In July 1944, the 1,684 Hungarian Jews from the Kasztner train discovered for themselves that Bergen-Belsen was not the place of horror they had first feared. Éva Speter remembers the camp as offering a certain degree of “cultural life,” as lectures and musical recitals were organized by the prisoners. But the constant fear was that the Nazis would not keep their promise and the Hungarians would never be released.
Their fear grew in intensity as the months went by and conditions in Bergen-Belsen began to worsen, but they were eventually released. They owed their freedom to the negotiations that continued, chiefly via Becher, with Jewish representatives in Switzerland. In December 1944, Éva Speter and her family boarded a train from Bergen-Belsen that took them south and, at last, out of the control of the Nazis. “The moment I knew we are in Switzerland,” she says, “a big stone fell from my heart, I must tell you. The Swiss behaved beautifully to us—Turkish towels, warm water and soap. It was heaven.”
Kasztner and Hansi Brand could not have predicted the fate of the train that had left Budapest on June 30, nor could they have guessed the dramatic turn of events that would lead, in a matter of days, to the cessation of deportations from Hungary. For, just more than a week before the train departed, the Allies received certain and detailed knowledge of the horrors of Auschwitz. Information about the extermination of the Jews had been known and publicized in the West since the killings of 1941. Churchill himself had spoken openly about the Nazis’ policy of mass murder, and the Polish government in exile in London had informed the Allied governments about the existence of Auschwitz as a concentration camp for Poles and about the executions that had taken place there in May 1941.
In July 1942,21 the Polish Fortnightly review, published in London, printed a list of twenty-two camps—including Auschwitz—where Nazi atrocities were taking place. On December 17, Antony Eden, the British foreign secretary, read a statement to Parliament condemning Nazi atrocities, including the murder of the Jews. After he had finished, the MPs (members of Parliament) stood for a minute’s silence. A message sent by the Polish resistance in March 1943 also mentioned Auschwitz as one of the places where Jews were being killed, and on June 1st that year22 the London Times published an article about “Nazi Brutality to Jews” at Auschwitz.
The next most significant event that increased the Allied level of knowledge about Auschwitz occurred when a report from a Polish agent code named Wanda23 arrived in London in January 1944. It stated that “children and women are put into cars and lorries and taken to the gas chambers in [Auschwitz–Birkenau]. There they are suffocated with the most horrible suffering lasting ten to fifteen minutes.”24 The report went on to state that “ten thousand people daily” were being murdered in “three large crematoria” and that nearly 650,000 Jews had already been murdered at the camp.
Many of the documents relating to this subject are still classified, so we can only speculate as to why Wanda’s report made such little impact. Part of the reason could have been that the very complexity of Auschwitz—its multiple functions as labor, concentration, and death camp—made it harder to interpret. But it is also possible—given the short debate that was about to occur over the question of whether to bomb the camp—that, for the Allies, the existence of Auschwitz was almost a distraction from the main task, as they saw it, of defeating the Germans.
Information about Auschwitz was about to reach a new level of detail because of the actions of four prisoners. The first two, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, managed to escape from Auschwitz in April 1944, and the next two, Arnošt Rosin and Czesław Mordowicz, escaped in May. When they reached nearby Slovakia, the information they gave was collated to form what became known as the Auschwitz Protocols. Kasztner himself was given an early copy of the report based on the first two prisoners’ evidence when he visited Slovakia on April 28, but he chose not to publicize its contents—presumably fearful of the effect on his negotiations with Eichmann. It was only in June that the Auschwitz Protocols finally reached the West. On June 18 the BBC broadcast news about Auschwitz, and on the 20th the New York Times published the first of three stories about the camp, reporting the existence of “gas chambers in the notorious German concentration camps at Birkenau and Oświęcim [Auschwitz].”25
In June and July 1944, however, knowledge of the mass murders taking place at Auschwitz did undoubtedly produce one change in policy–on the Axis side. In the wake of the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews, numerous protests had been made to Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian head of state. Even Pope Pius XII, whose failure during the war publicly to denounce the extermination of the Jews has been much criticized, appealed to Horthy to stop the deportations. President Roosevelt and the King of Sweden also lobbied Horthy in close succession.
Finally, on June 26, Richard Lichtheim, a member of the Jewish Agency in Geneva, transmitted a telegram to England containing information about the Auschwitz Protocols, and called upon the Allies to hold individual members of the Hungarian government responsible for the crime. This cable was intercepted by the Hungarian authorities and shown to the Prime Minister, Dome Sztojay, in early July and the contents were then communicated to Horthy.
It was all too much for the seventy-six-year-old Hungarian leader. In 1940, thinking the Germans would win the war, he had ardently supported them; in 1943, thinking they would lose, he had tried to sidle up to the Allies; in March 1944, he had cooperated with Hitler and stayed in office after German troops occupied his country. Now, in the wake of threats of personal retribution, this weathervane of a man changed direction once again, and informed the Germans that the deportation of the Hungarian Jews must stop. With Hungarian troops protecting him in the capital, Horthy enforced his order and, on July 9, the deportations ceased.
Horthy was challenging the Germans at a time when they were at their weakest, for June 1944 had been a catastrophic month in the fortunes of Nazi Germany. On June 6, Allied forces had landed on the Normandy beaches and, by early July, it was clear that they were not going to be pushed back into the sea as Hitler had foretold. Meanwhile, on June 22, the Soviets had launched Operation Bagration, a massive push against German Army Group Centre in Belorussia. This latter action which, unlike D-Day, has not entered the public consciousness in the West, was of much greater import to Horthy who ruled a country in the center of Europe. While the Germans fielded thirty divisions in an attempt to deal with the D-Day landings, they had a massive 165 divisions facing the Red Army, and yet they were still being pushed back. It could only be a matter of a few months before the Soviets were at the gates of Budapest. Horthy, like Werner Best in Denmark before him, knew it was time to construct an alibi.
There was another consequence resulting from detailed information about the true nature of Auschwitz reaching the West, a controversial question that still simmers on in debate today—the call for the bombing of the camp. In June 1944, the War Refugee Board in Washington received a plea from Jacob Rosenheim of the Agudas Israel World Organization that the Allies bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. This request was forwarded six days later by John Pehle, head of the War Refugee Board, to the Assistant Secretary of War, John McCloy, although Pehle added that he had “several doubts”26 about the feasibility of this idea. The suggestion was rejected by McCloy on June 26, both as impractical and because it would cause the diversion of bombers that were engaged in “decisive operations”27 elsewhere.
Another telegram had arrived in Washington on June 24, this one from the World Jewish Congress in Geneva via the War Refugee Board in Switzerland. It called for, among other measures, the bombing of the gas chambers themselves. On July 4, this plea too was rejected by McCloy, who cited the same reasons he had outlined in his June 26 letter. Significantly, an inter-office memorandum at this time addressed to McCloy from a member of his staff, Colonel Gerhardt, contains the phrase: “I know you told me to ‘kill’ this ...”28 suggesting, at the very least, that the idea of bombing was dismissed without considered judgment.
Requests
to bomb Auschwitz were also reaching London. When Churchill heard about them on July 7, he wrote to his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, saying—now famously—“Get anything out of the Air Force you can and invoke me if necessary.”29 The Air Ministry examined the various possibilities and Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Secretary of State for Air, replied on July 15 in a broadly negative manner. He pointed out to Eden that it was impossible for British Bomber Command to cover such a great distance during one night—and the British specialized in night-time bombing. Only the Americans bombed by day, and so he proposed laying the matter before them. He did suggest that one way forward might be for the Americans to drop weapons at the same time as they attempted to bomb the killing installations, in the hope of instigating a mass breakout.
In any event, as his letter makes clear, he was passing responsibility for the whole business over to the U.S. Air Force. American General Spaatz was questioned about the proposal when he visited the Air Ministry shortly afterwards. He suggested aerial reconnaissance of the camp as a possible way forward and the request was passed on to the Foreign Office, where it never surfaced again.
The overall question of bombing Auschwitz rumbled on through the summer, with John McCloy in the U.S. War Department in August dismissing further pleas for action from the World Jewish Congress. In Britain, a Foreign Office official suggested in an internal memorandum that, regardless of any practical difficulties, there were also “political”30 reasons not to pursue the bombing—almost certainly the “flood” of displaced Jews that would after the war seek sanctuary in Palestine, a territory currently governed by the British.
So, on both sides of the Atlantic, the decision was made not to bomb Auschwitz. But, crucially, the decision was also made not even to consider the bombing of Auschwitz. No proper aerial reconnaissance of the camp was undertaken, no feasibility study drawn up, no detailed attempt of any sort made to evaluate the various options. The overwhelming sense is of both governments’ attention being focused elsewhere (with the possible exception of Winston Churchill—although even he dropped the matter after his initial “get anything out of the Air Force you can” note).
Of course, the British and Americans had a great deal on their minds in July 1944. The progress of Allied troops through Normandy demanded huge attention; the Red Army were at the gates of Warsaw and the Polish “Home Army” was calling for support; and, on July 20, an assassination attempt was made on Adolf Hitler at his headquarters in East Prussia. There were clearly a large number of competing priorities for Allied air resources, and it is easy to see how the prevailing wisdom in London and Washington became that Auschwitz would best be destroyed by ignoring the camp directly and putting every effort into winning the war as swiftly as possible on the ground. All that is true, and yet the motivation behind the rejection of the calls for bombing the camp appears to possess a less savory dimension. The lack of proper consideration and the dismissive tone in some of the documents all give off the lingering sense that no one was bothered enough to make bombing Auschwitz a priority.
The officials who so swiftly dismissed the calls for bombing would, no doubt, be astonished by the veritable academic industry that has grown up around the question today. So deeply has the issue penetrated the popular consciousness that one academic, when talking to Jewish audiences, finds “that many people are convinced that bombing the camps would have saved many of the six million Jewish victims.”31 The bombing question has become much bigger than a debate about practicalities and has taken on a symbolic dimension—proof that the Allies could have prevented Jewish deaths but chose not to. This is why the issue has to be examined carefully and calmly, to prevent the emergence and growth of a new myth that “many of the six million” could indeed have been saved by the bombing.
The problem, of course, with examining the practicality of any Allied bombing of Auschwitz is simple—it did not happen. We are thus in the realms of counter-factual history, a land where little ever can be finally resolved. Although there seems general expert agreement that nothing would have been achieved by bombing the railway to the camp—the Nazis would have diverted the Auschwitz trains on to another route and swiftly repaired the track—there is no such consensus on the question of actually bombing the gas chambers. Hence, impassioned articles are written detailing the immense difficulties of a bombing raid either by USAF B17s or B24s or by the lightly armed British Mosquitoes,32 while other publications fiercely question the alleged technical obstacles and suggest that bombing could well have destroyed the crematoria.33 As with much counter-factual history, there is no conclusive answer.
Luckily, however, there is a way through the maze—at least if one considers when the most impassioned and insistent pleas for the bombing of the camp were made to the Allied authorities. Given the timing of the delivery of the Auschwitz Protocols to the Allies, and the decision by Horthy to cease deporting the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, it is possible to say conclusively that there is no possibility that the bombing of the camp or the railway lines would have prevented any of the Hungarian Jews dying. The detailed information simply reached the Allies too late (for example, the Hungarian deportations ceased on July 9 and the British Air Minister replied negatively to Eden about the proposed bombing on the July 15th).
The next area of this complex issue that one can approach with almost the same level of certainty is the effect of any bombing on the extermination capacity of the camp. The Auschwitz Protocols contain detailed descriptions of the location of the four main crematoria. But even if a daring daylight bombing raid had been mounted against them with pinpoint accuracy, and even if these killing installations had been completely destroyed, the Nazis still would have been able to continue gassing people elsewhere at Auschwitz. Crucially, the location of “The Little White House” and “The Little Red House” were not disclosed in the Auschwitz Protocols, and they offered all the extermination capacity the Nazis then required.
After the Hungarian action was discontinued, Auschwitz was operating with massive excess killing potential. Instead of 10,000 people being killed every day the number dropped to an overall daily average of fewer than 1,500,34 and continued at around that level until November and the closing of the crematoria. Therefore the conclusion must be that, far from saving “many” of the “six million,” any bombing of the camp initiated by the requests in the summer of 1944 would have saved no one. In fact, because of collateral damage to the barracks only meters from the crematoria it would probably have killed hundreds of the very prisoners the raid was designed to save.
This is, of course, an intellectual conclusion and not an emotional one. And, because so much of the debate around this issue is conducted at an emotional level, the conclusion will prove unsatisfactory to many who want to think that the Allies could have done much more to prevent the killings. Perhaps they could have—perhaps, for example, dropping guns into the camp would have precipitated a revolt—though it seems unlikely in the extreme that prisoners weakened by hunger could have suddenly and without preparation staged a revolt against SS men in watchtowers armed with machine guns and protected behind electrified fences. We shall never know—because, by posing that question we are back in the downwardly spiraling land of the counter-factual.
The debate about the possible bombing of Auschwitz is so passionate because it masks a wider ranging and less specific question: Shouldn’t more have been done to try to save the Jews? The British government, for example, knew for certain of the existence of the Nazis’ systematic campaign of destruction against the Jews—it even knew the names of the Operation Reinhard camps and the death toll in each—by the beginning of 1943. Yet, despite pleas from members of Parliament such as Eleanor Rathbone that immigration restrictions should be loosened so that large numbers of Jews from Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania could be offered the right to emigrate to countries of safety, the British government remained steadfastly opposed.
In February 1943, Anthony Eden, in reply to a similar plea from Willi
am Brown (MP), stated: “The only truly effective means of succouring the tortured Jewish, and I may add the other suffering peoples of Europe, lies in Allied victory.”35 A few weeks later, in discussions in Washington in March 1943, Eden said that it was important “to move very cautiously about offering to take all the Jews out of a country,” adding, “if we do that, then the Jews of the world will be wanting us to make similar efforts in Poland and Germany. Hitler might well take us up on any such offer, and there simply are not enough ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them.”36 (This despite the fact that, during the last three years of the war, means were found to ship more than 400,000 German and Italian POWs across the Atlantic.37)
Eleanor Rathbone was bitter in her criticism of the inaction of the Allies in her speech during a House of Commons debate on May 19, 1943: “If the blood of those who have perished unnecessarily during this war were to flow down Whitehall, the flood would rise so high that it would drown everyone within these gloomy buildings which house our rulers.”38 While we can never know for certain what would have happened if the Allies had dropped emigration restrictions for Jews under threat, it is hard not to agree with Ms. Rathbone that more could (and perhaps should) have been done by the Allies to try to help. It is possible, therefore, that the current debate would be more fruitful if it focused less on the bombing of Auschwitz and more on the admittedly more complex question of Allied wartime immigration policy.
Meanwhile, the ending of the deportation of the Hungarian Jews had consequences both in Budapest—where Eichmann fumed—and at Auschwitz, where the spare capacity in the gas chambers meant that plans were now made to liquidate the population of one whole section of Birkenau—the gypsy camp. This special section of Birkenau had been used since February 1943 to accommodate (at its peak) about 23,000 gypsy men and women. They were allowed to live as families and wear their own clothes, and did not have their hair shaved. Conditions in the gypsy camp, however, soon became among the worst in Auschwitz. Overcrowding combined with lack of food and water meant that disease was rife, particularly typhus and the skin disease called noma, and many thousands died. Altogether, 20,000 of the 23,000 gypsies sent to Auschwitz died there, whether of disease or starvation, or in the gas chambers when the gypsy camp was eventually liquidated.
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