Why I’m addressing this I don’t know.
I hate the fact that we (U.S.) had internment camps for Japanese-Americans. Really disappointed that virtually no one, other than the Governor of Colorado, complained at all. But to compare the internment camps in the U. S. with the concentration camps in Europe is so far off the mark it’s hard to fathom.
Clearly the comment was only to get a reaction, and I just gave it one. Stupid me.
Quite right, this was my point all along.
The point isn’t to help prisoners at the camps, who would likely be killed in the bombing run anyway, but to disrupt the overall…industrialised process and save more in the future - the whole point of the concentration camps was to kill large amounts of people quickly and efficiently, so disrupt this and the process becomes less efficient, meaning fewer people die.
This would also have been the point of bombing the train lines, means they can’t ship more people to the camp and rely on other, less efficient methods they had used before they decided to make the process into…just that, a process. This ‘Final Solution’ had been discussed at the Wannsee Conference.
I have no sources or cites, only an opinion.
At a certain point in the war there would have been a sense of disbelief that any civilized country would plan, build and operate death camps, without access to inteligence that was collected contrary to this belief.
In any war there is displaced civillians and conditions can be harsh and stories and gossip run wild, regarding conditions, witness the debunking that was required post Katrina.
Then the balance tilts and Europe is invaded at Normandy, Italy and the Russian onslaught westwards. Those camps can and were over run by ground forces, which would have been the expectation once the stories became more common knowledge and could not be denied, so what is the better course of action.
Germany had gone too far, necks were gonna be stretched. Destroy or wreck a good amount of the camps and you have Germans with plausible deniablity, destroyed records of atrocities , individuals who may have never faced trial for what they did, to be killed or wounded in an airstrike. The same with witnesses.
Holocaust deniers are out there in the face of overwhelming evidence already, put a few internees out of their misery would have been the best that could have been accomplished, concidering their physical condition at the end of the war, at the expense of justice for those that had already died, and possibly let more than a handful of Germans historically get away with murder.
Was this on the minds of allied high command, I don’t know.
Declan
As already noted, closing a train line is not as simple as a single bombing run. It takes a sustained - and dangerous effort.
It was already in allied military interest to shut down as much of German rail traffic as possible, so one should factor in this in breezily talking about what the Allies should have done.
*Otherwise, to avoid further hijacking a thread relative to this:
No doubt - I know the resistance in France was constantly blowing up railway lines. But that is just one avenue, which is why I asked about the camps themselves. With nowhere to go, the rail issue becomes moot.
How much effort it would take to knock out a camp I admit I’ve no idea, but from DSeid’s cite it seems a bombing run could have caused significant disruption to the process.
The Allies had actual intelligence from their own operatives within six months of their opening that the camps were actually extermination camps. Whatever the general populace did or did not know or believe, the people at the command level were aware of the situation.
This does not offset points such as those by spifflog, but the speculation that the Allies might have simply not known the enormity of the situation is not supported by facts.
Well, part of the problem is none of can know.
Historical experience says that it would be rather hit-or-miss actually hitting a single camp target even with one large raid, never mind doing effective damage to the actual “killing infrastructure” (ovens, chambers, what-have-you).
Now, imagine running a run where said mechanisms are in no way damaged, but you managed to hit the prisoners (not all of whose identities can your intelligence be sure of) AND say you lost the typical daylight run worth of bombers and escorts.
Men have died pretty much for nothing, plus you’ve sapped the level-best chance of stopping the whole disgusting thing, destroying the bloody German war machine and forcing surrender.
My argument is that military commanders in the midst of a war which is killing millions of own soldiers need to stay focused, and what appears “possible” in hindsight is armchair generalship.
There were close to 1,500 camps and sub camps (also called satellite camps) throughout France, Germany, Poland and the rest of Europe. Granted many of them were very small. As we have discussed, it would take a concerted effort to destroy a rail way system going into a camp, and then a periodic effort to KEEP it out of commission. Even if you manage that, then what do you do about the other 1,499?
Even with the effort to knock out German industry, their output of war goods continued almost to the very end of the war. Granted, there are many complex factors in this, but the really is, WWII strategic (and tactical bombing) wasn’t all that efficient. So if the allies weren’t as successful as they wanted to be in the war effort it’s self, why would they bleed off effort bombing the camps, and the 1,500 targets, when that was probably not going to be successful, and if it was, wasn’t going to to much for the larger war effort?
We had camps for German Americans and Italian Americans too, but only people who were considered high risk, as there were just too damn many German and Italian Americans. Internment of German Americans - Wikipedia
And while the internment of Japanese-Americans was one of the many low points in American history, the comparison to the Nazi death camps and concentration camps is not apt. They were both isolated camps and in effect prisons, but the comparison stops there. The Nazi ones worked their inmates to death and engaged in wholesale slaughter. They were similar in that they were both affronts to human dignity, and different in that the non-American version slave labor and mass murder.
But the debate isn’t necessarily an either-or. Allied bombing runs weren’t all about destroying the German war machine to begin with, as pointed out targeting factories was phased out in favour of city area bombing.
In addition, bombing a camp would damage the German war machine. The worst case scenario is possible, but given demonstrated Allied capabilities there’s no reason that they couldn’t have pulled off a ‘mini-Dresden’, carpet-bomb the place. Destroy the crematoria, gas chambers, barracks, depots, the lot. Killing the prisoners and guards (SS Death’s-Head Units - replacing them would take men out of the Waffen SS - “…in 1942 all camp personnel were folded into the Waffen-SS to allow for easier rotation of wounded Waffen-SS personnel into camp positions and for camp personnel to be easily transferred into combat units should the need arise. This last measure was frequently used for SS personnel who were deemed “too soft” for duty in a concentration camp…”).
This gives the Nazis the choice of rebuilding, allocating men and resources to the new camp or forgetting about it. A win-win for the Allies - either the war effort is disrupted or the Holocaust is.
The best way to end the Holocaust was to end the war. Bombing “a” camp just kills the inmates in that camp more quickly. There were plenty of other camps to shuttle prisoners to.
As already noted, the move to city area bombing was due to low accuracy of bombing raids, AND the contemporaneous analysis / objective of destroying the German war machine. City bombing intended to do that, specifically.
Not really, at best trivially
Hardly a win-win as there are foregone opportunities to directly degrade, not by strained 2nd to 4th order effects.
Agreed, but it would also stop any further inmates being transported to it once the air force reduces it to rubble. Additional resources would be required to transport prisoners to other camps, and the ghastly facilities required - even the Nazis recognised that resources were actually required for the efficient ‘answering of the Jewish question’. Indeed, that was the whole point of the camp system.
This goes back to the air force capacity and the effectiveness of what was actually done.
Do you understand that that the allies had a finite amount of resources to fight the Axis? They weighted a cost benefit analysis on what they did and did not do. What ship to build What tank. How many of each. The cost to bomb and this is the part you don’t seem to get, continue to bomb again and again and again was not worth the effort it would take to Nazis to shift the inmates to another camp. It just wasn’t cost effective to do it.
The effectiveness of which was questioned now and then. Low accuracy maybe, but the question is always should the Allies have bombed the camps, rather than the technical feasibility:
“…if the Allies had seriously considered that death camp as a potential target, they would have found that bombing it was no more complicated from an operational standpoint than was bombing any of numerous other targets during the war. What ultimately determined their decision against bombing was not any military assessment of whether the gas chambers could have been successfully destroyed with minimal collateral damage, but rather a predetermined mindset as to whether those facilities should have been treated as a valid target.”
Depending on how much effort would be required this pay-off could be far more worthwhile than ordinance spent targeting civilians, in that actual military resources would be directly required to rebuild. I admit this is speculation on my part, as it would not address the real reason for targeting the camps, trying to save more than are killed.
Put it this way - would the bombers pulled off other missions for our hypothetical run on the bigger camps significantly lengthen the war, let along enough to make the victim count higher? Or would the destroyed camps save more?
Edit: @spifflog, of course, which is why I mentioned the effort and how many bombs and bombers we had available (although we were able to drop 3200 tons worth on Dresden and our manufacturing outstripped the Germans considerably), and also brought up if the bombs were best used on the camps or elsewhere, with the aim of saving as many as possible. I’ve no idea, which is why we’re in GD and why I asked the question in the first place.
Non responsive. I already highlighted the issue of limited resources, etc.
The military focus was on defeating the enemy. this contributed nothing.
I apologize for associating wmfellows with David Irving.
Eh? You’ve lost me.
It relates to the use of Allied resources. In other words, we had the means but not the will. Military focus is always the same, but the way to do so is always open to debate, how the resources should have been used for the greater good.
The reason we didn’t bomb concentration camps is because it would have been a waste of time. They only existed as a method of minimizing the cost of murder and removing them would have transferred the process somewhere else. There was certainly an inexhaustible supply of train-side ditches to dump the bodies of dead people. They could have made the rail cars the Zyklon B gas chambers and killed people on the way to the nearest ditch.
The destruction of the camps would in no way have impeded the ease with which people could have been murdered.