Auschwitz, Bombing of

In April 1944, the two Auschwitz inmates Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped from the camp. They managed to flee to Slovakia, where they wrote down in May 1944 what they claimed was unfolding at Auschwitz. This report was sent in various versions and languages to several Jewish personalities. At the same time, the German authorities in Hungary started deporting the Hungarian Jews, many if not most of them via the Auschwitz Camp.

Since Vrba and Wetzler claimed that Jews were being mass murdered at Auschwitz, Jewish pressure groups concluded that the Hungarian Jews were brought to Auschwitz to be killed. They lobbied with the British and U.S. government to bomb the railway line leading to Auschwitz, and the Auschwitz camps themselves.

The U.S. government consistently and steadfastly refused to bomb targets not conducive to supporting the main goal of winning the war. While Britain’s premier minister Winston Churchill agreed to have the camp bombarded, the Royal Air Force refused to carry out such a mission, claiming technical difficulties.

Allied airplanes could reach the Auschwitz region, beginning with the establishment of secure Allied airfields in Italy in early 1944. Reconnaissance flights were conducted regularly. The earliest known photos of the Auschwitz Camp were taken in May 1944, and from then on with some regularity every month. Furthermore, the British Government received all the intelligence information of the Polish underground with regularity. Therefore, the Allied governments and air forces knew exactly what was going on at Auschwitz.

Already in late summer of 1943, the chairman of the Allied Joint Intelligence Committee asserted their conviction that gas-chamber propaganda was untrue, and had been invented by Polish and Jewish agitators to rile up the Allies. (See the section on the United Kingdom in the entry on propaganda.)

Allied air photos of the Auschwitz camps confirmed this impression. These photos showed a peaceful camp. They refuted atrocity propaganda spread by the Polish and Jewish underground about huge open-air incinerations, smoking crematoria chimneys, and the entire area being blanketed in smoke. Therefore, the Allied air forces’ decisions were correct to bomb the nearby I.G. Farben’s BUNA factories at Monowitz instead, which were essential for Germany’s war effort, and to not endanger the lives of innocent inmates in this forced-labor camp.

It goes without saying that no representative of the Allied governments back then and even today could ever admit that they considered the Polish and Jewish gas-chamber propaganda to be phony. As a result, Jewish organizations and orthodox Holocaust promoters accuse the Allies to this day of not having done anything to stop the slaughter at Auschwitz.

(See the section about Auschwitz in the entry on air photos.)