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1942 - 2022

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could have been repaired, the 
damage would have delayed the 
deportations and saved lives.
“[I]t would have helped if 
we had bombed the railroad 
lines leading to Auschwitz. The 
purpose of those rail lines was 
to carry human beings to their 
death, and we might even have 
been able to use long-range 
fighter planes to get down right 
on the tracks and knock them 
out,
” McGovern said. 
Regarding a junction through 
which trains passed on the 
way to Auschwitz, he said: “We 
should have hit that junction 
and disabled it. We should have 
hit the rail lines, even if we had 
to go back several times.
”
It is also important to 
remember that there were 
bridges along those routes, and 
bridges could not be quickly 
repaired. Some of the requests 
put forward by Jewish groups 
at the same time actually 
named bridges that should be 
targeted. Those pleas were no 
secret. On July 10, 1944, the 

Jewish Telegraphic Agency 
reported that recent escapees 
from Auschwitz were urging 
the following: “The crematoria 
in Oswiecim [Auschwitz] and 
Birkenau, easily recognisable 
[sic] by their chimneys and 
watch-towers, as well as the 
main railway lines connect-
ing Slovakia and Carpatho-
Ruthenia with Poland, especial-
ly the bridge at Cop, should be 
bombed.
”

EMPTY EXCUSES
Debating the options for Allied 
action, a commentator in the 
Ken Burns film argues that 
bombing Auschwitz might 
have been a bad idea because 
some of the inmates could have 
been harmed. That argument 
is disingenuous for two rea-
sons. First, the United States 
could have bombed the railway 
lines and bridges to Auschwitz 
without endangering inmates. 
Second, the presence of those 
prisoners was not the reason 
the Allies rejected the bomb-

ing requests; note that they 
bombed those oil factories in 
broad daylight, even though 
slave laborers were likely to 
be there. Likewise, the United 
States bombed a rocket factory 
in the Buchenwald concentra-
tion camp in daylight in August 
1944, even though the workers 
would be there; many were 
indeed killed, but the Allies 
considered the attack to be jus-
tified despite that risk.
Nahum Goldmann, who was 
the Jewish Agency’s represen-
tative in Washington as well 
as co-chairman of the World 
Jewish Congress, repeatedly 
asked U.S. officials to bomb 
Auschwitz as well as the rail-
ways and heard their excuses 
about not wanting to “divert” 
planes from the war effort. 
Three days after Ben-
Gurion’s speech in Jerusalem, 
Ernest Frischer of the Czech 
government-in-exile report-
ed to Goldmann and the 
WJCongress that the Allies had 
been bombing “fuel factories 

… in Oswiecim and Birkenau,
” 
not far from the “extermination 
installations.
” Goldmann point-
ed out that fact to Allied offi-
cials, to no avail. They were, as 
Ben-Gurion put it, not willing 
to even “lift a finger” to rescue 
Jews.
In a recent JTA interview, 
Burns asserted that President 
Roosevelt “could not wave a 
magic wand” but did his best 
to help the Jews during the 
Holocaust. Ben-Gurion, who 
actually lived through those 
days and was an eyewitness to 
Roosevelt’s abandonment of the 
Jews, understood the reality far 
more clearly. 

Rafael Medoff is founding director 

of the David S. Wyman Institute for 

Holocaust Studies and author of 

more than 20 books about Jewish 

history and the Holocaust. Monty N. 

Penkower is Professor Emeritus of 

Modern Jewish History at the Machon 

Lander Graduate School of Jewish 

Studies and author of a five-volume 

study about the rise of the State of 

Israel between the years 1933-1948. 

continued from page 4

