The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should It Have Been Attempted?

The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should It Have Been Attempted? Edited by Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. Pp. xvii+350. $29.95.

This collection of essays and documents on the oft-requested but never-conducted bombing of Auschwitz originated in a 1993 symposium hosted by the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Participants included prominent military and diplomatic historians with particular expertise in the history of strategic bombing and the Holocaust. In addition to expanded versions of the conference papers, the volume includes a collection of wartime primary documents and excellent introductory and intercalary overviews by editors Michael Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum.

As the editors and several contributors note, much of the historical debate on this emotional question originated in 1978 with an article and book by David Wyman. Wyman, who was invited but declined to contribute to The Bombing of Auschwitz, argued that the Allies knew about the horror occurring at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex by 1944, that the genocide there could have been seriously disrupted by aerial bombing in the summer and fall of 1944, and that the failure of the Allies to bomb the facility stemmed from a profound indifference to the plight of Jews being murdered there. Wyman's thesis went largely uncontested—and unengaged—until the resurgence of historical interest in the history of strategic bombing in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Much of the book pursues Wyman's thesis by focusing on several technical but increasingly hypothetical questions: (1) Could and should the Allies have known by late 1944 what was happening at Auschwitz? (2) If so, could Allied bombing have seriously disrupted the genocide at the complex? (3) If so, given the costs and likely results of a bombing initiative, should the Allies have attempted it?

There is growing historical evidence that the answer to question (1) is affirmative; cryptanalytic, photographic, and other intelligence from as early as 1942 contained considerable evidence of Auschwitz's dark business. In fact, as Gerhard Weinberg points out, the Allied code-breaking effort was at times steeped in knowledge of the genocide, since the Germans occasionally used extermination statistics from the camps (encrypted in a medium-grade cipher that had been broken by the British) as random-number seeds for their Enigma machines. Nevertheless, there is no clear consensus among the contributors on whether this evidence should have alerted Allied military planners to the magnitude of the horror. Much of the evidence was indirect, and Allied analysts were poorly trained and equipped to recognize what are now telltale signs.

All of the book's contributors acknowledge one crucial and germane peril of doing this sort of counterfactual history: the temptation to transplant modern sensibilities into the past. For us, the Holocaust is the single greatest failure of human civilization in the twentieth century. This assessment can make it difficult to appreciate how good and intelligent people might have failed to apprehend what to modern eyes is hideously obvious.

Question (2) is in many ways the most contentious. Here, too, the debate centers on largely technical issues: the narrow window in which bombing could have occurred (from the summer of 1944, when British and American bomber forces with sufficient range became available, to November 1944, when the Nazis started destroying the camp in an attempt to cover their crimes); the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of aerial bombing, both by heavy bombers and smaller attack aircraft; the precise layout of the complex (the gas chambers and crematoria) and the number and types of bombing raids necessary to have disrupted it seriously; the proximity of the prisoner quarters, and how many innocents would have been killed or injured; the state of German air defenses at the site; and other demands on Allied bomber forces in the wider war against Germany.

For most of the contributors, the answer to question (2) determines the answer...