Why didn't the Allies bomb Auschwitz

[Gwenick]

Just read this link

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4175045.stm

It's all very well asking now - "should we have bombed it" - but then what would we be saying if we HAD - it would probably be something along the lines - of "OMG look how many innocent Jews we killed trying to 'save' them".

What about those Jews who survived, and have gone to on to get married and have children, or those that survived and were reunited with family members?? How would the families feel now if we'd bombed them?? I don't think it would have helped bombing them - the Nazi's would only have found somewhere/somehow else to persecute the Jews.

Opinions please (nice controversial one for a Sunday afternoon ;-)

I think it is safer to keep this discussion about the holocaust and it's victims and the reasons around that.
To bring the modern world where the Jewish and Israel have new influence and effect and opportunity regardless of how you feel about it, I do not think it proper somehow?

I'm embarrassed to say I'd never heard of the 5 million "other" figure. Of course I knew that communists, gypsies, homosexuals and disabled people were also murdered in the camps, but I can't remember ever noticing a definite figure for it until this thread. Has this been a generally accepted figure or is it something which has been calculated quite recently? (Ocean, you say 11 or 12 million people who died in the camps is the "official" figure - what d'you mean, d'you mean this is accepted by governments, UN etc.? and is referring to people who actually died in the concentration camps?)

Socci of course I've read Prettycandles post......what exactly is your point??

Hi Gwen
not got anything to say on the subject but am getting fed up over there so thought I may join you ;)

irony does not come across well in the printed word unfortunately, so even if you were trying to be ironic with your comment about rich Jewish relatives it actually ends up sounding hurtful, especially on a thread where some (many) people have a very strong emotional connection with the atrocities

oh right so my Jewish relative doesn't have any family connections with the holocaust then - despite the fact that his family came from Germany originally???

Perhaps people should think twice about accusing people of being antisemetic and racist as well then.....without good reason.

I think this article on whether anti-Semitism still exists is interesting.

I look at all the information available about the Holocaust with some interest. I was born less than 10yrs after WW2 but it was never mentioned when I was a child and I never heard the term 'concentration camps'. Then I recall asking my mum about them, after I'd seen it in a book and she was very reluctant to tell me much (to protect me from the horrors, I guess). She said they were special war prisons, that was all, but I knew from her manner there was more to it. Eventually, I found out the terrible truth and now, as we see more on TV, books etc, the Holocaust (a term that wasn't in general usage when I was a child) seems closer in time to me than it did years ago. I'm glad it's now talked about and that my children have the chance to learn lessons from it.

Re bombing Auschwitz, dh thinks British planes didn't have the capability to fly both there and back and were refused permission from Russia to use their airbases to refuel.

I am not going to continue on this thread, because it seems to me you are being obtuse for obtuseness sake

you were not commenting on having a Jewish relative, your comment was all about how much money he ("the jew" as you so pleasantly put it) had.

and that's enough from me, because I'm finding this thread too upsetting

oh for goodness sake Twiglett - what is the matter with some of you?????? Read the post which I was referring too and I mean READ it - not just 'assume' you know what I meant.

You said 'irony doesn't come across well in printed word'..........well having said that you can't write anything in printed word the same as you can speak it - so lets just scrap all debate subjects incase someone gets the wrong end of the stick.

Gwenick I am scratching my head as to how some people could misiterpret your contributions as anti semetic.

As for failing to see why you should have an inward chuckle at your rich (Jewish) relative.

Chuckle away, it does not make you anti Jewish .

Message withdrawn

but |Socci as a neutral onlooker to this discussion I cannot for the life of me see how anyone can extract anything remotely offenive in a single thing Gwenick has said.
I have read and reread her contributions and still cannot see how anyone could possibly infer anything antisemetic or even insensitive.

In fact I thought her postings were extremely eloquent and informative. I for one learned new stuff from what she said

There's an article here about how things become offensive (or not) depending on context.

OK, why is it so hilarious that one person in your family happens to have a bit of money and - shock- is also, as you so charmingly put it 'the Jew"? Do please explain, because I don't get why this is 'funny' at all. It's not ironic (it would be ironic if, in the light of people saying Jews have too much money , the only Jewish people you knew were living in poverty.) You merely seem to be implying that the stereotype is true as far as you are concerned and thus criticism is justified. The criticism of Jews for having too much money is an ancient one, used as an excuse for persecution for centuries. In the middle ages Jews were persecuted for being too rich, Hitler said that the Jews were taking jobs and money from decent Germans, and now, even today, the same thing is said (often about cabals of rich Jews controlling public life etc - again a 'reason' used by Hitler for mass murder). This is why these kind of comments leave a nasty taste in the mouth.
I think people here are confusing the death camps - where 9 out of ten of all victims were Jewish, deliberately murdered in killing factories efficiently and legally created to eliminate every Jew in the world - with people who died elsewhere in different ways. Yes, there were others who died. Nobody has EVER denied that. But did you know that for decades the communist Polish government said that Auschwitz was where Polish civilians died, with absolutely no mention of the Jews? That for decades after the war there was still widespread disbelief that Jews had suffered in any particular way - and those witnesses who survived to tell their tales were routinely disbelieved? The idea that Jewish people have somehow gained some unfair benefit by claiming a degree of suffering they are not 'entitled' to is not just offensive, but wildly wrong.
As for why Auschwitz wasn't bombed, my post further down was taken from a very interesting article in the Times newspaper which I think answers the original question very well.

Also to claim a documentary about Auschwitz (which is what the documentary series was about, actually) is 'biased' because it focuses primarily on Jewish suffering, when Auschwitz was created to kill Jews, and where nearly every victim was Jewish, where Jewish babies were gassed and burned, and Jewish children torn away from their mothers experimented on and so on in an endless parade of suffering, seems to be to be a tad insensitive at the very least. And to claim that this is wrong, when you have refused to watch the series at all, seems particularly blinkered.

Thank you aloha- I have been trying to compose a post like that for ages, but I couldn't possibly have bettered yours. I find it staggering that people can't see what is wrong with those sort of remarks. It makes me despair.

Really good link, Caligula.

This is from the history learning site - I think it deals with the facts very well.

The Holocaust is the name given to the murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies etc. by the Nazis during World War Two.

Hitler had made it perfectly clear in "Mein Kampf" what he thought of the so-called "untermenschen" (the sub-humans) but to most people these were the thoughts of a madman.

However, during "Krystalnacht" in 1938 the Nazis had shown their desire to persecute the Jews and in the war Hitler had the opportunity to carry out his plan to rid Europe of all undesirables (from his point of view) and he concentrated his efforts in Eastern Europe. After the attack on Russia, murder squads from the SS moved behind the army and systematically wiped out towns and villages containing Russian people (the same people who had welcomed the German Army into Russia as liberators against the Russian leader Stalin!).

However, the process was slow and the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, was concerned that the men doing the evil deed were becoming demoralised shooting innocent civilians and he looked for another solution. The lead to the Final Solution decided at the infamous Wannsee Conference in 1942 when it was ordered that all Jews in Europe be killed in extermination camps. With due speed, German industrialists were required to design and produce ovens and gas chambers that would enable the mass murders to be carried out quickly and cleanly without involving German personnel too much.

The most infamous camps were at Auschwitz, Belzac, Sobibor and Treblinka. Here Jews, Eastern Europeans (many of whom were also Jewish), gypsies and the physically and mentally handicapped were brought and murdered.

For many years there has been an accepted figure for the number of Jews murdered - six million. As a result of recently found evidence this figure is now being upgraded and some historians have put the figure as high as 7 to 8 million. To this day mass graves are still found in Russia of Jews murdered by the Einsatzgruppen (SS) and so the final figure may never be truly known. The gypsy community claims that 50% of all gypsies were murdered while the number of handicapped people murdered is not really known.

As the war came to a close the Nazis destroyed many of the records they held but the survivors of the extermination camps have given us an accurate portrayal of what ?life? was like in these hell-holes. The death camps were seen as factories which had to make profits such as extracting the gold teeth from the victims and selling it (or sending it to Switzerland which would explain the recent problems with "Nazi Gold" in banks in that country) and the camp commanders exchanged ideas on how to make their camps more efficient and therefore more profitable.

Deaths of Jews in the Holocaust
Poland
3,000,000
90% of all Jews there
Germany
210,000
90% of all Jews there
Czech.
155,000
86% of all Jews there
Holland
105,000
75% of al Jews there
Hungary
450,000
70% of all Jews there
Ukraine
900,000
60% of all Jews there
Roumania
300,000
50% of all Jews there
Russia
107,000
11% of all Jews there

Total number of European Jews killed = 6 million

Added to this must be those other groups murdered in the death camps such as gypsies, the physically disabled, the mentally disabled and those involved in resistance movements against Hitler.

Hitler decided on the fate of the Jews at a meeting in a Berlin lakeside mansion at Wannersee on January 20th 1942.

Here is an extract from the minutes of that meeting:
"In the course of the Final Solution, the Jews will be brought to the east for labour. Large labour gangs will be formed, with the sexes separated, which will be used for road construction. No doubt a lot of them will drop out through natural wastage. The remainder who survive will have to be dealt with accordingly."

"Accordingly" meant the building of what were literally factories to kill people - the death camps like Auschwitz\Birkenau, Sobibor, Treblinka.

Each death camp had to make a profit and each camp was in competition with the others to see which could make the most. Hence why hair was shaved from the heads of victims (to use in mattresses), gold teeth were taken out etc. There was even competition to see which gas was the most effective though each death camp eventually used Zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide). Each camp had to keep an accounts book that could be inspected. Jews were selected to help in the murder of other Jews before they themselves were murdered.

This is the memorial in Warsaw where tens of thousands of Jews from Warsaw were sent to the death camps. This memorial is shaped like the carriages of the cattle wagons that took these people to their deaths. The names of the families known to have died are carved on the inside of the 'wagons'.

This part of another memorial in Warsaw's Peace Park shows Polish Jews being lead off by Nazi soldiers.

To this day there is still some confusion as to the number of murders that took occurred in the death camps. The Nazis destroyed records as the Russians advanced from the east and as the war came to an end there was a rush to murder more and more and it is probable that we will never know the true figure of those murdered in these death camps. It is possible the 6 million is a conservative figure.

Those greedy Jews ... buying all the expensive houses, and hogging the glory of the Holocaust. Geez.

(I'm with the "how can you not see the anti-semitism here" camp, just in case my sarcasm's not showing clearly enough.)

NQC - well you certainly put that a bit more succinctly than I did I couldn't agree more.

Eh, actual information is nice, too, Aloha.

Oh, and to the "why were they discriminated against", well, they were the only non-Christians in Europe. Given all the fighting between Protestants (of various flavours) and Catholics in the past, it's hardly suprising everyone was horrible to people who weren't even Christian.

moving back on topic - another possibility would have been for the Allies to bomb the rail lines used to transport prisoners of the Nazis to Auschwitz. i have a vague recollection - which might be wrong tho - that one of the reasons that this wasn't done was that it might have revealed that the Allies had broken German Codes (as this would be the most likely way for the Allies to have had access to this information).

and for all you "irony" fans:-
I'm Jewish. I grew up with a mum on benefits, and no financial support from my dad, in my grandparents home (who were low paid machinists).

Regarding the 'not wanting to give away the enigma code breaks'. It was quite common for the allise to have to make dreadful decisions regarding what could be done with the information they gained from having broken the codes. It was not uncommon for shipping to fall under attack because the allies could not re-route them based on the enigma information. And as awful as this was, in the end keeping the secret would have saved more lives, since it shortened the lenght of the war.

Also bombing the railway lines would have been a very temporary measure in slowing the slaughter. Totaly desirable if even one life was saved, of course. However the argumant was made at the time that the bomb sorties would be more effctivly used else where. It was a time of dreadful decisions. We can, at 60 years distance see that things may well have been done better. But I don't think that is was as easy to see at the time, when man/woman power, planes and bombs were all in short suppy.

And to put in my 5 ps worth. What happened to the Jews in WW2 was an evil unparalleled in Human existance. Others were undoubtibly treated in vile and inhuman ways but the Nazi attitde to the Jews was in a class of wickedness all of its own.

Thank you Aloha for taking the time and trouble to post all that. Like NQC says, it's really helpful to get some facts on here.

hmb, i don't agree that the holocaust was 'an evil unparalleled in Human existance'. one look at the figures for deaths under stalin (if you're looking at numbers) or rwanda (if you're looking at genocide) or the killing fields of cambodia (I could go on and on and on) should show you that 'league tables' of human on human cruelty make no sense and somehow take away from the horror that should fill us when we remember what we as a human race are capable of.

I think the lesson that we should all take from the holocaust is to be watchful of ourselves, as all human beings are capable of the kind of silence and denial that allowed that abomination to take place in Germany and Poland in the 1940s. To argue that somehow it was 'worse' seems to me to feed the same kind of nationalism and race division (somehow, this could only have happened in Germany???) that caused the holocaust in the first place (i'm not saying for a second that you're saying this by the way hmb).

completely agree HMB that war is full of dreadful decisions. and thank you for that informative answer to my question