On the European continent more people knew than they cared to admit - perhaps even to themselves. See The US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos http://www.ushmm.org/research/center/encyclopedia/
From my thread [thread=519922]here[/thread]: The Washington Post article quotes one Holocaust researcher “anyone looking through this volume is going to be astounded at how vast the camp system was. . . . It’s simply not possible to think of these activities as an aberration when you see all of the information.”
Another researcher is quoted “What we are seeing in this project is that all of Europe was a camp.”
Certainly, but the Germans were their own worst enemies when it comes to staining their own reputation with propaganda. The insult “Huns” for Germans was initiated by the Kaiser, of all people, who wanted his adventurism in China to inspire fear and terror that would be remembered for a thousand years. In WWI the Germans initiated strategic bombing of cities and used dreadnoughts to shell unarmed coastal cities (Germany had signed a treaty pledging not to attack unarmed cities) and initiated unrestricted submarine warfare. Germany also initiated the use of lethal gas (also despite having pledged not to do so by signing the Hague Convention only 8 years previously).
Germany also was harsh on civilians in occupied Belgium, intentionally waging a campaign of terror to deter snipers (francs-tireurs).
And in WWII, Hitler’s Nazi’s advocated terror and massacre to control conquered areas. The sirens put onto Stukas to scare the populace are just the tamest example.
I’m not saying the Germans are evil per se; remember that in both wars Germany perceived itself to be stronger than its enemies, but far behind in the race for colonial expansion, and not receiving proper respect from other powers. Perhaps that frustration as much as anything drove them to portray themselves as fearsome monsters.
Whatever the cause, Germany earned its reputation for over-the-top wartime horrors all on its own, and would have done so even if the Allies had scrupulously kept their mouths shut.
What they were asked to do was to bomb the railways leading to the camps, and the camps themselves (specifically the area were the gas chambers were located at Auschwitz). Also, to make that knowledge public.
I once researched this for a project when I was in college, but that was long ago, so I’m going by faulty memory, and have no links.
But it turns out that the NYT published several articles about what was going on in the camps during the war. The problem was, they were almost always attributed to some Jewish advocacy group, rather than a “real” reporter. Also, they were small, and in the back pages.
Finally, as others have already mentioned, most people who read them discounted them, for two reasons:
they were too horrific to be believed, and
people had memories of WWI atrocity reports against the Germans that turned out to be fabricated, and didn’t want to be taken in again
Bombing of flat, spread-out facilities like railroads is just not very effective. what damage there is can be fairly easily repaired (especially if you have whole camps of slave laborers nearby).
Besides, the Germans would probably have just unloaded their victims at the site of the railroad damage and sent them on a ‘death march’ toward the camps. After all, that’s what they did near the end of the war with the camps in the east when Soviet armies were getting close – they just marched the inmates west to other camps, shooting or clubbing any who fell behind.
Also, most of the camps were far to the east of Germany, in Poland & Russia. It would have been tough to fly bombers that far, and they would have had to just fly over places like the Ruhr valley, ignoring all the industrial & war production happening there. Hitting those sites was a better strategic decision, and shortened the war. Probably more victims were saved by ending the war sooner than could have been saved by bombing the camps directly.
Realistically, nothing. By the time outside countries knew about the Holocaust going on, they had already committed themselves to a policy of “Germany first” and “unconditional surrender”. So public awareness of what was happening wouldn’t have changed the way the war was being fought. Bombing Auschwitz would have been a symbolic act that the Allied air commands felt would be a diversion of resources away from winning the war and really putting a stop to the murders.
Not to mention that SHAEF had a firm policy that all humanitarian or political concerns should take a permanent backseat to military concerns - the business of wrapping the war up ASAP. The Dutch begged Eisenhower to send troops to liberate the northern Netherlands to help alleviate the horrendous famine there, but it was out of their way so they were denied (although to the Allies credit, they did organise food drops with the acquiescence of the Germans).
I am pretty sure that many in netral nations (Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, etc.) knew quit a bit about what was going on. Sweden was shipping irion ore, ball bearings, machine tools to Germany-their sales agents in Germany probably knew about what was taking place.
This is a key point. The Allies did try some focussed bombing raids, often with very poor outcomes. They had specific knowledge about the production facilities for the V2 rocket. They tried to bomb the facilities, instead they hit the accommodation for the slave workers that were building the rockets. The idea that you could attack the concentration camps with a good outcome is close to ridiculous. The single most likely out come is that you kill the inmates. Given the general belief was that the camps held prisoners in the same manner as the British and Americans had rounded up minorities - and were not systematically killing the inmates - a bombing raid on a concentration camp would in itself be nowadays considered a war crime. The actual gas chambers were little more than tiny concrete shells, and even if they had been hit could have been rebuilt in a week.
Indeed, this is the main problem. The camps were not the issue. It was the process feeding them.
As a nitpick to the OP, and a very commonly misunderstood fact - the extermination camps were not even in Germany. As t-bonham@scc.net notes, most were in Poland, some in Russia, and there were others in Coatia and Yugoslavia. There were conventional concentration camps inside Germany, but there were - at least initially - built to be used to house prisoners - not with a view to systematic killing - mostly within hours of arrival. Belsen was one such, and was the basis for the camp portrayed in Life is Beautiful.
The wikipedea page on extermination camps includes this picture from 1944. There are enough clues here to figure out that something very odd is occurring, but as noted above, it is easy when you know the answer. The captions were added in 1978 with knowledge of what was happening. There were probably very few overflights of the camp in the course of the war, indeed this may be the only one. Flights were very risky. The big question is - why is there a dedicated rail link? This suggests an industrial level activity. During a war such things should be of interest - finding out what is going on would usually be valuable strategic information - even if the horrific reality is unthinkable.
Why would they? The fact that Jews were rounded up all over Europe wasn’t a secret. But that doesn’t mean they were going to be murdered. Allies governments knew because escapees and other informants came to them to denounce those crimes. Vichy or other “german-friendly” government would have been amongst the last places they would have brought their testimonies and evidences to.
I know there has been people stating that they had suspicions because for instance, elderly people were sent to “labour camps”. But even assuming you’e aware of that, there’s a very wide gap between finding it suspicious and assuming that people are exterminated.
Again, why? Unless it’s common knowledge in Germany, how an iron ore exporter would learn about extermination camps? It’s not like foreign visitors were given a tour.
This. According to some of my elderly relatives who were partisans in the Balkans, the reason organized reistance couldn’t stop the camps was there were unfortunately other targets of greater value to the war effort (i.e., winning the war as fast as possible was considered the best strategy).
In some cases, after the camps were liberated, the liberating army officers went and rounded up everyone in the nearby town, and had them marched through the camps to see what had been going on. (I believe Patton was one of them)
I’ve always wondered just how ‘convenient’ it was for the locals to claim they had known nothing of what went on in the camps. For example, soldiers reported that they could smell the odor of burned human flesh some distance away as they approached the camps. But the people living there never smelled it?
Look, Concentration camps were nothing new. Everyone knew about them. The British “invented” them in the Boer wars. And of course the Nazi’s claimed that the camps were full of criminals etc, (which was true). The Nazi’s just said the Jews were “working”.
So, the Concentration camps were not a secret. The Death camps were, and just how bad things were in the other camps- that wasn’t widely known.
Even within the Nazi hierarchy there was a realization that they needed to conceal the full extent of what was going on. Himmler told some of the other top SS leaders that the German people would be too “sentimental” if they knew that the SS was planning on exterminating all Jews.
The nine-hour-plus Holocaust documentary Shoah (1985) relates that not all Jews were shipped packed in cattle cars a la Schindler’s List. While many Polish and other Eastern European Jews had heard rumors of extermination and were packed in, many times Jews from Western Europe – France, the Netherlands – had never heard the rumors and were sent on regular trains complete with assigned seat numbers, dining cars etc. They had no idea what was awaiting them. And here’s a detail I found fascinating: One railroad or train-station worker interviewed told of having seen one Jew on one such train actually get off to go buy something in the station! And when the train started to pull out without him, he actually ran after it to catch it! :eek:
