Desperate Pleas to Stop the Slaughter
As the Nazis deported hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, Jewish leaders in Palestine and around the world begged the Allies to bomb the death camp and the railway lines leading to it. Their desperate cries for help, however, fell on deaf ears.
In June 1944, the Jewish Agency Executive in Jerusalem discussed the possibility of requesting Allied bombing of Auschwitz. But they ultimately decided against it, fearing that such an attack could inadvertently kill Jewish prisoners. As David Ben-Gurion, the chairman, stated: “We do not know the real situation in Poland, and it seems to him that we cannot propose anything in this matter.”
A Drastic Change of Heart
Yet just a few weeks later, the Jewish Agency leadership had a dramatic change of heart. Suddenly, they were actively lobbying the Allies to bomb Auschwitz, with representatives in multiple countries pressing the case. What caused this abrupt reversal?
The turning point appears to have been the arrival of the Auschwitz Protocols—a detailed report smuggled out of the death camp by two escaped prisoners. This chilling document revealed the full, horrific truth about Auschwitz: that it was not a labor camp, but an extermination center where Jews were systematically murdered in gas chambers.
Bombing Requests Flood In
Armed with this new information, the Jewish Agency sprung into action. In late June 1944, Yitzhak Gruenbaum, a member of the Agency’s executive, began aggressively lobbying for bombing raids on Auschwitz. He met with journalists, sent letters to Allied officials, and even cabled the Soviet government, urging them to bomb the camp and railway lines.
Gruenbaum was not alone. Nahum Goldmann, the Jewish Agency’s representative in Washington, also pressed the U.S. government to bomb Auschwitz. And in London, the Agency’s secretary, Moshe Shertok, appealed directly to British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden.
A Feasible but Rejected Proposal
Remarkably, the Allies had the capability to bomb Auschwitz. By mid-1944, the U. S. Army Air Force’s Fifteenth Air Force, based in Italy, had the range and resources to strike the camp. And the Allies were already bombing industrial targets near Auschwitz, including a synthetic oil factory less than 5 miles from the gas chambers. Despite this capability, the decision to bomb the camp was never made, often attributed to a combination of strategic priorities and a lack of understanding of the full extent of the horrors occurring within its walls. Allied knowledge of Auschwitz was limited, and while some reports highlighted the atrocities, many in positions of power underestimated the urgency of intervention. As a result, the chance to disrupt the operation of the camp and potentially save countless lives was ultimately lost amidst the chaos of war.
Yet the bombing requests were repeatedly rejected. Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy claimed that such an operation would require “the diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations elsewhere.” In other words, the Allies prioritized their main military objectives over rescuing the Jews of Auschwitz.
A Missed Opportunity of “Monumental Proportions”
Historians continue to debate whether bombing Auschwitz could have significantly disrupted the Nazi killing machine. Some argue that even imperfect bombing raids might have slowed the deportations and saved thousands of lives. Others contend that the moral dilemma of potentially killing prisoners made the risks too great.
Ultimately, the Allies’ failure to act on the repeated pleas to bomb Auschwitz remains a source of bitter controversy. As one scholar concluded, “With the kind of political will and moral courage the Allies exhibited in other missions throughout the war, it is plain that the failure to bomb [Auschwitz] Birkenau, the site of mankind’s greatest abomination, was a missed opportunity of monumental proportions.” The haunting question remains: What if the Allies had chosen to intervene?
