RAF Bomber Command summer 1940, How to bomb Auschwitz?

[swampyankee]

In eastern Europe the Nazis applied extreme measures against any resistance in their occupied territories.
Even to the extent of 100 hostages killed for each German soldier killed by the resistance.

You'd think that would have completely stopped any resistance, and increased the co-operation of the local population.
But instead in resulted in even more people joining the partisans, anything to get away from the possibility of being deported to Germany for forced labor, or sticking around and taking the risk of being picked up and shot as a hostage.

It easy to sit back later on and say nothing could have been done that would have made a difference, but there's no way to know for sure.
Sometimes doing anything is better than doing nothing.

One easy thing could have been done: ease immigration restrictions. Many countries severely limited immigration or limited it by ethnicity. The US was one; my brother-in-law's grandfather and his immediate family were among the last Jews permitted to enter the US before WWII. My brother-in-law's father had no cousins survive the Holocaust.

 

[Graeme]

John McCloy,

 

[stona]

I think the difficulties of an attack on Auschwitz need to be repeated.

Heavy bombers flying from England could have had little impact on the holocaust before the summer of 1944. But, a huge but, Auschwitz could not be attacked at night because it was too small to appear on the British H2S radar carried in RAF bombers and was also beyond the range of ground-based electronic night-bombing aids such as Oboe and GH. Night bombers would have difficulty identifying the target and even greater problems in hitting it without destroying nearby barracks. With hindsight we might know that the prisoners of the camp would have welcomed their own destruction if even a temporary halt in the killing process might be achieved, but the Allied planners could not possibly understand or know this. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

What about Allied Air Forces in the Mediterranean? Anglo-American heavy bombers flying from Italy had the range to reach Auschwitz. However, the American heavy bombers of the US Fifteenth Air Force, created in November 1943, and medium and heavy bombers of RAF No. 205 Group did not deploy from North Africa to Italy until December 1943. RAF No. 205 Group would have had the same problem as Bomber Command in locating and attacking Auschwitz at night. Although the Fifteenth had Auschwitz in reach by December 1943, it did not have the long range escort fighters that enabled it to operate deep into enemy territory with acceptable losses until the end of March 1944. It began operations against Hungary by attacking the Budapest rail marshalling yards on 3 April 1944. The next day, the Allies flew their first photoreconnaissance sortie over the I. G. Farben synthetic oil and rubber plant at Auschwitz and began sustained operations over Rumania by attacking the Bucharest marshalling yards. By then, all the Polish death camps had discontinued operations, save Majdanek, liberated by the Russians in July 1944, and Auschwitz.
On 7 July 1944 the Fifteenth dispatched its first raids to targets near Auschwitz: 448 bombers and 1,150 tons of bombs against the refinery complexes at Odertal and Blechhammer, 60 miles northwest of the death camp. The Americans continued to attack these targets through 26 December 1944, expending almost 4,200 sorties and 9,250 tons of bombs. Six weeks later, on 20 August, the Fifteenth sent the first of three raids against the I. G. Farben Industries at Auschwitz, using 127 bombers and 334 tons of bombs. The Americans followed up these raids on 13 September, 18 December and 26 December. From 29 August through 19 December, the Americans also bombed two Czechoslovakian targets within 40 miles of the camp: Moravska Ostrava and Bohumin..
Birkenau ceased its mass killing operations in mid-November 1944. For each and every day before that date, the complete destruction of its crematoria/gas chamber complexes might have saved more than 1,000 lives every 24 hours. But this does not alter the fact that 95 percent of the 5.8 million Jews and millions of others who died in Hitler's death camps, concentration camps, executions, and ghettos died before the Allied airpower had both the knowledge and capacity to interfere.

The final option offered by those saying that the gas chambers themselves might have been targeted is a special operation such as operations like the Mosquito attacks on the Amiens Prison, the Dutch records facility, and Gestapo headquarters in Oslo and Copenhagen. These missions, consisting of a few aircraft, struck a single structure at low altitudes and followed routes largely over water, where they would not be detected and tracked until close to their targets. Even so, the attackers were intercepted at Amiens. Such would not be the case for a long land route from the Adriatic Sea to southern Poland. The use of forty such fast aircraft to attack several buildings from slightly differing headings at approximately the same time, or in closely coordinated waves, would have presented a daunting, perhaps insurmountable, problem in coordination and mission planning. In addition, a close examination of the tactics employed in low-level Mosquito attacks shows that, with the single exception of experimental tactics unsuccessfully used on V-1 launching sites, they always attacked above-ground facilities and then only with straight-ahead or shallow-dive approaches. Such tactics, although highly accurate against walls and the sides of buildings, would be less effective against the gas chambers at Auschwitz, which were below or only slightly above ground level.

All the above is largely taken or paraphrased from Richard G Davis, 'Bombing the European Axis Powers;.

 

[tyrodtom]

The Nazi's committed the crime because they thought they could do it and keep it a secret, and some even thought that the rest of the world wanted them to do this, and were too weak willed to do it themselves.
The Allies did just about nothing to make them think otherwise.

During the last few years of the war the Nazi's had slave labor digging up corpse that had been buried for years, from the early phase of the Holocaust , when the killing had been by gunfire.
Burning the bodies, crushing what was left, trying to hide the evidence.
They remembered the Kaytn spectacle, they wanted no evidence left. No bodies, no crime.
The people who committed these crimes, ( and the victims) though nobody knew, and the few that did know, didn't care.

Don't target the hardware, target the people doing the crime.
The administration areas, and guard barracks usually had some separation from the inmates and killing hardware to get away from the smell, and the disease.

Even the dumbest Nazis had to have known the war was lost toward the last, but they were out contact with reality after living in a closed society for so long.
They war ended a lot quicker than they expected, and they left too much evidence of the crimes.

True, a probably impossible mission.
But something should have at least been attempted.

 

[buffnut453]

But something should have at least been attempted.

And therein lies the problem....it's all to easy to say "something should have been done" but it's harder to determine WHAT to do that would have any impact on Nazi efforts to progress the final solution. By the time the Allies had bases within range, the Nazi programme to exterminate "undesirables" was so widespread that there was no way to stop it other than by overrunning the facilities themselves.

 

[michael rauls]

As a young student of history I remember asking why, why would the victims of the Holocaust just surrender, get on the cattle trains and walk into the gas chambers. Why didn't they fight back, especially when often those directing the capture and transport were often few and lightly armed. The Jewish people are capable of fighting like lions, as shown at the Warsaw uprising and of course Israel's victory over everyone of its neighbours. The answer to my young self was of course, through subterfuge the people didn't know they were being rounded up and transported to be murdered.

So, maybe that's where Bomber Command, and the BBC can make the impact. Leaflets, broadcasts, etc. to Europe's Jewish people warning them. Of course we need to determine what the British knew and when.

You know, that's an angle I had never considered before and it just might have made a difference. Not bombing the camps, which in my opinion would have been very likely unsuccessful in making much of a difference but a concerted information campaign to warn the potential victims.
Some would flee, some would fight, and some would try to hide. It obviously wouldn't save everyone but seems like it could have made a difference. If it saved even 5 or 10% it surely would have been worth the effort.

 

[michael rauls]

One easy thing could have been done: ease immigration restrictions. Many countries severely limited immigration or limited it by ethnicity. The US was one; my brother-in-law's grandfather and his immediate family were among the last Jews permitted to enter the US before WWII. My brother-in-law's father had no cousins survive the Holocaust.

Ageed. I have always been horrified by how reluctant most countries were to allow immigration by German Jews in the years imediatly preceding ww2. Even though the death camps weren't going by say 1938 it was pretty obvious to all that it was pretty bad for Jewish people in Germany and getting worse at a rapid clip.

 

[GrauGeist]

History has shown that societies have not always been kind to Jewish populations.

So, it is not surprising that immigration policies across the board were restrictive in the 30's - one of the tools the Nazis used to come to power, was to blame them for the ills of Germany post-war (WWI), so by 1944, there would have still been strong anti-Semitic feelings toward them among the German population.

if the camps were bombed, cances are that any prisoners that escaped would be killed on sight, reprisals would be stepped up and additional prisoners would be used to repair infrastructure as well as any aircrew shot down during the missions(s) would suffer (as they already did late-war) at the hands of the civilians.

The only way to have stopped the camps, would have been to have a concerted action of destroying the crematorium and assassinating the leading admins across all the camps all at one time - that was simply not do-able.

 

[Admiral Beez]

Ageed. I have always been horrified by how reluctant most countries were to allow immigration by German Jews in the years imediatly preceding ww2. Even though the death camps weren't going by say 1938 it was pretty obvious to all that it was pretty bad for Jewish people in Germany and getting worse at a rapid clip.

Agreed. One thing that baffles me, Britain controlled Palestine and the Balfour Declaration earmarked the territory as the Jewish homeland, but still Britain refused to let Europe's Jew relocate there. Of course the Brits were talking out of both sides of their face, wanting to follow the Balfour Declaration while at the same time curry favour with the Arabs and Persians.

I am of course taking my own thread off-topic, but this bugs me to this day. Britain went from the potential saviour of the Jewish people to its barrier to success, resulting of course in the Jewish insurgency. Imagine if Britain had permitted mass migration to Palestine in interwar years, up to 1939 and then into the war period where possible. There would have likely have been a Jewish division fighting Rommel in Egypt in 1941/42, rather than a Jewish brigade in 1944. As for keeping the Arabs on Britain and the West's side, well we know how that turns out. Anyway, that's my off-topic rant.

 

[pbehn]

What is this nonsense? Was this your intention from the start? Have you started a thread yet that wasn't having a go at the British in some way?

 

[Admiral Beez]

What is....

As a Brit I reserve the right to call out my nation on its historical errors. But I apologise for going OT and if my post triggers you. I'll say no more.

Let's go back to Bomber Command. If we went with leaflets instead of bombs to help the Poles and Jews based on the 1940 report from Polish resistance, what would they say? What did the Brits know in 1940 or 1941? What about 1943 or 44, would a leaflet drop be of any use?

 

[michael rauls]

For whatever its worth, for my part anyway, I was not pointing a finger at the Brits. The U.S.( my country) was as reluctant as any to allow immigration by Jews prior to Ww2., at one point actually turning back a ship full of German Jews that had got out.
They ultimately ended up back in Germany and God knows what happened to them.
I found this particular incident quite disturbing when I saw it on a documentary years ago.

 

[Admiral Beez]

An interesting article on Bomber Command's leaflet raids over Germany in 1939-40.

PsyWar.Org - BOMBER COMMAND - White Bombs: THE LEAFLET RAIDS

 

[swampyankee]

Antisemitism was endemic among the elites of the democratic countries of the world; the US was not immune (there were quotas at many universities to limit the numbers of Jews in universities and medical schools. Some universities retained such policies well into the 1950s). This endemic antisemitism may well be one of the reasons, possibly even more so than anti-bolshevism, that Hitler's rise to power didn't really raise any political red flags. Interestingly, until active alliance with Hitler, Italian fascism was not antisemitic (see Why Mussolini's Italy Embraced Hitler's Anti-Semitism, for example. Part of this is no doubt related to the expulsion of Jews from the many parts of the Italian peninsula that had been ruled by the Spain).

After the US closed its doors to Jews -- the quotas were set by the racist policies embedded in US immigration laws written in the 1920s and in force until the Johnson administration -- Jews were admitted to other countries in North America, most notably Mexico.

 

[tyrodtom]

More open immigration would have only helped the Jews well enough off to be able to leave their homes and build up their lives again in another country.

That takes a lot of money or a lot of outside help.

My own family sponsored a refugee family from Germany, in the late 30's.
From what I've been told ( that was about 10 years before I was born) that wasn't a easy, or popular thing to do in that era.

 

[pbehn]

As a Brit I reserve the right to call out my nation on its historical errors. But I apologise for going OT and if my post triggers you. I'll say no more.

Let's go back to Bomber Command. If we went with leaflets instead of bombs to help the Poles and Jews based on the 1940 report from Polish resistance, what would they say? What did the Brits know in 1940 or 1941? What about 1943 or 44, would a leaflet drop be of any use?

Auschwitz as a target is one thing, de railing your own thread with nonsense about Rothschilds in 1917 is another. Nothing triggers me more that a prat prattling about Rothschilds and then saying I am triggered. Its an aviation forum, stick to aviation.

 

[Admiral Beez]

Nothing triggers me more that....

It's a discussion on bombing Auschwitz granted, but I see no issue with folks sharing allegories or personal stories that expand upon the matter or offer contemporaneous context. We'll return to the core topic soon enough. To me that's a conversation, not a derailment as you suggest. Even you're taking us to surprising and off topic places, such as sharing your personal emotional triggers. Anyway, if you feel you must have the final word on the matter, the soapbox is yours, I'll take us back to aviation.

 

[Admiral Beez]

if the camps were bombed, cances are that any prisoners that escaped would be killed on sight, reprisals would be stepped up and additional prisoners would be used to repair infrastructure as well as any aircrew shot down during the missions(s) would suffer (as they already did late-war) at the hands of the civilians.

Some would willingly take their chances, but I see your point. What about destroying the railways and means to get to the camps? Train busting is more a Fighter Command job, but until the Wallies have a foothold in Europe this needs to be Bomber Command. But level bombers can't hit anything with precision. Perhaps Mosquitos?

 

[WARSPITER]

Mosquitoes ? Not in 1940.

 

[buffnut453]

Some would willingly take their chances, but I see your point. What about destroying the railways and means to get to the camps? Train busting is more a Fighter Command job, but until the Wallies have a foothold in Europe this needs to be Bomber Command. But level bombers can't hit anything with precision. Perhaps Mosquitos?

Firstly, totally cutting a railway is hard to do because repairing them isn't actually very tricky....remove the old rails, haul in some ballast to make the rail bed, lay new tracks and you're off to the races. Yes, it would have diverted resources from repairing other important infrastructure components but that's just a question of priorities and availability of resources which, in the timeframe in question, weren't really a problem.

Even if you could destroy the railways, the Nazis would simply march the victims to the camps...and shoot any that refused. A mentality that force-marched 80,000 Allied POWs across hundreds of miles in the winter of 1944-45 would have no qualms about forcing so-called "untermensch" to walk a few miles to get past a broken stretch of railway line.