No Wars for Jews

A year ago, B-2 stealth bombers and “bunker busting” bombs attacked three nuclear sites in Iran. Whether the primary aim of the U.S. action was to help Israel, or to eliminate the potential threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran to world order, is a moot point. However, there is no doubt about the meaning of a recent story about a Young Republicans chapter in Tennessee that was in turmoil because of a mail campaign promoting a platform that included “No wars for Jews.” In fact, a little over 80 years ago the U.S. refused to bomb a target on behalf of the Jews.

I am referring of course to whether the railway lines to Auschwitz should have been bombed during World War II, a controversial Holocaust topic. The year was 1944. It was already too late for a majority of those murdered during the Holocaust. Yet it was abundantly clear that the extermination machine at Auschwitz was still operating at full capacity, in spite of the fact that the tide of war had turned against the Nazis and their allies. From April to November, the gas chambers and crematoria were consuming as many as 12,000 human beings a day, most of them Hungarian Jews.

Realizing that a significant number of Jews still in Nazi hands could be saved if the murder machine could be interrupted, Jewish leaders appealed to the Americans (and the British) to bomb the railway lines into Auschwitz. The appeals led nowhere. Why?

Was it because details about Auschwitz and the extermination of the Jews were uncertain? Hardly.

As early as 1941, Winston Churchill referred to the killing of Jews in Eastern Europe as a crime for which there is no name. Varian-Fry wrote about it in 1942, as did the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph. The Pope knew details about what was later called the Holocaust as early as 1942. Eyewitness accounts by Jan Karski about the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto and about the Belzec extermination camp, and the Vrba-Wetzler Report about Auschwitz, indicate the facts were known.

Was it because the bombers available did not have the flying range? Not at all. In 1944 an industrial slave labor camp near Auschwitz, Buna (also known as Monowitz), that produced aviation fuel and synthetic rubber, was bombed more than once by the Americans.

The claim that bombing the rail lines to Auschwitz would be ineffective because the lines were easily repaired is simply another excuse, as Rafael Medoff points out. In fact, the Allies found that bombing the German rail lines was very helpful to the war effort.

Perhaps the most compelling reason for not bombing was that Auschwitz was not a military target and the primary focus of the Allies was to end the war as quickly as possible. Here again the excuse is not convincing, for Auschwitz contained a large ammunition factory that was producing the fuses (detonators) for one-half million artillery shells per month. The factory, Weischel Union Metallwerke, included 2000 to 2500 workers, mostly young Jewish women, and was located in Auschwitz II (Birkenau). Originally, it was a Krupp enterprise located in Essen. It moved to Auschwitz after it had been bombed in 1943. It was a valid bombing target in the past, so why not now?

As it turns out, the primary reason for not bombing Auschwitz lies in another direction. Thomas J. Dodd, U.S. counsel at the 1945-46 Nuremberg Trials, later a U.S. Senator, was concerned there were too many Jews in the prosecution. He wrote, “Jews should stay away from this trial—for their own sake. For—mark this well—the charge ‘a war for the Jews’ is still being made.” In Eight Days at Yalta, Diana Preston says the same, citing President Roosevelt’s advisors in noting that the rail lines at Auschwitz were not bombed because doing so would have confirmed the charge that the war was a war for the Jews.

Not only Jews asked the Allies to bomb Auschwitz. The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather is about Witold Pilecki, a Polish man who was a member of the Polish underground during World War II. Pilecki volunteered to have himself arrested and sent to Auschwitz. Pilecki’s reports, smuggled out to the underground for over two years, describe how Auschwitz transitioned from being a concentration camp to an extermination center, mainly for Jews. The information he provided was sent to the Polish Government in Exile in London, then on to the Americans and the British. The Allies rejected requests by the Poles to bomb Auschwitz for “fear of stirring up antisemitism at home.” (After the war Pilecki was accused of being a spy for the west by the Communist government of Poland. He was executed, but his notes survived.)

The decision not to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz was due to a toxic combination of antisemitism and isolationism, both of which were pervasive in the U.S. in the 1940s. (Perhaps, to some extent today too, as the news from Tennessee suggests.) It was of paramount importance, particularly to the Americans, that their fight in World War II not be seen as a war on behalf of the Jews.

Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.