Add to that, all the “allied” countries who had cooperated with the nazis. Countries like Holland, France, Belgium and such - had no problem rounding up jews and handing them over. Back in the USA we were supposed to have sympathy for those “oppressed” nations. How would it look if they were also suppressors?
On a side note - one of my favorite shows was “Hogan’s Heroes” but you never see any mention of concentration camps or anti-semitism. Hard to believe not a single allied prisoner under Hogan would not have been Jewish. Just one time they slightly mentioned Jessie Owens and worry about black POW Kinch defeating a German in boxing.
But it wouldn’t have. That’s the thing. It’s not like the Nazis would have said “Oh well, rail lines are busted. Guess we better turn all these Jews loose.”.
In all likelihood, they’d have either force marched them to the camps, or shipped them elsewhere.
At best, you may have given them a few more days in transit.
I was going to say what **Shodan **did - bombing the death camps would have been a very low priority for the Allies when they had so many other, more militarily relevant, targets to bomb.
Knowing something is happening as a fact is very different from seeing it. Most GIs knew the Nazis were murderers, but seeing it can be a very different thing.
I’m pretty sure he did that in the concentration camps in the W. Allies zone. I’ve seen documentary footage of civilians going through them. The extermination camps, however, were in Poland and except for Auschwitz had all been dismantled/ destroyed before they were liberated.
Forced marched them to what camp? Auschwitz / Treblinka were built specifically as killing centers. If they are blown to pieces it will take time to build a new one. When people are being killed on an assembly line, anything to gum up the works could end up saving people.
How is it going to “save” them though? Let’s say we bombed the main rail depot at the camp. Trains within some arbitrary distance would have the prisoners disembark and walk to the camp. Outside of that arbitrary distance, they’d just take them elsewhere. It’s not like they were going to turn them loose or something.
Another consideration that just came to me is that prior to about January of 1944, the US 8th AF wasn’t really equipped (i.e. P-51s w/drop tanks) to bomb that far into Germany without suffering grievous losses (see the second Schweinfurt raid in October 1943 for an example). Until those fighters came on the scene, the 8th AF was limited to bombing within the range of their P-38 and P-47 escorts, which was limited to cities in western Germany.
Most of the camps were in Poland or central Germany- until 1944, they were effectively out of Allied bombing range.
A certain percentage of Holocaust victims were also shot rather than gassed. So if the gas chambers weren’t available, we’d probably just see lots of shot Jews.
In my understanding, the Nazis transitioned to gas chambers because shooting Jews wasn’t killing them fast enough (as well as causing significant psychological harm to the executioners). If that’s true, then destroying the gas chambers would have resulted in a lower volume of murder, and lower overall deaths.
I meant bombing the camp itself. Basically the same idea as bombing factories. Yes, they’ll have them up and running again in a week, but that’s a week where they aren’t producing munitions. In the same way, thats a week or a few days where they aren’t gassing people. Yes there are other ways to kill people, mass shootings had already been done. But that was slower and messier. Especially in regards to hiding the evidence. The death camps made killing possible on such a scale that just slowing down the rate may have saved lives, especially by mid 1944 when the end and liberation was coming into sight.
That occurred at lots of camps, I think, and the public display cabinets for newspapers were used to display graphic posters and photographs, fairly quickly.
They did report what they knew, as they knew it: until the camps were overrun, all the news media had to go on were individual reports. But once they did have access, what they saw was reported with plenty of coverage.
All the death camps were in pre-1939 Poland. They were out of range of 8th AF P-51’s in conventional missions from-to East Anglia in the UK. Auschwitz at least however was within range of 15th AF P-51’s based in Italy from mid 1944 in conventional round trip missions. Other of the camps might be reached on escorted ‘shuttle’ missions from either UK or Italy to Soviet bases in Ukraine as was also done in a few cases against other types of target in June-September 1944. But that was a result of the Soviets pushing the front lines well west of where they were in 1943.
There is therefore a reasonable political discussion about bombing the death camps in daylight from mid 1944 but not much earlier. Also the most accurate form of night bombing in mid-late war was Oboe radio time-of-arrival navigation which could produce results similar to what daylight bombing practically achieved, though not match exceptionally successful daylight bombing in good conditions. But Oboe was limited by the radio horizon to targets not far into western Germany until stations were set up on the Continent later. Likewise 8th AF fighter range became practically longer when the a/c could divert on the way back to fields in Belgium and eastern France from late summer 1944.
There were many wiseacres who said “Well, I expect it’s all propaganda, or at least greatly exaggerated - just like the Belgian atrocity stories or the corpses-into-soap stories during the last war. When the war’s over, we’ll find out it was all nonsense, just like last time.”
What war?
The first camp (Dachau) was open 39 days after Hitler became Chancellor. it got it’s first shipment of prisoners 2 weeks later. The war didn’t start for 6 more years.
But they weren’t extermination camps, to begin with. The official line was that it was just hard beds and hard work. There was plenty of casual brutality, and some people died or were killed. Some were even released, at first.
and during the German invasion of Belgium, there were some definite atrocities, but the Allied propagandists really made a meal of them and exaggerated them far beyond their actual degree.
True. The British hurt themselves by propagandizing America into WW1, we were sceptical about such claims after wards. It turned out that the Brits were just as nasty Imperialist Warmongers as the Imperial Germans in the Great War.
I think there’s a distinction to be made between the (obvious and generally understood, *at the time[/]) notion that the Nazi régime, collectively and as individuals, was committing no end of “ordinary” murders and other acts of violence.
What was more difficult to grasp, and to define legally as something egregiously distinct, was the notion of systemic, industrialised extermination. Philippe Sands’s book East West Street goes into this in detail (arising from the fact that the originators of two, somewhat competing, ideas of how to define and prosecute in that situation, i e., “crimes against humanity” and “genocide”, grew up more or less on the same street as Sands’s own family).
We still struggle with making that sort of distinction.
I recall reading a New Yorker article some years ago on tFDR’s dilemma as to whether or not to bomb the camps, but can’t find it now. As I recall, the plan would have been to bomb not only the camps but the railroad tracks leading to them. Rebuilding the tracks would have proven time-consuming. One powerful argument against doing so was the probable impact on Allied morale from our planes killing tens of thousands of inmates, including women and children. Bombing the camps may well have saved lives, but it would have muddied a lot of water.