being focused elsewhere (with the possible exception of Winston Churchill—although even he dropped the matter after his initial “get anything out of the Air Force you can” note).

Of course, the British and Americans had a great deal on their minds in July 1944. The progress of Allied troops through Normandy demanded huge attention; the Red Army were at the gates of Warsaw and the Polish “Home Army” was calling for support; and, on July 20, an assassination attempt was made on Adolf Hitler at his headquarters in East Prussia. There were clearly a large number of competing priorities for Allied air resources, and it is easy to see how the prevailing wisdom in London and Washington became that Auschwitz would best be destroyed by ignoring the camp directly and putting every effort into winning the war as swiftly as possible on the ground. All that is true, and yet the motivation behind the rejection of the calls for bombing the camp appears to possess a less savory dimension. The lack of proper consideration and the dismissive tone in some of the documents all give off the lingering sense that no one was bothered enough to make bombing Auschwitz a priority.

The officials who so swiftly dismissed the calls for bombing would, no doubt, be astonished by the veritable academic industry that has grown up around the question today. So deeply has the issue penetrated the popular consciousness that one academic, when talking to Jewish audiences, finds “that many people are convinced that bombing the camps would have saved many of the six million Jewish victims.”
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The bombing question has become much bigger than a debate about practicalities and has taken on a symbolic dimension—proof that the Allies could have prevented Jewish deaths but chose not to. This is why the issue has to be examined carefully and calmly, to prevent the emergence and growth of a new myth that “many of the six million” could indeed have been saved by the bombing.

The problem, of course, with examining the practicality of any Allied bombing of Auschwitz is simple—it did not happen. We are thus in the realms of counter-factual history, a land where little ever can be finally resolved.
Although there seems general expert agreement that nothing would have been achieved by bombing the railway to the camp—the Nazis would have diverted the Auschwitz trains on to another route and swiftly repaired the track—there is no such consensus on the question of actually bombing the gas chambers. Hence, impassioned articles are written detailing the immense difficulties of a bombing raid either by USAF B17s or B24s or by the lightly armed British Mosquitoes,
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while other publications fiercely question the alleged technical obstacles and suggest that bombing could well have destroyed the crematoria.
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As with much counter-factual history, there is no conclusive answer.

Luckily, however, there is a way through the maze—at least if one considers
when
the most impassioned and insistent pleas for the bombing of the camp were made to the Allied authorities. Given the timing of the delivery of the Auschwitz Protocols to the Allies, and the decision by Horthy to cease deporting the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, it is possible to say conclusively that there is no possibility that the bombing of the camp or the railway lines would have prevented any of the Hungarian Jews dying. The detailed information simply reached the Allies too late (for example, the Hungarian deportations ceased on July 9 and the British Air Minister replied negatively to Eden about the proposed bombing on the July 15th).

The next area of this complex issue that one can approach with almost the same level of certainty is the effect of any bombing on the extermination capacity of the camp. The Auschwitz Protocols contain detailed descriptions of the location of the four main crematoria. But even if a daring daylight bombing raid had been mounted against them with pinpoint accuracy, and even if these killing installations had been completely destroyed, the Nazis still would have been able to continue gassing people elsewhere at Auschwitz. Crucially, the location of “The Little White House” and “The Little Red House” were not disclosed in the Auschwitz Protocols, and they offered all the extermination capacity the Nazis then required.

After the Hungarian action was discontinued, Auschwitz was operating with massive excess killing potential. Instead of 10,000 people being killed every day the number dropped to an overall daily average of fewer than 1,500,
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and continued at around that level until November and the closing of the crematoria. Therefore the conclusion must be that, far from saving
“many” of the “six million,” any bombing of the camp initiated by the requests in the summer of 1944 would have saved no one. In fact, because of collateral damage to the barracks only meters from the crematoria it would probably have killed hundreds of the very prisoners the raid was designed to save.

This is, of course, an intellectual conclusion and not an emotional one. And, because so much of the debate around this issue is conducted at an emotional level, the conclusion will prove unsatisfactory to many who want to think that the Allies could have done much more to prevent the killings. Perhaps they could have—perhaps, for example, dropping guns into the camp would have precipitated a revolt—though it seems unlikely in the extreme that prisoners weakened by hunger could have suddenly and without preparation staged a revolt against SS men in watchtowers armed with machine guns and protected behind electrified fences. We shall never know—because, by posing that question we are back in the downwardly spiraling land of the counter-factual.

The debate about the possible bombing of Auschwitz is so passionate because it masks a wider ranging and less specific question: Shouldn't more have been done to try to save the Jews? The British government, for example, knew for certain of the existence of the Nazis' systematic campaign of destruction against the Jews—it even knew the names of the Operation Reinhard camps and the death toll in each—by the beginning of 1943. Yet, despite pleas from members of Parliament such as Eleanor Rathbone that immigration restrictions should be loosened so that large numbers of Jews from Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania could be offered the right to emigrate to countries of safety, the British government remained steadfastly opposed.

In February 1943, Anthony Eden, in reply to a similar plea from William Brown (MP), stated: “The only truly effective means of succouring the tortured Jewish, and I may add the other suffering peoples of Europe, lies in Allied victory.”
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A few weeks later, in discussions in Washington in March 1943, Eden said that it was important “to move very cautiously about offering to take all the Jews out of a country,” adding, “if we do that, then the Jews of the world will be wanting us to make similar efforts in Poland and Germany. Hitler might well take us up on any such offer, and there simply
are not enough ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them.”
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(This despite the fact that, during the last three years of the war, means were found to ship more than 400,000 German and Italian POWs across the Atlantic.
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)

Eleanor Rathbone was bitter in her criticism of the inaction of the Allies in her speech during a House of Commons debate on May 19, 1943: “If the blood of those who have perished unnecessarily during this war were to flow down Whitehall, the flood would rise so high that it would drown everyone within these gloomy buildings which house our rulers.”
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While we can never know for certain what would have happened if the Allies had dropped emigration restrictions for Jews under threat, it is hard not to agree with Ms. Rathbone that more could (and perhaps should) have been done by the Allies to try to help. It is possible, therefore, that the current debate would be more fruitful if it focused less on the bombing of Auschwitz and more on the admittedly more complex question of Allied wartime immigration policy.

Meanwhile, the ending of the deportation of the Hungarian Jews had consequences both in Budapest—where Eichmann fumed—and at Auschwitz, where the spare capacity in the gas chambers meant that plans were now made to liquidate the population of one whole section of Birkenau—the gypsy camp. This special section of Birkenau had been used since February 1943 to accommodate (at its peak) about 23,000 gypsy men and women. They were allowed to live as families and wear their own clothes, and did not have their hair shaved. Conditions in the gypsy camp, however, soon became among the worst in Auschwitz. Overcrowding combined with lack of food and water meant that disease was rife, particularly typhus and the skin disease called noma, and many thousands died. Altogether, 20,000 of the 23,000 gypsies sent to Auschwitz died there, whether of disease or starvation, or in the gas chambers when the gypsy camp was eventually liquidated.

The Nazis considered the gypsies racially dangerous and “asocial.” They wanted to be rid of them and, proportionate to their population numbers, the gypsies suffered more than any other group under the Third Reich apart from the Jews. There is no accurate statistic for the number of gypsies killed by the Nazis, but between a quarter and half a million are thought to have perished.

The implementation of the Nazis' anti-gypsy policy was inconsistent, however. In the Soviet Union, Nazi killing squads murdered gypsies along with Jews; in Romania the extensive gypsy population was not targeted en masse (although thousands still died as a result of mistreatment); in Poland the majority of gypsies were sent to concentration camps; in Slovakia the policy of persecution was enforced unevenly; and within Germany itself many gypsies were deported, first to ghettos in Poland—5,000 were sent to Łódź and were among the first to die in the gas vans of Chełmno in January 1942.

In Germany the Nazis saw one of the greatest “dangers” as the transference of gypsy racial characteristics into the Aryan population through so-called “Mischlinge” (“mixed blood”) gypsies, and nothing illustrates more clearly the warped sensibilities of the Nazis in this regard than the story of how one eight-year-old girl named Else Baker
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found herself in the gypsy camp at Birkenau in the summer of 1944.

At the start of the year Else had been living happily with her family in Hamburg. Even though disturbed by war, she had a secure place in a normal family unit—or so she thought. Suddenly, one night early in 1944, there was a knock at the front door and several strangers entered, announcing themselves as members of the Gestapo. They said they had come to take Else away, back to her “real” mother. Under the eyes of her devastated parents Else was dragged away, out of the house and into the darkness. She was taken to a warehouse near the port that was full of gypsies, many of whom she remembers as being very disheveled. Else, dressed by her mother in her best clothes, stood and looked at them and gradually went into shock. Only later did she discover that she had been adopted, and that her “real” mother was a half gypsy. The man and woman whom she had always known as her mother and father were, in fact, her adoptive parents, who had brought her up since she was ten months old.