Rafael Medoff

In the March 2003 SHAFR newsletter, William J. vanden Heuvel of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute defends the refusal of the Roosevelt administration to bomb Auschwitz. He argues that the Allies had no choice but to "totally direct [their] bombing strategy toward destroying Nazi fuel supplies, their synthetic oil industries."1 What vanden Heuvel neglects to mention, however, is that some of the oil facilities that the Allies struck were situated within a few miles of the Auschwitz gas chambers--meaning that the Allies could have easily bombed the gas chambers and crematoria used for the mass murder of Jews. On August 20, 1944, a fleet of U.S. bombers dropped more than one thousand bombs on the oil refineries in the factory areas of Auschwitz, less than five miles from the gas chambers. On September 13, American bombers struck the factory areas again; this time, stray bombs accidentally hit an SS barracks (killing fifteen Germans), a slave labor workshop (killing forty prisoners), and the railroad track leading to the gas chambers.

U.S. bombers carried out similar raids on December 18, December 26, and January 19. The frequent Allied bombings of seven other synthetic oil refineries near Auschwitz in 1944-45 included a January 20 raid on Blechhammer, forty-five miles from the death camp, which made it possible for forty-two Jewish slave laborers to escape.2 In his memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel recalls how he and other Auschwitz prisoners reacted when the bombers struck: "We were not afraid. And yet, if a bomb had fallen on the blocks, it alone would have claimed hundreds of victims on the spot. But we were no longer afraid of death; at any rate, not of that death. Every bomb that exploded filled us with joy and gave us new confidence in life. The raid lasted over an hour. If it could only have lasted ten times ten hours!"3

Similarly, when I interviewed former Auschwitz inmate Rabbi Menachem M. Rubin in 1997, he reiterated what he had written in a letter to van den Heuvel on December 27, 1996: "I stood in Auschwitz, looking skyward a number of times, as Allied planes passed overhead to bomb the nearby synthetics plant at Blechhammer. To drop a bomb on the crematoria would have been a simple and life-saving act. . . . By destroying a crematorium thousands would have been saved daily. The number of inmates possibly killed would have been much fewer than the number saved.” He also noted that “the people working in and around the gas chambers were condemned to be murdered anyway."4 Vanden Heuvel, in his SHAFR article, makes no mention of Rabbi Rubin's letter to him. Yet he does mention one unnamed Auschwitz survivor whose reported remarks seem to coincide with vanden Heuvel's view that bombing death camps would have been wrong because some prisoners might have been accidentally harmed in the process of knocking out the gas chambers where twelve thousand Jews were being murdered daily in 1944.5

Officials of Roosevelt's War Department repeatedly rebuffed proposals by Jewish groups to bomb the death camps. Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy insisted that raiding the death camps would sap resources "essential" to Allied military operations elsewhere. Yet the administration was perfectly willing to divert military resources for an assortment of reasons far less compelling than the opportunity to knock out mass-murder camps. For example, an Air Force plan to bomb the Japanese city of Kyoto was blocked by Secretary of War Henry Stimson because of the city's artistic treasures.6 Assistant Secretary of War McCloy, who was adamant about not diverting bombs to hit Auschwitz, personally intervened to divert American bombers from striking the German city of Rothenburg because he feared for the safety of the city's famous medieval architecture.7

The State Department, which strongly opposed the proposal by Jewish activists to create a government agency to rescue Jewish refugees from Hitler, in August 1943 established a government agency "for the protection and salvage of artistic and historic monuments in Europe."8 General George Patton even diverted U.S. troops to rescue 150 prized Lipizzaner horses in Austria in April 1945.9 Perhaps the Zionist leader Rabbi Meyer Berlin was not so far off the mark when he told U.S. Senator Robert Wagner in early 1943 that "if horses were being slaughtered as are the Jews of Poland, there would by now be a loud demand for organized action against such cruelty to animals. Somehow, when it concerns Jews everybody remains silent."10

The Roosevelt administration's decision to remain silent, like its decisions to rescue horses, art, and architecture, was conscious, deliberate, and committed to writing. Thanks to the research of David S. Wyman, published in his book The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945, there is no mystery as to why War Department officials repeatedly rebuffed behind-the-scenes proposals by Jewish groups that the United States bomb Auschwitz. Assistant Secretary of War McCloy claimed at the time that the War Department had undertaken "a study" that found that such bombing would require "the diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces." But Wyman's examination of the department's records shows that in fact no such study had been done. Rather, the War Department had already decided in February 1944 that it would not allow the armed forces to be used "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."11

Joseph Bendersky's recent study, The 'Jewish Threat': Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army, documents the widespread anti-Jewish prejudice among senior U.S. military officials throughout the past century and its impact on policy decisions--including the decision to refrain from bombing the death camps and the War Department's false claim to have studied the feasibility of the proposals. Bendersky finds that:

at the time, the army never attempted to acquire intelligence or
make the necessary operational assessments to determine whether such
bombing was feasible. The army never pursued any systematic examination of
the proposals presented to it; nor did it ask theater commanders what might
be done. The quick and repetitious responses from the army without much
inquiry into the intelligence or technical and operational aspects later
interjected by critics of bombing suggest other reasons for these policy
decisions, including indifference among highly placed officers to the
plight of Jews.12

Vanden Heuvel misrepresents the position of the Jewish Agency (Palestine Jewry's autonomous governing agency during the British Mandate period) with regard to the bombing issue. He claims that at a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive (JAE) in Jerusalem on June 11, 1944, JAE chairman David Ben-Gurion and his colleagues "voted eleven to one against the bombing proposal." What actually happened at the June 11 session is that Ben-Gurion opposed requesting an Allied attack on Auschwitz because "we do not know what the actual situation is in Poland"; similarly, his colleague Emil Shmorak opposed it because "we hear that in Oswiecim [the Polish name for Auschwitz] there is a large labor camp."13 At that point, not realizing that it was a death camp, they saw no reason to bomb it.

Eight days later, however, Richard Lichtheim, in the Jewish Agency's Geneva office, sent the Jewish Agency leadership in Jerusalem a detailed summary of the first eyewitness account of the mass-murder process (the account was produced by two Auschwitz escapees and is known as the Vrba-Wetzler report). Lichtheim noted that when the agency leadership had previously learned of the deportation of Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau region, they “believed that it was done to exploit more Jewish labour in the industrial centres of Upper-Silesia." What the Vrba-Wetzler report revealed, Lichtheim wrote to his JAE colleagues in Jerusalem, was that in addition to the "labour camp in Birkenau" there were also "large-scale killings" in Birkenau itself "with all the scientific apparatus needed for this purpose, i.e. . . . specially constructed buildings with gas-chambers and crematoriums. . . .The total number of Jews killed in or near Birkenau is estimated at over one and a half million."14

Upon receiving this information, the Jewish Agency leadership promptly launched a concerted lobbying effort to persuade the Allies to bomb Auschwitz. Moshe Shertok, chief of the Jewish Agency's political department, and Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, who were stationed in London, lobbied the British. Yitzhak Gruenbaum, chairman of the JA's Rescue Committee in Jerusalem, repeatedly pressed his colleagues in the United States to lobby Washington, which they did, and agency representatives in Europe lobbied locally stationed American diplomats on the subject.15

There can be no doubt that Ben-Gurion and his JAE colleagues knew of these lobbying efforts: when officials of the British Foreign Office promised Shertok in early July that they would actively pursue the idea of bombing the death camps, Shertok immediately telegrammed Ben-Gurion to tell him that Shertok had asked Foreign Minister Anthony Eden to bomb "death camps and railway lines leading to Birkenau" and that Eden had "already asked [the] Air Ministry [to] explore [the] possibility [of] bombing camps [and] will now add railways." At the next JAE meeting, Ben-Gurion relayed the news from Shertok and cited it in support of speculation that recent Allied bombings of Hungarian railway stations "may have been undertaken in response to our proposals and demands."16

Recently discovered documents further demonstrate that the entire Jewish Agency leadership was involved in pressing the bombing idea. The first of the documents is a note dated June 20, 1944, from Yitzhak Gruenbaum to Chaim Barlas, the JA representative in Istanbul. The key sentence reads: "We have relayed to Moshe [Shertok, in London] a proposal from [Moshe] Krausz [the JA representative in Budapest] as well as ours to bring about the bombing of the rail lines connecting Hungary with Poland and of the death camps in Poland." The sentence demonstrates that Shertok's lobbying in London for the bombing was not undertaken independently of the JA headquarters in Jerusalem. Gruenbaum's use of the plural "we" and "ours" indicates that the instructions from Jerusalem were no longer the sole idea of Gruenbaum, but rather came from the Agency leadership, and the reference to a similar proposal from Krausz demonstrates that Gruenbaum was not the only JA official pushing the idea during that early stage of the bombing discussions.17

The second of these documents, which was published in a collection of documents released by the Israeli and Russian governments, is a report to Ben-Gurion by a JA official in Egypt, describing his attempts in July of 1944 to convince a Soviet diplomat in Cairo that the Allies should bomb the death camps.18 The third document is the previously unpublished transcript of a session of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee on September 29, 1944, in which Yitzhak Gruenbaum reports to his colleagues on the agency's efforts to promote the bombing proposal, with none of the committee members expressing any objections.19

Vanden Heuvel is equally mistaken in his claim that "mainstream Jewish opinion was against the whole idea of bombing Auschwitz." In fact, only one official of a Jewish organization is on record as having explicitly objected to the idea of bombing the camps (for fear of harming the inmates). That was A. Leon Kubowitzki of the World Jewish Congress, and even he repeatedly urged the Allies to use paratroopers to attack Auschwitz. In any event, Kubowitzki’s objection was overruled. His superiors and colleagues at the World Jewish Congress (in New York, London, and Geneva) repeatedly lobbied the Soviets and the British to bomb Auschwitz.20

Many in the Jewish community publicly or privately advocated bombing the death camps or the railways leading to them. Between June and October 1944, such bombing proposals were put forth by, among others, the Orthodox group Agudath Israel;21 the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe;22 the Labor Zionists of America;23 the U.S. Orthodox rescue group Vaad Hatzalah (both its New York headquarters and its Geneva representatives);24 Slovak Jewish leaders Gisi Fleischmann and Rabbi Michael Weissmandel;25 Czech Jewish leader Ernest Frischer;26 Benjamin Akzin, a Jewish staff member of the U.S. government War Refugee Board;27 the editors of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and the Independent Jewish Press Service;28 and columnists for the New York Yiddish daily Morgen Zhurnal and Opinion, the Jewish monthly edited by American Jewish Congress president Stephen Wise.29 The American Jewish Conference, a coalition of all leading U.S. Jewish organizations, called for "all measures" to be taken by the Allies to destroy the death camps.30

It is true that American Jewish leaders failed to protest vigorously when the Allies rejected their requests to bomb Auschwitz. Some Jewish leaders were intimidated by domestic anti-Semitism and were afraid they would be accused of interfering with the Allied war effort if they pressed for military action against Auschwitz. Marc Dollinger remarks in his recent study, Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America, that although "the deteriorating condition of European Jewry demanded that American Jewish leaders take more decisive action, even when that meant exceeding the limits of acceptable ethnic group expression," they did not do so for fear of "charges that their ethnic interests outweighed the need for victory," that Jews were "more self-interested than patriotic."31 But the fact that Jewish leaders were reluctant to publicly press the bombing issue is not the same as saying they were opposed to the bombing of the death camps. They were not. Nor does their hesitancy mitigate the refusal of the Roosevelt administration to make any serious effort to interfere with the annihilation process.

Dr. Medoff is Visiting Scholar, Jewish Studies Program, SUNY-Purchase; Associate Editor,
American Jewish History; and Director, The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust
Studies

1. William vanden Heuvel. SHAFR Newsletter, March 2003.
2. David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews (New York, 1984), 299-300; Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (New York, 1981), 335.
3. Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: 1969), 71.
4. Menachem M. Rubin, Letter to William van den Heuvel, 27 Dec. 1996. Copy in the possession of the author.
5. Vanden Heuvel,
6. Godfrey Hodgson, The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson, 1867-1950 (New York, 1990), 322-4.
7. "Kyoto Addendum" (Letters), Amherst: The College & Its Alumni 28:3 (Winter 1976), 31.
8. "U.S. Group is Named to Save Europe's Art," New York Times, 21 Aug. 1943: 9.
9. Carlo D'Este, Patton: A Genius for War (New York, 1990), 742-3.
10. "Confidential Memorandum by Rabbi Meyer Berlin," 24 Feb. 1943, 5. File: Harold P. Manson, I-62, Abba Hillel Silver Papers, The Temple, Cleveland.
11. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 291-3.
12. Joseph Bendersky, The 'Jewish Threat': Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S.Army (New York, 2000), 344.
13. Jewish Agency Executive [JAE] Minutes, 11 June 1944, Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem.
14. L22/35, Central Zionist Archives.
15. Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, 245, 251-2; Dina Porat, The Blue and the Yellow Stars of
David: The Zionist Leadership in Palestine and the Holocaust, 1939-1945 (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 218-9; Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust (New York, 1996), 218.
16. JAE Minutes, 16 July 1944, Central Zionist Archives.
17. The Gruenbaum-Barlas letter was mentioned for the first time in the footnotes of Shabtai Teveth's Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust, 281, note 16, but Teveth was citing it to make a different point and did not quote the entire sentence. The full text of the Gruenbaum-Barlas letter was published for the first time in Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum, eds., The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the
Allies Have Attempted It? (New York, 2000), 262.
18. Epstein to Ben-Gurion, 3 September 1944, Eytan Bentsur et al., eds. Documents on Israeli-Soviet Relations 1941-1953 - Part I: 1941 - May 1949 (London and Portland, OR, 2000), 83. This document was actually first mentioned in Porat, The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David, 218. What Porat did not mention (since she had no particular reason to mention it), now revealed by the publication of the complete document for the first time, is that Epstein's report was addressed to David Ben-Gurion.
19. JAE Minutes, 29 Sept. 1944, Central Zionist Archives.
20. Goldmann to Masaryk, 3 July 1944, World Jewish Congress Papers, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati; Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, 321.
21. John Pehle, "Memorandum for the Files," 24 June 1944, 16/15/peh, Benjamin Akzin Papers, Metzudat Ze'ev (Jabotinsky Archives), Tel Aviv; David S. Wyman, "Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed," Commentary, May 1978, 37-8.
22. Samuel Merlin, "A Year in the Service of Humanity: A Survey of the Activities of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, July 1943 - August 1944" (New York: Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe), 25, Palestine Statehood Groups Papers, Yale University.
23. "Last Chance for Rescue" (editorial), Jewish Frontier 11 (Aug. 1944), 4.
24. Akzin to Pehle, 2 Sept. 1944, 16/15/peh, Akzin Papers; Isaac Lewin, "Attempts at Rescuing European Jews with the Help of Polish Diplomatic Missions During World War II," The Polish Review 22:4 (1977), 3-23.
25. Wyman, "Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed," 38.
26. Pehle to Kubowitzki, 3 Aug. 1944; Kubowitzki to Pehle, 9 Aug. 1944. Both in World Jewish Congress Papers.
27. Akzin to Lesser, 29 June 1944, 16/15/peh, Akzin Papers.
28. "Reported Germans Willing to Exchange Hungarian Jews for Supplies," Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 20 July 1944, 1; "We and Hungarian Jewry" [editorial], Independent Jewish Press Service, 7 July 1944, 1-A; "Protests Register" (editorial), Independent Jewish Press Service, 21 July 1944, 3-A;
"Devil's Barter" (editorial), Independent Jewish Press Service, 28 July 1944, 3-A.
29. Jacob Fishman, "From Day to Day," Morgen Zhurnal , 27 June 1944, 1-2; Theodore N. Lewis, "Men and Events," Opinion 14:11 (Sept. 1944), 33-4.
30. "Huge Open-Air Demonstration in New York Demands Rescue of Jews from
Europe," Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 1 August 1944, 2; "40,000 Here Seek Way to Save Jews," New York Times, 1 Aug. 1944, 17.
31. Marc Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America (Princeton, 2000), 80.