This is very interesting. Churchill & Roosevelt knew about Auchwitz in 1944. Why did they decide to bomb German cities and towns instead of preventing trains reaching Auschwitz?
2006-10-12 13:39:01 · 11 answers · asked by Mrs Mole 2 in Arts & Humanities ➔ History
They were not a military target. Bombing them would not have shortened the war by one hour. Simple as that.
2006-10-12 15:45:12 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 2⤊ 0⤋
You are on the verge of falling into every amateur historian's trap - judging the actions of the past by the standards of the present. Yes, nowadays we might judge several million Jewish lives more valuable than several hundred thousand combat soldiers' lives, but - even if your suggestion about saving them was true, and it isn't - you could not criticise leaders of sixty years ago for judging it their way in their own time.
The first reason the suggestion does not work is because you cannot say "these Jews died because the railway lines were not bombed". These Jews died because of a monstrous collective blindness and madness of the German people, allowing Hitler to gain power and do what he wanted. You absolutely cannot and must not try to say that it was somehow Churchill's and Roosevelt's fault instead.
The second reason is that the concentration camps were on the other side of Berlin, towards the Polish border. It was only very late in the war that the allies had bombers powerful enough to reach Berlin, never mind beyond it.
2006-10-12 21:28:59 · answer #2 · answered by bh8153 7 · 2⤊ 1⤋
A. The Nazis just death-marched Jews to the camps when there was no other transportation. They dispatched troops to do just that even when they were needed at the front.
B. The Nazis were very efficient at restoring bombed railway lines to service. Often they could have line running the day after a bombing raid-they had lots of expendable slave labour after all.
C. The Allies had a policy of total warfare that meant that every bomb was targeted in such a way to bring surrender ASAP. If it came down to preventing civilian deaths or destroying the Nazi capacity to wage war, they took the latter every time.
2006-10-12 16:49:07 · answer #3 · answered by michinoku2001 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Probably because most of the people going to Auschwitz were already there by 1944. The only thing bombing the railroad lines would have accomplished at that point was cutting off the little amount of food the prisoners were getting.
2006-10-12 13:43:57 · answer #4 · answered by pacerslover31 3 · 3⤊ 0⤋
They knew Auschwitz was there. They would have had no idea what it was though. Could you imagine what the place would have looked like? There would have been other concentration camps around that would have been bigger with more evidence of human rights abuses than the death camps. They just didn't understand. Nobody but the top echelons of Nazism did.
That, and like others have said, the bombers then were not like what we have today. They had low range, were poorly guided, and dropped extremely inaccurate bombs. To knock out the railways would have been extremely difficult and therefore seen as a waste of resources when they needed to knock out munitions factories and military bases.
2006-10-12 18:00:31 · answer #5 · answered by Johnny Canuck 4 · 2⤊ 1⤋
The bombs were very innacurate and they didn't want to kill the people in the camps. Yeah the people there would have been happy with the bombing BUT it would have made things look horriable. We would have been risking innocent lives to try to prevent killings. Kind of a catch-22 for them. So they didn't want to risk it. If they had had todays "smart" bombs they proably would have tried BUT in those days the bombs were terriable. You simply dropped the bomb and hoped it went where you wanted. The wind and everything else was a factor.
2006-10-12 13:43:45 · answer #6 · answered by Anonymous · 5⤊ 0⤋
It was also extreme range for the bombers of the time. When Churchill wanted to help the Warsaw uprising of 1944 he asked leave to land for refualling on the other side in Soviet held territory (and was refused).
2006-10-12 14:22:05 · answer #7 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
As horrible as it sounds, there were other targets of greater military importance. The camps were a huge drain of military personnel and resources for the Nazis, and bombing troops or factories made the war end faster than the rail lines to the camps.
2006-10-12 13:49:18 · answer #8 · answered by adphllps 5 · 4⤊ 0⤋
They had far more important targets to bomb... factories, ports, V-2 launch facilities.
2006-10-12 16:48:39 · answer #9 · answered by nonjoo 2 · 1⤊ 0⤋
In a war you need to focus resources on important and specific targets of the enemy!!!!!!!
2006-10-12 14:10:05 · answer #10 · answered by Ali.D 4 · 1⤊ 0⤋