America and the Bombing of Auschwitz: The Importance of Asking the Right Questions

For the debate among scholars over the history of socialism in America, see especially John H. M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds., Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism (New York: Doubleday, 1974), and Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (New York, W. W. Norton, 2000).

Michael Fleming’s book Auschwitz, the Allies and Censorship of the Holocaust (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2014) is the fullest account of what the Allies knew about Auschwitz, and it conclusively proves that the Verba-Witzler report did not tell Allied leaders anything which they did not already know or strongly suspect. “The Western Allies were continuously advised of what was happening at Auschwitz through 1943 and 1944.” (p. 10) Fleming is quite critical of the British and American failure to act and blames it on anti-Semitism in Great Britain and the United States. (pp. 274–81) See also Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler’s “Final Solution” (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980); Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), p. 207; Breitman, “Allied Knowledge of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943–1944,” FDR and the Holocaust, Verne W. Newton, ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 175–82. In response to information about the camp which had reached the West, the Polish government-in-exile in London as early as August, 1943 had proposed bombing Auschwitz.

Henry L. Feingold, “Bombing Auschwitz and the Politics of the Jewish Question During World War II,” The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum, eds. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 202. See also Patricia Cohen, “Roosevelt and the Jews: A Debate Rekindled,” New York Times, May 1, 2009.

Richard Breitman, “The Failure to Provide a Safe Haven for European Jewry,” FDR and the Holocaust, 137; Michael Berenbaum, “Why Wasn’t Auschwitz Bombed?” Ha-‘aretz, May 16, 2010; Alan E. Steinweis, “The Auschwitz Analogy: Holocaust Memory and American Debates over Intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 9 (fall, 2005), 276–89. The conservative historian William D. Rubinstein said it is difficult to imagine “a greater confession of . . . inaccuracy and wishful thinking” than claiming that bombing Auschwitz would have saved any Jews. Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not have Saved More Jews from the Nazis (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 84, 114. Andrew Roberts, the biographer of Winston Churchill, relied heavily in his history of the war on Rubinstein’s interpretation of the Auschwitz bombing issue. Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War (New York: Harper/Collins, 2011), pp. 245–48. Richard Overy, a prominent British historian of World War II, had a different view. He said Rubinstein’s The Myth of Rescue was “pernicious” and a “remorseless diatribe,” and said its central hypothesis was “absurd and unprovable.” Richard Overy, “Could More Have Been Done?” Times Literary Supplement, October 10, 1997, 9–10.

Michael Burleigh, Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II (New York: Harper/Collins, 2011), pp. 454–57; David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (New York: Random House, 2005), pp. xiii, 457–58; Michael Makovsky, Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 172, 182–83.

Wiesel quoted in Michael Berenbaum, “Preface,” The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum, eds. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), p. xiv. Wiesel’s most famous statement on the bombing question is in his novel Night. Eli Wiesel, The Night Trilogy (New York: Hill asnd Wang, 2008), p. 78.

“Netanyahu Says Allies Knowingly Let Jews Die,” Washington Times, April 15, 1988; Michael Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide (New York: Random House, 2015), p. 279; Ari Shavit, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2013), pp. 380, 394; Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Point of No Return,” Atlantic, 306 (September, 2010), 64; Jerry Gordon, “The Auschwitz and Iran Bombing Controversies: Are There Parallels?” http://​www.​newenglishreview​.​org/​custpage.​cfm/​frm/​3777.

Michael C. Desch, “The Myth of Abandonment: The Use and Abuse of the Holocaust Analogy,” Security Studies, 15 (January–March, 2006), 130; Desch, “Abusing the Holocaust,” American Conservative, 12 (April, 2004), 21–27. For an attempt by an antisemitic Holocaust revisionist to justify the failure to bomb Auschwitz, see Samuel Crowell (pseud.), “An Exercise in Futility,” Journal of Historical Review, 29 (March/April, 2001), 38ff.

Danny Orbach and Mark Solonin, “Calculated Indifference: The Soviet Union and Requests to Bomb Auschwitz,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 27 (spring, 2013), 107. See also Jeffrey Herf, “The Extermination Camps and the Ally to the East: Could the Red Army and Air Force Have Stopped or Slowed the Final Solution?” Kritika, 4 (fall, 2003), 913–30; Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 93, 231; Peter Hayes, Why? Explaining the Holocaust (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), pp. 180–81.

Burleigh, Moral Combat, 459–62.

For an earlier and brief discussion of the bombing issue, see Arthur D. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (New York: Ace Books, 1967, 1968), pp. 289–90. Morse’s book appeared the same year as the Six-Day War in the Middle East. Readers drew comparisons between the weak American and European support for Israel in 1967 and their failure to bomb Auschwitz twenty-three years earlier. The issue was also mentioned briefly in books by Holocaust historians Raul Hilberg, Henry L. Feingold, and Nora Levin, and by Ben Hecht in his 1961 book Perfidy. The apathy referred to in the title of Morse’s book extended beyond Jews. Note the title of a 1984 book by Haim Genizi, American Apathy: The Plight of Christian Refugees from Nazism.

For the crucial role of Wyman, see Michael J. Neufeld, “Introduction to the Controversy,” The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? Michel J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum, eds. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 1–2; Paul B. Miller, “David S. Wyman and the Controversy over the Bombing of Auschwitz,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 40 (fall, 2003), 370–80; Frank W. Brecher, “David Wyman and the Historiography of America’s Response to the Holocaust: Counter-Considerations,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 5 (#4, 1990), 423–46; Lucy S. Dawidowicz, “Could America Have Rescued Europe’s Jews?” What Is the Use of Jewish History? Essays by Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Neal Kozodoy, ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1992), 169–74.

David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), ch. 15; Wyman, “Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed,” Commentary, 65 (May, 1978), 32–46. For a critical view of Wyman’s book, see Peter Novick, Holocaust in American Life, p. 48.

Wyman, Abandonment of the Jews, p. 304. For the influence of Wyman on this issue, see for example William L. O’Neill, A Democracy at Home: America’s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1993), pp. 225–31; David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 796–97; Jay Winik, 1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), pp. 451–72, 535–36; Randall Hansen, Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942–1945 (New York: New American Library, 2009), pp. 193–96, 285; Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (New York: Little, Brown, 2000), pp. 209–211; Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006), pp. 144–47; Joseph W. Bendersky, “The Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U. S. Army (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 313, 337–47; and George Brown Tindall, America: A Narrative History, 2nd edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), p. 1226. The Tindall volume is a college history textbook.

For other attacks on McCloy, see Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), ch. 10; Henry L. Feingold, Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), pp. 265–67. For criticism of McCloy’s boss, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, see Michael Beschloss, The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1941–1945 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), pp. 63–67, 88–89.

Dawidowicz, “Could America Have Rescued Europe’s Jews” 178.

The historian David I. Kertzer has written three outstanding books on the recent history of the relationship between the Papacy and Jews. They are The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (New York: Random House, 1997); The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Random House, 2001); and The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (New York: Random House, 2014). The last of these volume won a Pulitzer Prize. In his essay “On the Political Stupidity of the Jews,” Irving Kristol argued that a history of powerlessness and victimization had prevented Jews from acquiring the skills necessary for “astute statesmanship.” This essay originally appeared in Azure, #8 (autumn, 1999) and was republished in Irving Kristol, The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942–2009 (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 301–314.

Richard Forreger, “The Bombing of Auschwitz,” Aerospace Historian, 34 (summer, 1987), 98–110; James H. Kitchens III, “The Bombing of Auschwitz Reexamined,” Journal of Military History, 58 (April, 1994), 233–66; Richard H. Levy, “The Bombing of Auschwitz Revisited: A Critical Analysis,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 20 (fall, 1997), 128–70. These three essays were reprinted in Neufeld and Berenbaum, eds., The Bombing of Auschwitz. This book stemmed from a symposium on the question of bombing Auschwitz held at the National Air and Space Museum marking the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Rondall R. Rice, “Bombing Auschwitz: U.S. Fifteenth Air Force and the Military Aspects of a Possible Attack,” Bombing of Auschwitz, 157–62. This essay originally appeared in the journal War and History in 1999. For a persuasive case that bombing Auschwitz would not have been effective, see Tami Davis Biddle, “Allied Air Power: Objectives and Capabilities,” Bombing of Auschwitz, 35–51. Biddle is a leading American authority on bombing during World War II. For the bombing of the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz, see Kevin A. Mahoney, “An American Operational Response to a Request to Bomb Rail Lines to Auschwitz,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 25 (winter, 2011), 438–46. Air power historian Richard G. Davis claimed that an effective bombing of Auschwitz would have required up to eight weeks of constant bombing. It is unlikely any Allied military chief would have agreed to this. Davis, Bombing the European Axis Powers: A Historical Digest of the Combined Bomber Offensive, 1939–1945 (Maxwell Air Force Base, Al: Air University Press, 2006), pp. 399–413. See also Williamson Murray, “Monday-Morning Quarterbacking and the Bombing of Auschwitz,” Bombing of Auschwitz, 204–213.

See, for example, Sturt G. Erdheim, “Could the Allies Have Bombed Auschwitz-Birkenau?” Bombing of Auschwitz, 127–56. This essay was first published in Holocaust and Genocide Studies in 1997. For the wartime doubts regarding precision bombing, see John Ellis, Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War (New York: Viking, 1990), pp. 175–85.

Neufeld, Bombing of Auschwitz, 64. Yehuda Bauer, the distinguished Israeli scholar of the Holocaust wrote, “The Allied did not really care; and even if they had cared, it is doubtful whether large numbers of Jewish could have been saved.” Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 20,012), p. 222.

Keith Lowe, The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017), pp. 162–65; Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), pp. 410–12, 482.

Quoted in Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue, p. 161. The American War Department told the British government in early 1944 that “It is not contemplated that units of the armed forces will be employed for the purpose of rescuing victims of enemy oppression unless such rescues are the direct result of military operations conducted with the objective of defeating the armed forces of the enemy.” Quoted in Rafael Medoff, “The War Refugee Board and the Failure to Bomb Auschwitz,” Too Little, and Almost Too Late: The War Refugee Board and America’s Response to the Holocaust, Medoff. ed. (Washington: Davis S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, 2017), 143. Medoff noted that Roosevelt’s executive order establishing the War Refugee Board, America’s major rescue effort during the war, stated that its operations would be “consistent with the successful prosecution of the war.”