With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, one theory has included the bombing of the largest gas chambers of the Nazi regime -- Auschwitz -- as one of the possible efforts that would've saved lives. Clearly, Allied bombings had a significant impact on the eventual winning of World War II, but some theorize that had the gas chambers been actually bombed, the more than million people who lost their lives in these execution rooms may have been saved.
A fleet of American bombers dropped more than one thousand bombs on the Auschwitz factory areas, on August 20, 1944. A few weeks later, on September 13th, the U.S. bombers returned and hit the factory areas again. Stray bombs also hit an SS barracks, a slave labor workshop, and the railroad tracks leading to the gas chambers just five miles away. Similar raids were conducted on December 18th, 26th, and January 19th.
Yet, consistently Allied forces refused proposals to bomb the death camps and the gas chambers themselves.
Roosevelt's War Department continuously rebuffed proposals by Jewish groups to bomb the execution camps. However, at the time, it was felt that this would use valuable resources that could be better used elsewhere, and that few lives would truly be saved. Of course, resources had been diverted for other more frivolous reasons, such as General George Patton's sending of American troops to Austria to rescue 150 prized Lipizzaner horses.
In addition, Auschwitz survivors tell tales of how bombings of the factories and other areas did not fill them with fear, instead they longed for the day when the bombs fell on the chambers of death. Yet, this was just one more failure in a complicated web of failures, according to Medoff.
By bombing the gas chambers, the Allied forces would have bought the Jewish people being held there more time -- time to hopefully facilitate the end of the war and their release. Instead of worrying about art treasures and rare horses, efforts should've been made to do whatever possible to stop the mass genocide been perpetrated by the Nazis.
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Rafael Medoff, "New Perspectives on How America, and American Jewry, Responded to the Holocaust," American Jewish History 84 (1996), 257.
