In 1978, David S. Wyman started a major controversy with his Commentary Magazine article “Why Auschwitz was never bombed.” In his piece, Wyman tells of the written account of two escaped Auschwitz prisoners who documented the fact that the camp was a death factory to wipe out its prisoners. He tracks the path of correspondence to the U.S. government and questions why the U.S. did nothing to intervene at the time, in 1944.
Professor Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Suicide and Terrorism at the University of Chicago, recently conducted a study on such a bombing.
“I just wanted to know the answer for myself, what the moral issues were involved with bombing Auschwitz,” Pape said in a recent interview.
Pape said that the biggest takeaway from his research is that bombing Auschwitz would not have come at the expense of the U.S. war effort – the issue was that the U.S. had found that strategic bombing was not helping in its efforts to defeat the Germans.
As a moral issue, when the U.S. received the intelligence, it was assumed there was not the large number of prisoners that, in fact, there were. According to Pape, there were hundreds of thousands of Jews at issue, not millions.
“There was no precision bombing,” said Pape, so the U.S. would have had to drop so many bombs to get a 90 percent probability of destroying the crematoriums at Auschwitz that more than 4,000 prisoners would have perished.
Dr. Michael Berenbaum, who edited the book, “The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies have attempted it?” explained that in June 1944 the Jewish Agency for Israel, the ruling party over the Jewish settlement in Palestine, decided not to ask the Allies to bomb Auschwitz.
“The reasoning behind that decision was, ‘We do not know what is happening on the ground’,” Berenbaum said. “’Because we do not know what is happening on the ground and innocent Jews could be killed, we cannot request that Auschwitz be bombed.”
However, Berenbaum said the counterargument is that at least 8,000 people were being killed daily by the summer of 1944 so they would have died anyway and bombing Auschwitz would have seriously hurt Germany’s ability to slaughter Jews.
“Consequently, once you know what was happening in Auschwitz, that assumption [that the people on the ground are alive and going to stay alive] is not a valid assumption,” Berenbaum said.
So could the U.S. have pulled off the bombing of Auschwitz in 1944? Yes. But whether the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz: that is a topic that is still up for debate.
