RAF Bomber Command summer 1940, How to bomb Auschwitz?

swampyankee said:

Industrial targets were also pretty hard targets.

Well, the massacre was already happening. At Sobibor, there were rarely more than 600 prisoners in the camp at any one time; 200,000 to 250,000 people were murdered in the time it operated, which was from about May 1942 to Oct 1943, about 520 days. The massacre was already occurring at a rate of 400 to 500 people per day.

It stopped operating when there was a prisoner revolt and mass escape in 1943. About 60 of the 300 prisoners that escaped survived the war, which is a much better survival rate than remaining there. Belzec had about 7 survivors out of the 400,000 to 430,000 Jews who entered the camp.

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Sobibor was an extermination camp covering a few hectares. So was Belzec.There was an uprising at Treblinka, a similar camp. These are not comparable with a massive complex like Auschwitz which covered many square kilometres, excluding all the satellite camps.

There were many survivors from the Auschwitz complex, it did not exist solely as an extermination camp, though it did operate in this capacity.

Who knows what a German reaction to an armed insurrection in the camp would have been? They may have just liquidated the resistance and the barracks from which they came. They may have liquidated the entire camp from which the uprising started. They may have accepted the economic consequences of liquidating the entire complex. The only sure thing is that any insurrection would have been ruthlessly, bloodily and successfully repressed by the Germans.

stona said:

Sobibor was an extermination camp covering a few hectares. So was Belzec.There was an uprising at Treblinka, a similar camp. These are not comparable with a massive complex like Auschwitz which covered many square kilometres, excluding all the satellite camps.

There were many survivors from the Auschwitz complex, it did not exist solely as an extermination camp, though it did operate in this capacity.

Who knows what a German reaction to an armed insurrection in the camp would have been? They may have just liquidated the resistance and the barracks from which they came. They may have liquidated the entire camp from which the uprising started. They may have accepted the economic consequences of liquidating the entire complex. The only sure thing is that any insurrection would have been ruthlessly, bloodily and successfully repressed by the Germans.

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That's the way the Nazi's reacted to any uprising. But they didn't have enough troops on hand at Auschwitz to do it.
The whole idea of a concentration camp was to put the prisoners in one small area so it took a minimum of troops to guard them.

If a strike had aimed at the killing personnel themselves, and not the hardware, I think it would had a better result.
The personnel killed would have to be replaced, and the survivors would have known they were now targets.
Maybe the "final solution" wouldn't seem like such a good idea after all.

Everybody seems to be fixated on the gas chambers, and tracks.
The gas chambers were usually not separated from the inmates by much.
The guard barracks and administration areas were separated at most camps.

If they had decided to just kill everyone by gunfire, a method they'd already tried earlier in the Holocaust and found too slow, and too hard on the killing personnel.; They would have had to get a lot of outside help.
That would take troops from other fronts, and the secret of the "final solution" wouldn't be much of a secret anymore.

tyrodtom said:

That's the way the Nazi's reacted to any uprising. But they didn't have enough troops on hand at Auschwitz to do it.
The whole idea of a concentration camp was to put the prisoners in one small area so it took a minimum of troops to guard them.

If a strike had aimed at the killing personnel themselves, and not the hardware, I think it would had a better result.
The personnel killed would have to be replaced, and the survivors would have known they were now targets.
Maybe the "final solution" wouldn't seem like such a good idea after all.

Everybody seems to be fixated on the gas chambers, and tracks.
The gas chambers were usually not separated from the inmates by much.
The guard barracks and administration areas were separated at most camps.

If they had decided to just kill everyone by gunfire, a method they'd already tried earlier in the Holocaust and found too slow, and too hard on the killing personnel.; They would have had to get a lot of outside help.
That would take troops from other fronts, and the secret of the "final solution" wouldn't be much of a secret anymore.

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All they have to do is cage them in, in the cold, starve them, freeze them to death, cover up the remains later. The Nazis were bastards. It wasn't just the Jews they killed. Nothing could have been done. At least there were a few survivors to populate Israel. The strongest survived. That's why Israel has survived. The survival of the fittest.

tyrodtom said:

Everybody seems to be fixated on the gas chambers, and tracks.

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I had said *if* there were such a bombing raid (or ground action), target the Crematoriums (along with camp admins) because killing prisoners are easy, disposing of whole bodies is labor and time intensive.

With the ovens out of commission, it would create a huge bottleneck in the process, which the later camps were not designed for.

tyrodtom said:

That's the way the Nazi's reacted to any uprising. But they didn't have enough troops on hand at Auschwitz to do it.
The whole idea of a concentration camp was to put the prisoners in one small area so it took a minimum of troops to guard them..

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There were about 3,500 SS personnel at Auschwitz in mid 1944.

We know what happened when there was an uprising at Auschwitz when the Sonderkommando in Birkenau, suspecting a selection supposedly to move some to another camp was actually a selection for execution, attacked the SS.

It started in Crematorium IV and within minutes SS reinforcements arrived and started shooting at any exposed prisoners. One survivor recalled looking into the yard of the crematorium compound and seeing scores of his comrades "lying very still in their blood stained prison uniforms", with SS men firing at anybody who still stirred. By then most of the remaining prisoners, many not involved in the initial attack on the guards, had run across to Crematorium V, hiding inside. SS guards dragged them out, threw them on the ground with other recaptured inmates and shot them all in the back of the neck. An estimated 250 prisoners were killed this way.

About 30 minutes after the initial assault on the guards a second uprising broke out at Crematorium IV. The Sonderkommando there had heard shots and seen smoke rising from Crematorium IV, which the prisoners had set ablaze. Initially they remained calm, but this uprising was provoked when SS guards approached and some Soviet PoWs panicked and pushed a German Kapo into the burning furnace. The Sonderkommando prisoners now joined the Soviets, arming themselves with knives, other tools and hand grenades. They cut a hole in the fence surrounding the compound and about 100 prisoners escaped. The SS hunted them all down. One group were found hiding in a shed in the small town of Rajsko, two miles from the camp. The SS saved their bullets, set the shed on fire and burned them alive.

Reprisals continued for sometime. Any prisoners remotely connected to the uprisings were killed. This included four women who had smuggled explosives into Birkenau.

Not one prisoner had escaped, and at least 600 were slaughtered by the SS. There was a far greater SS presence in and around Auschwitz than at the extermination camps like Sobibor and Treblinka and there were far more elaborate security arrangements.

The uprising had no effect on the rate of killing. Crematorium IV was burned down, but had been out of commission since May 1943 and the SS continued to use other facilities. An estimated 40,000 men, women and children were murdered in a two week spurt after the uprising, including thousands of Jews from Theresienstadt.

Incidentally, when the SS finally abandoned Auschwitz in January 1945 about one hundred of the Sonderkommando prisoners who had survived the uprising were among the tens of thousands forced westwards. By amazing good fortune many of these men survived until liberation.

That's the point...liberation. All these schemes for arming prisoners, bombing rail lines etc. are really pie in the sky. The way to save whoever had survived the horror of the Holocaust and bring and end to the killing was to win the war. Anything else is just fantasy.

GrauGeist said:

With the ovens out of commission, it would create a huge bottleneck in the process, which the later camps were not designed for.

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They would just have used pyres and pits to dispose of the bodies. The crematoria were overwhelmed by the volume of killing when the Hungarian Jews arrived, and this was the solution. We don't have to guess, we know what would have been done in the unlikely event of the destruction of the crematoria.

tyrodtom said:

If they have had any method of immediately killing everybody, they would have already done it.

They went to gas chamber because they had already tried the killing by gunfire.
It wasn't fast enough. Plus not many men could stand to do it day after day.
They didn't have enough men, or schnapps.

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Ive seen a couple documentaries that claimed one of the reasons the Nazis came up with the death camps was that the killing of civilians was as one put it was"unpopular with the regular German troops and many of them refused to do it outright".
I hope that's true,.......that many of the German troops did refuse to commit these atrocities.

Kevin J said:

All they have to do is cage them in, in the cold, starve them, freeze them to death, cover up the remains later. The Nazis were bastards. It wasn't just the Jews they killed. Nothing could have been done. At least there were a few survivors to populate Israel. The strongest survived. That's why Israel has survived. The survival of the fittest.

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Late in the war the Nazi's were digging up many kill sites where the victims were shot and buried, burning the bodies, and crushing what bones were left.
Very labor intensive, and done by inmates.
So labor intensive that not many old kill sites got sanitized.

Once the Nazi's saw the war was very likely going to end not favorable to them, they were very concerned that they needed to destroy the evidence.
Gas chambers , and cremation were the only way dependable enough to get ride of the people, and the evidence of what they had done.

Probably the best way to attack the camps would be finding Hitler's bunker and trying some target practice with Tallboys.

michael rauls said:

Ive seen a couple documentaries that claimed one of the reasons the Nazis came up with the death camps was that the killing of civilians was as one put it was"unpopular with the regular German troops and many of them refused to do it outright".
I hope that's true,.......that many of the German troops did refuse to commit these atrocities.

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According to Hitler's Willing Executioners (a book that has been criticized for problems in research and flaws in methods), German soldiers could get leave from most forms of murdering civilians, unless the civilians were Jews.

I'm certain some percentage of German ground troops were less than willing to be involved in the mass murders. I'm also certai that percentage was very low in SS units

swampyankee said:

Probably the best way to attack the camps would be finding Hitler's bunker and trying some target practice with Tallboys.


According to Hitler's Willing Executioners (a book that has been criticized for problems in research and flaws in methods), German soldiers could get leave from most forms of murdering civilians, unless the civilians were Jews.

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Goldenhagen gives a few verifiable examples of officers and men not participating directly in the murders and suffering no adverse consequences. The point is that most Germans (and others) were happy to do it.

The problem with Goldenhagen is that the police men and units he largely references were not 'ordinary Germans'. That is something beyond the scope of this reply and something those interested might like to look into for themselves. Goldenhagen's book should be read, it makes some good arguments, but it is far from perfect.

Another good book on the subject is Ordinary Men, by Christopher Browning .
It's about Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police who were responsible for mass shooting as well as roundups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942.
You need to read this to understand the mechanics of the Holocaust.
Once the Jews were in the various death camps, and work camps, the manpower requirement was minimum.
But the manpower requirement to gather the Jews from all the small and large communities was considerable.

Don't forget what had to be done with people who could not be transported because they were unfit to travel ( too old, too sick, or too young) They were killed on the spot.
Their executioners weren't always SS Einsatzgruppen.
It was a depressing book to read.

The uprising of the Jewish and other Poles in 1944 certainly caught the Germans by surprise.

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Yes and no help came from the USA and Britain in 1944, just as in 1940 when they let Poland get divided between Nazi and Communist forces. Or in 1945 when they let Europe get divided to Communism. Hitler may have had a stupid pact with Stalin in 1939, but it was surpasssed by Churchill and Roosevelt agreement with Stalin to divide Europe.

It may not be fashionable for an Australian to say it but I think Churchill had a better understanding of the global situation of WW2 than Roosevelt or Hitler, but he did not have the military power to mould things. And yes Stalin played everyone like a boss!

In 1940 Auschwitz as a death camp didn't exist yet. Auschwitz was bombed by 15th AF bombers coming from Italy in Aug. 1944, but they didn't target the death camp but an A.G. Faben synthetic fuel plant nearby. Auschwitz could be bombed but the Allied command, for whatever reasons, did not consider bombing the death camp or the transportation system leading to it, and thus saving Jews as worthwhile.

Jake

taly01 said:

Yes and no help came from the USA and Britain in 1944, just as in 1940 when they let Poland get divided between Nazi and Communist forces. Or in 1945 when they let Europe get divided to Communism. Hitler may have had a stupid pact with Stalin in 1939, but it was surpasssed by Churchill and Roosevelt agreement with Stalin to divide Europe.

It may not be fashionable for an Australian to say it but I think Churchill had a better understanding of the global situation of WW2 than Roosevelt or Hitler, but he did not have the military power to mould things. And yes Stalin played everyone like a boss!

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I think the last paragraph is not entirely true: Churchill had little concern or understanding of the peoples under imperial control of the European powers. While the British were likely not the worst imperial power -- I don't know enough about imperial behavior to say which country was worst (and it certainly varied by time, although it would be hard to imagine one worse than the Congo when it was under Leopold's personal, murderous reign, which should put Leopold's name in the book right next to Pol Pot) -- the colonial authorities were certainly not going to win any prizes for human rights, civil liberties, or judicial equity. Churchill's treatment of independence activists throughout the Empire was little better than Stalin's: indefinite detention, torture, non-judicial punishment, and concentration camps.

Churchill fully understood the aims of Stalin just as he had understood those of Hitler. Britain by the end of WWII was a junior partner in all ways
and could do little about the shaping of post war Europe.

Big Jake said:

In 1940 Auschwitz as a death camp didn't exist yet. Auschwitz was bombed by 15th AF bombers coming from Italy in Aug. 1944, but they didn't target the death camp but an A.G. Faben synthetic fuel plant nearby. Auschwitz could be bombed but the Allied command, for whatever reasons, did not consider bombing the death camp or the transportation system leading to it, and thus saving Jews as worthwhile.

Jake

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The cognitive link between bombing death camps and saving Jews is entirely bogus. As has been pointed out numerous times on this thread, the bulk of exterminations happened in places and timeframes where the Allies lacked the range to attack the camps. Even when the Allies could attack, such raids would not have halted the slaughter - the overall system of systems that was the extermination process was too vast to be interdicted, and bombing accuracy was too poor.

Big Jake said:

Auschwitz could be bombed but the Allied command, for whatever reasons, did not consider bombing the death camp or the transportation system leading to it, and thus saving Jews as worthwhile.

Jake

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Explain to me how bombing the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps could have saved the prisoners, Jewish or otherwise.

You say that the Allies did not consider saving the Jews worthwhile (the vast majority of the victims of the Holocaust were dead July 1944 anyway) which is a facile statement with no evidence to support it at all. The Allies did save many Jews and others, by winning the war.

Big Jake said:

In 1940 Auschwitz as a death camp didn't exist yet. Auschwitz was bombed by 15th AF bombers coming from Italy in Aug. 1944, but they didn't target the death camp but an A.G. Faben synthetic fuel plant nearby. Auschwitz could be bombed but the Allied command, for whatever reasons, did not consider bombing the death camp or the transportation system leading to it, and thus saving Jews as worthwhile.

Jake

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If you want someone to blame then blame the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope for not threatening to excommunicate all Catholic Germans and his church for organising the escape lines for these war criminals to South America.

There were members of the church who were German and organised the escape of Nazis. That much is known. What the motivation was is not
and is not the fault of the church itself.

Are you also going to blame the Pope and the Catholic church for organising the escape of 780,000 jews from Europe during the war ? An independent
and highly credible source puts this figure at 860,000 when adding in escape routes other than those directly set up by the Vatican.

WARSPITER said:

There were members of the church who were German and organised the escape of Nazis. That much is known. What the motivation was is not
and is not the fault of the church itself.

Are you also going to blame the Pope and the Catholic church for organising the escape of 780,000 jews from Europe during the war ? An independent
and highly credible source puts this figure at 860,000 when adding in escape routes other than those directly set up by the Vatican.

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Okay, show me this highly reputable source.