Why didn't we bomb concentration camps?

Great Debates
21

Your statement can’t really be refuted because it makes no claims of fact and is not based on an intelligent or educated assessment of the situtation.

The idea that “we” were on the same path as the Nazis is simply idiotic. “We,” if by “we” you mean the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, those being the countries largely involved in European strategic bombing in that theatre of war, were in no way on the same path towards extermination of entire groups of their own population, the way the Nazis were. It’s an absurd claim and suggests you don’t know anything about Nazism, a philosophy that is about as far from Western liberal democracy as you can possibly get. Nobody taking a serious and objective look at those countries in 1939 would conclude that they were on their way to setting up their own versions of Dachau. If that were true, why haven’t we done it yet? We won the war. What’s stopping us?

The reason the Allies didn’t bomb the concentration camps is that, to sum up a lot of little reasons, they were a little fucking busy at the time. The Allied emphasis was, for good reason, on destroying the ability of the Nazis to mount military resistance. The Allies were not ignorant or uncaring of Nazi horrors; we weren’t fighting them over nothing. The Allies, with good reason, wanted to devote military resources to causing the Nazi regime to cease existing, which - correctly, as it turned out - was the only way to actually stop Nazi atrocities.

Hundreds of thousands of Allied servicemen died stopping the Nazi regime. There are more Canadians buried over there, or blown to bits so there wasn’t even anything to bury, than I could even begin to count. Thousands and thousands of them died bombing the Nazis. We’re just a week past V-E day here, for fuck’s sake. Some people get it - once again, as they do every year, the Dutch were effusive in their gratitude for Canada’s part in liberating their country. But apparently all that blood and sacrifice isn’t enough for you. If we “didn’t care,” why did 43,000 Canadians die stopping the Nazis?

And as Sophistry and Illusion points out, the idea that it even would have been feasible to do is stupid. The Allies didn’t have the technology to accurately bomb targets at that distance (most of the death camps were at the extreme end of Allied bomber range; Auschwitz, Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec were all in modern-day Poland, not in Germany) except maybe if they’d tried broad daylight raids, in which case the losses to fighters would have torn the Allied bomber force to shreds.

22

I would add to this in noting that whatever the “day after the game” 20/20 hindsight, the record on strategic bombing consistently disrupting railhubs - even ones of key direct military importance - is not brilliant.

Already Allied bombers took massive losses focusing on core military targets (per the doctrine of the day), spending blood and material on bombing that would not have materially speeded up the end of the war, and might well have delayed it, would be unconscionable. More soldiers dead, more delays, and no certainty that any prisoners lives would be saved. Given information of the day, the Allies were already expending massive effort and it is frankly insulting to imply otherwise.

23

I must have expressed myself very poorly in the OP, so I’ll try and address your points.

This isn’t hard to answer - although dying in the gas chamber and being blown up in a bombing run both end up with you being dead, the former is an ultimately pointless death and exactly what the Nazis want, whereas the latter ends up with the mechanisms of death around you also blown up, saving more in the future. Which is why the survivor I talked to prayed that whenever he heard the distant drone of aircraft engines that they were on their way to drop bombs on the camp, even if it would mean his death.

This is the crux of my last question, basically, did we have enough bombs. I don’t know if we did, but the question that results from this is were the bombs better spend on the camps than other targets (like residential bombings, as mentioned above). Again, I don’t know…which is why we’re deep in GD territory - initially I contemplated a GQ thread, but reconsidered for reasons that you can see.

In which case we would have then bombed those factories, which Allies did aplenty.

Well, if we could afford to waste bombs (3200 tons of them!) on Dresden this speaks to the idea that the bombs would be better used trying to save Jews.
What we knew is of key importance, but by all accounts by the latter half of 1944 the Allies had the Vrba-Wetzler report on the purpose and capability of Auschwitz, which was confirmed by aerial reconnaissance. A chap called Benjamin Akzin who put unsuccessfully the case to the Roosefelt no doubt puts the argument better than I:

From what I’ve been able to gather, the Auschwitz camp took several months to establish and ‘gear up’ for the mass murder it’s known for now;
“Glucks informed SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, that a camp would be built on the site on February 21, 1940.[9]
…
The first prisoners—30 German criminal prisoners from the Sachsenhausen camp—arrived in May 1940, intended to act as functionaries within the prison system. The first transport of 728 Polish prisoners which included 20 Jews arrived on June 14, 1940 from the prison in Tarnow, Poland.”
(from the wiki on Auschwitz).

So, if we’d have carpet-bombed the camp out of existence it would have taken them a while to rebuild and restart the murder, saving the victims who would otherwise have been killed in the time it took to rebuild. DSeid’s very interesting link seems to state this too, but goes further:

24

Except that the Japanese had internment camps for Allied civilians and we didn’t bomb those.

We were at all out war with Germany and Japan. Diverting critical resources such as bombers to targets that did not further the goal of winning the war would not make sense.

25

The embarrassment of looking like the Nazis, that’s what.

Like it or not, mass forced sterilizations in the name of eugenics and rounding up people according to their ethnicities into camps are things America did, and things that strongly resemble Nazi behavior; which is exactly why they became regarded as embarrassments. This is something that has widely been acknowledged; you are simply trying to rewrite history.

26

And don’t forget the mass extermination program!

27

I don’t know why I’m bothering to respond to this, but…

So, we were heading down the path of NAZI Germany, and the only thing that stopped us was… embarrassment? EMBARRASSMENT???

Gee, maybe we should’ve pulled out a big ol’ can of “embarrassment” at the beginning of the war, shoved it in the face of Hitler, and avoided the whole mess.

28

Do you not understand the difference between an internment camp and an extermination camp? This comment has nothing to do with this discussion.

Do you seriously believe that one or two bombing runs on the Crematoria would have significantly detracted from the ability to otherwise win the war?

29

Perhaps you need to take a look at how Japan ran its internment camps.

You have any reason to believe that one or two bombing runs would have been effective, given the same was hardly ever true for factory targets?

30

You mean the Manhattan Project? :wink:

31

Shakester, this is wmfellows. I believe he is in agreement with Dr. Irving, from his previous postings. You’re not going to get him to change his mind.

32

Japanese prisoner of war camps were horrible and indeed many died there but they did not exist in order to exterminate as the very efficient Crematoria did. There is no reason to believe that bombing them would have saved lives as there is for bombing the extermination camps.

No, but according to my cite, Stuart G. Erdheim, in “Could the Allies Have Bombed Auschwitz-Birkenau?” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, (Fall 1997), pp. 129-170, does, or that at least it would have no more difficult than taking out a factory target. (And indeed those often missed their mark.)

Of course strategic bombing wasn’t only targeted at industrial targets. While bombing the Crematoria was not worth it, bombing civilians to degrade morale was.

But sure nothing cold be diverted from the highly effective strategic bombing effort

The most good the bombing did was to force the Germans to use up resources defending against it. A run against the camps would also have forced that defensive posture.

33

Well, you made a highly speculative assertion, and I pointed out the nearest thing to reality that compares. You got some facts to back up your assertion, let’s see them.

Are you claiming that 2 bombing runs would have convinced the NAZIs to stop killing Jews?

34

What?

Having looked up Irving I am not in any fashion in “agreement” with David Irving. Irving appears to be a disgusting Nazi sympathizer and a Holocaust denier. I am neither. The Holocaust most certainly happened, it liquidated millions and millions of Jews and other sundry other “undesirables” in Nazi race-mythology and represents one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever seen, the worst in modern Western history.

What would led you to engage in such a disgusting smear really escapes me. Previous postings?

35

I have precious little patience for historians second guessing in comfort from armchairs.

I agree that the “dehousing” bombings were a waste, and suggested so above.

However, they were based on a real military rationale (a bad one, one that was arguably deeply mistaken), with a view to breaking the Germans and ending the war. I readily grant that said efforts were probably wasted and would have far better spent on factories, rail lines, etc. However, Harris etc genuinely believed that they were working towards breaking the German military resistance.

No such rational existed for internment camps, concentration camps and the like.

Putting oneself in the shoes of the Allied military command, which was already losing hundreds of planes, the military analysis is clear.

First, your characterisation of the strategic bombing campaign in general is … extreme, many military analyses point to the significant degrading of German industrial capacity (yes it grew, but it grew at much lower rates than the Allies - resources diverted helped).

Second, it strikes me as … wishful thinking that bombing the camps would have done anything relative added ‘defensive posture.’

36

The US didn’t even bomb interment camps in the Asia where US and other allied soldiers were being kept and forced into slave labor.

37

Actually, Irving did not “originate that story.” The issue of whether or not Bomber Harris’s air campaign was moral was well under way years before Irving published his account of the Dresden raid. His portrayal certainly gave an enormous boost to the awareness of that raid among people who had not paid much attention to the matter, previously. However, the issue, (of all the raids, not just the one on Dresden), was well known to any student of the war and the morality of the raids was a hot topic of discussion.

This is partly correct. British bombsights were not in the same class as the Norden and devastating losses, (by both the British and the Germans), persuaded all the European combatants that daylight raids were too prohibitively expensive to maintain. (The Yanks tried it anyway, but were saved from self-destructing by the development of long range escort fighters.)

However, Harris’s tactics were much more deliberate than than you present, here. Harris had his people work out the ways in which cities could be completely destroyed by bombardment and he worked to perfect those techniques that made it impossible for much of the citizenry in bombed areas to survive. Beginning with pathfinder raids made at twilight, where Mosquitos would drop incendiaries on still visible portions of the center city and various “rings” expanding outward, the heavy bombers then brough in more incendiaries, using the existing fires as targets. The result was the creation firestorms that eliminated any flammable substance and sucked oxygen out of nearby areas. It was a very effective technique that, once he was out from under Hap Arnold’s thumb, Curtis LeMay brought to Japan, causing greater death and destruction in Tokyo than that caused by the later nuclear bombs.

The reason that Dresden is singled out in such discussions is that, unlike Hamburg, Frankfort, and a number of other of Harris’s targets, Dresden had no manufacturing centers. Many consider the city not a legitimate military target. It did have a rail marshalling yard, but that was effectively destroyed by daylight bombing by the USAAF; there was no need to destroy the city except that it was something that we could do.

While Irving surely distorted a lot of the facts in his book, he did not “originate” the story, but chose Dresden for his topic based on an already growing revulsion regarding its destruction.

This is getting away from the topic of this thread, however, and any further discussion should probably be moved to its own thread.

38

While you’re correct about the history of eugenics in the U.S., you’re not saying anything that proves this was a factor in the Allied bombing startegy. (And it’s not as if antisemitism was invented in the U.S.; there was a long tradition in Germany, too.) If you can’t cite this theory you need to let it go before it hijacks the thread.

And personal comments like these are not necessary:

39

Attacking other posters in this way is not going to promote the discussion.

Let’s stick to the topic and leave the comments on other posters out of it.

= = =

This goes for all the by-play with Der Trihs, as well. If anyone find his comments silly, demonstrate the errors of his post or ignore him without getting into a distracting hijack over his beliefs.

[ /Moderating ]

40

I think there is a misconception on what allied bombing could have done to stop the killing in the camps. First there weren’t just a few of them. And there are literally hundred and hundreds of camps and sub camps. So even if you stop the killing at one place, there are hundreds more. And keep in mind if you stop the inmates going into the camps due to bombing, you are stopping the food. and other supplies that the inmates are counting on to live.

Also what do we think will happen if the camp is bombed, or the railways are bombed? Do you think that thousands of inmates will just waltz out of the camps and go home to their families? Just catch a cab back to Warsaw? And you just don’t bomb the rail way once and it stays destroyed. The Germans will rebuild it in a day. It must be bombed again and again. It would take a concerted, sustained effort in blood and equipment. And this effort taken from the general war effort would prolong the war in some small way.