The President supposedly made these remarks while visiting a Holocaust memorial.
JERUSALEM - President Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel's Holocaust memorial Friday and told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz to halt the killing, the memorial's chairman said.In 2000 Dear wife and I toured Poland with a priest friend of ours. We visited Auschwitz while there. I've never been to a bleaker place in my life. 55 years after the war ended death still hung in the air.The Allies had detailed reports about Auschwitz during the war from Polish partisans and escaped prisoners. But they chose not to bomb the camp, the rail lines leading to it, or any of the other Nazi death camps, preferring instead to focus all resources on the broader military effort, a decision that became the subject of intense controversy years later
My sister's mother and father-in-law were concentration camp survivors.
Could the US have bombed Auschwitz? We could have. Would it have changed anything? Bombing the camp would have left few survivors, Nazi or Jewish. The likely result of a bombing would have been the Germans sending their victims elsewhere. They did have around ten other extermination camps similar to Auschwitz in either Germany or Poland.
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Tags: Auschwitz, President Bush
Comments (3)
Bombing Auschwitz would hav... (Below threshold)1. Posted by bryanD | January 11, 2008 9:47 AM | Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
Bombing Auschwitz would have been an interdiction exercise (ghetto -> camp). Interdiction by bombing doesn't work. You need boots on the ground.
So the Final Solution would have continued in more ad hoc ways and would have accelerated. That was the pattern.
As the Red Army stormed Lodz and the Wehrmacht pulled back, the Einsatz groups went in. They massacred the Jews in the ghetto since the camp system logistics had broken. Some remained alive by minutes, though. Because that's how close the Russians were.
The SS would have yawned at the allies bombing Jews. The Jews were in custody. That would not have changed.
Also, though I'm not sure how far past 1944 it continued, the German Jewish Union (and others) were negotiating ransoms by the boxcar-load. It was basically a Nazi joke on them, but it was considered a viable goal by some persons who could have held influence in allied political circles. Toland's "Adolph Hitler" goes into detail on the subject.
1. Posted by bryanD | January 11, 2008 9:47 AM |
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
Posted on January 11, 2008 09:47
2. Posted by Jim Addison | January 11, 2008 2:29 PM | Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
Agreed - bombing one or more of the extermination camps wouldn't have accomplished anything in the long run, and might even have sped up the killing in some cases.
The best thing we could have done at that point is exactly what we did: defeat the Germans on the ground and physically liberate the camps.
Our best chance to prevent deaths in concentration camps was before we entered the war. We could have allowed more Jewish and other refugees from Europe to come to the USA. A certain degree of perfect hindsight would be involved, of course.
2. Posted by Jim Addison | January 11, 2008 2:29 PM |
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
Posted on January 11, 2008 14:29
3. Posted by MaryAnn Spager | January 12, 2008 9:36 AM | Score: -1 (1 votes cast)
The US supposedly did not know of the existence of the death camps until after the allies crossed the Rhine at the end of the war. If we bombed Auschwitz, we would have killed what there were of the survivors. This president is beyond stupid.
3. Posted by MaryAnn Spager | January 12, 2008 9:36 AM |
Score: -1 (1 votes cast)
Posted on January 12, 2008 09:36