Why did the Allies not bomb Auschwitz to save lives?

Wyman (1998, p.216-20) history professor and founder of the Institute of Holocaust Studies in Washington, has been one of the primary figures advocating for bombing the Auschwitz gas-chamber and rairoads, which would have “saved several hundred thousand [Jews], … without compromising the war effort” in “Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed” published in Commentary – a magazine dedicated to covering cultural and Jewish issues, in order to condemn Allied inaction and challenge the cultural norms that resulted in Allied apathy towards the Jewish plight.

Wyman (1984) begins his essay with a chronological narrative of the urgent race from one resistance member to another, critical information regarding the Holocaust. Starting from the personal tale of Vrba and Wetzler, the two Jews who dangerously escaped Auschwitz in April with what was then the most detailed report of the Holocaust, to the process of urgently smuggling this report out of Europe, and the numerous Jewish appeals to bomb Auschwitz once such information had been received. Throughout this narrative, Wyman directly identifies members of the Jewish resistance and tells the story through their eyes, humanizing them and encourages a sense of intimacy in order to draw sympathy from the reader.

For instance, the personal efforts of a dozen other individuals like Rabbi Weissmandel, Flischmann, Riegner, or Kopecky, are used to emphasize, through repetition, their pleas to bomb Auschwitz – whilst using this opportunity to appeal to pathos by quoting from the contents of their letters, describing the horrendous fate that awaited Jewish deportees “without food, water, or sanitary facilities”.

In contrast to these noble efforts, and their desperate pleas “every two to three days”, the Allies first had these messages “blocked” for “unknown reasons”. Even when information about the Holocaust had finally reached the Allies, their responses show apathy and a clear lack of concern for the Jews; it is not “contemplated [for] the armed forces […] the purpose of rescuing victims”, or internal notes that they are “chary of getting the Army involved in this while the war is on”, despite “fully appreciating the humanitarian motives”.

The endowment effect is the psychological tendency to feel more affected by the loss of something one once had. By July – when the bombing appeals were made, over 90% of Jews had already perished in Aktion Reinhardt; Wyman knows this – later admitting that “bombings would not have helped after 8 July, after the last mass deportation […] to Auschwitz”. (Steinbacher 2005) By August, when the Allies received critical plans regarding Auschwitz, it was far too late; by November, Himmler would have ordered a permanent halt to gassing operations. (Linton 2016)

However, by chronologically narrating a race to stop the Holocaust, and by implicitly assuming that Jewish lives were up for salvation through neglecting to mention the already-occurred failure to save Jews, Wyman takes advantage of the endowment effect – creating the feeling of tragedy through the visceral sensation that the allies bore consequentialist moral responsibility for their deaths, ultimately leading the reader to conclude on their own that the Allies did not care about the Jews.

While Wyman could have begun with an evaluation of the feasibility of bombing Auschwitz, by framing the juxtaposition of the urgency of the resistance’s heroic efforts against the Kafkaesque non-committal responses given by the Allies enrages readers and leave them with a clear impression of Allied villainy before even evaluating its technical feasibility, making later objections seem like excuses. The show-not-tell approach to demonstrating Allied malfeasance is ultimately more effective because it avoids the instinctive deflection prevalent in being (indirectly) faulted for mass-murder – as many readers presumably belong to Allied countries, and allows them to view the conclusion as their own.

This is in contrast to many others who have written about the same problem, such as US Air Force Colonel Rice (1999), who in responding to Wyman, has used statistics and technical military calculations to conclude that such a task would be difficult, without the primary focus of politics or a clear emotional narrative.

Since Rice’s primary goal had been to perform a strict cost-benefit analysis of the feasibility of the operation, rather than concluding any overarching moral lesson, his article mainly evaluates factors that would hinder the operation in an impersonal tone, such as the inaccuracy of bombers, lack of knowledge about other equally-important gas chambers, the heavily-armed flak of these complexes, poor weather, and so on.

However, Wyman’s understanding that such issues are not his primary strength allows him to sidestep such potential objections – even supposing there existed technical considerations that made it difficult to achieve the intended result by bombing Auschwitz, the fact that the allies seemed too apathetic to consider its possibility makes it seem like a post-hoc convenient justification. Indeed, as he has argued, if precision bombing, or any of the other suggested methods had not worked, then the allies should have tried or at least considered something else.

This conclusion would not be possible by starting with technical considerations, which explains the confidence Wyman has in admitting military operational difficulty in the essay’s second half – for instance, that “successful interdiction […] necessitated] close observation of severed lines and frequent re-bombing [every] few days”, which seem to contradict earlier assertions that Auschwitz could have been bombed at “minute cost to the war effort”, or the aforementioned acknowledgement that bombings “would not have helped” after 8 July.

That does not necessitate that Wyman’s strength lies only in emotional appeal to ethos or pathos to make his argument. His background as a historian allows him to provide a myriad of specific examples, instances, events, and peoples to argue his case, as well as point out contradictions therein.

For example, despite numerous Allied objections placid objections that “the most effective relief to victims of enemy persecution is the early defeat of the Axis”, Wyman demonstrates that the allies had no problem providing massive military aid to Yugoslav, Polish, or Russian partisans despite often questionable military need, making concern seem feigned and hypocritical.   

Rather than a primary focus on the feasibility of technical military operations like Rice, Wyman simply gives a dozen specific examples from July to November where the allies flew bombing operations within a hundred miles of Auschwitz – convincing non-military analysts that the allies could have easily spared planes to destroy Auschwitz, even though he later admits that flights from Italy to Poland (the only possible route) would have caused a “prohibitive rate of loss to the Air Force”.

Similarly, many objections had been made that bombing the complexes risked killing Jews and therefore should not be attempted, such as by the World Jewish Congress (WJC). In turn, Wyman draws attention to the fact that the Allied response to appeals mentioned “considerable opinion […] that [bombing Auschwitz] might provoke even more vindictive action [!] by the Germans”, the added exclamation mark to emphasize that the Allies, in their objections, did not “understand […] that wholesale massacres had already been perpetrated without any need for an alibi”, invalidating such naïve concerns.

Furthermore, Wyman deftly names half-a-dozen Holocaust survivors such as Olga who had hoped for an air-raid and had believed it had been worth dying for, though such testaments had not been available at that time. Cleverly, the fact that numerous Jewish organizations like the WJC had objected is relegated to a mere footnote.

In such a manner, by systematically eliminating all other possible objections for why the Allied did not help the Jews, the remaining explanation, no matter how improbable, must have been the truth. In this regard, Wyman’s ability to synergize historical evidence and data with intuitive and emotional reasons to agree is particularly persuasive, particularly for an audience that is already invested in Holocaust historiography, cultural criticism, or Jewish issues, and serves as an effective chapter in his later book, the Abandonment of the Jews.

Bibliography

Hillgruber, Andreas. War in the East and the Extermination of the Jews. CT, pp 95–96. Meckler: Westpoint, 1989. ISBN 0-88736-266-4

Linton, J. “Eastern Europe 1939-1945: Covering Letter from the Jewish Agency for Palestine to the Foreign Office Enclosing Plans and Descriptions of Auschwitz and Treblinka Death-camps, August 1944.” http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/worldwar2/theatres-of-war/eastern-europe/investigation/camps/sources/docs/7/. August 1944. Accessed October 2016.

Rice, Rondall. “Bombing Auschwitz: US 15th Air Force and the Military Aspects of a Possible Attack.” War in History 6, no. 2 (1999): 205-29. doi:10.1177/096834459900600204.

Steinbacher, Sybille. Auschwitz: A History. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2005.  ISBN 0-06-082581-2.

Wyman, David S. “Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed.” The End of the Holocaust, Indiana University Press, May 1, 1998. Accessed January 2017. doi:10.1515/9783110976519.306.

—. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945. Vol. 2. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. http://holocaust.umd.umich.edu/news/uploads/PEC_Niewyk_rescue_1993.pdf

---