Bush: 'We should have bombed' Auschwitz

[Ryette]

Originally Posted by masked_marsoe

Of course. I wasn't expecting a full answer, not from you or anybody.

I think we run the risk of changing the question to "Should the Allies have attempted to alleviate the suffering of Nazi concentration camp inmates?", to which we can all comfortably say "yes" and be done with it.

With the question as it stands, we open up a new variety of questions, each just as challenging. Is an instant death preferable to a long suffering with the prospect of survival?

And not all inmates resigned themselves to death. Take the example of Wiltold Pilecki again - he volunteered to be sent to Auschwitz, arrived in 1940, and escaped in 1943. Or St Maksymillian Kolbe, who volunteered to take the place of a stranger to be starved to death. Many more survived because they refused simply to die.

Indeed, this was the case with many of them, which brings me back to my point of the human right to life. Those who wanted to die quickly would obviously just give up the will to live--it wasn't that difficult to find death in a Death Camp.

As you said, oftentimes the reason that many, if not most, survived is due solely to their will to live. While some were watching in the distance as Allied planes bombed targets in the distance, some watched passively, some watched with hope that they would come for liberation, some watched hoping that they would bomb the camp itself, and others were all to willing to run those miles, barefoot, in the snow, to escape from the camp.

[Literary note for those interested: in the book I referenced earlier, shortly after the prisoners at Auschwitz were evacuated, the camp was liberated, rather than bombed. Obviously I wasn't at the camps, but I feel this book portrays the situation from a prisoner's standpoint with great accuracy, so any WW2 fanatics interested in the human rights aspect of WW2 should check out Night.]

[Admiral Donutz]

Bombing the camps I wouldn't do for moral reasons. You wouldn't know for sure if you woul save lifes in the long run, not to mention the emotion of you being the one ending lifes. As other have said I would target the infratructure (railway lines etc.) and maybe the gaschambers (though that would be tricky with the accuracy they had and all so this would be very unlikely to do). That would seriously hinder the nazis, while not having you kill thousands of people.

Now if it would be garanteed that if I would save tens of thousands by killing a thousand... then it might become interesting. But evne then it would be a very difficult moral choice. I... do not know... I do't wish to kill innocents, though neither do I wish to let a murderer continue with it's job when I can stop him... I would probably again chose to target the infrastructre and such and thus try to reduce the number of souls reach the camp.

[Rikupsoni]

I remember watching a documentary about this from TV. I don't think it was specifically about Auschwitz, but death camps anyway.

IIRC they discussed some options, some saying large bombers would have been too inaccurate, and that the best option would have been some small fighter-bombers such as P-38 either attacking from the Baltic Sea or from Soviet territory.

Because of the range of the small bombers, it would have not been possible at an early stage. But some experts said those high altitude bombers with advanced bomb sights were very accurate when destroying German factories, so that the "excuse" was useless.

It also interviewed some Jews from the camps. Some woman said they just hoped every day that Allies would have bombed the camp, and that it wouldn't have mattered if they had died just if the camp just would have been finished along the nazis.

But who knows how much it would have affected the killings. The Nazis themselves destroyed some of the camps at a later stage to prevent Allies getting evidence anyway.

Still, I think the bombing would have been good. Allies were killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians by bombing open cities anyways. Open city /=/ military target.

[Locomotor]

That's a very interesting question, to say the least. A great thought experiment in ethics. Kill some now, save potentially much more later? Still: targeting a concentration of suffering civilians seems counterintuitive. "Bombing you to save you" rarely ever works.

Military action, especially bombing, often yields unpredictable results. It could have turned out maybe much worse had we bombed the death camps. In any case, that's the way the accidents of history operate. It's hard to be sure of how it would have turned out had we done X instead of Y.

[Rookie103]

No, they would have killed all the Jews in them.

[wjlaslo]

I think in most cases the Allies made the right decision.

1. You're saving prisoners that are likely to die anyway before the war is over even if you do bomb the death camps.

2. The death camps have no military value. You can bomb them forever, wasting ammunition, but it doesn't win the war. The enemy will just keep manufacturing their ammunition and keep killing the innocents in other places and ways.

Put simply: You can have people suffer for a year and then be free, or you can lose the war and have them suffer until they die.

3. You are probably going to kill the prisoners, but you're also going to risk your own bomber crews. Many will be shot down before reaching the target. That's just a waste of life IMO, especially if your precious innocents are killed anyway either by your own bombs or by the Nazis.

[Joe Bonham]

They were DEATH camps, those people were going to die anyway.

And we could have at least bombed the railroads to the camps to slow or even stop the flow of prisoners.

[homo sine domino]

Originally Posted by Bohemund

And we could have at least bombed the railroads to the camps to slow or even stop the flow of prisoners.

I fully agree. Actually that's a pretty nifty idea there. I wonder why the allies didn't come up with it.

[Emperor Norton I]

The Allies had the idea of "Liberation through Victory", which is why they did not go after the camps. There was also much bigotry by the populous against Jews which is why we didn't accept many refugees, and also some anti-semitic internal elements in the governments that went out of their way to stop aid.

[Joe Bonham]

Also consider this - we greatly supported and supplied the French resistance... while the large Jewish revolts didn't get a single penny or bullet from the allies. They literally had to fight the Germans with knives and clubs.