Why didn't the allies do anything about the Holocaust..?

Question

In 1944, the allies knew about Auschwitz but why didn't they do anything e.g. bomb it?

Simple explanation please!
Lorna

Answer 1

bombing it was out of the question, for a start there several times the number of jews in there as there was nazis. auschwitz was eventually liberated, but thats not as easy as it sounds, the nazis wouldnt just let them in, hence why it took so long to liberate

Answer 2

Lorna, love, there is no "simple" explanation.
While the Western Allies did know SOME information about the death camps in 1944 - it was somewhat suspect (for that time). The info they had was that which had been smuggled out by Zionist groups who had taken some pictures and drawn some maps - that sort of thing. NOTHING concrete. Many rumors were circulating by late-'44, but no PROOF.
Those who reference a generalized anti-semitism are correct. Even we fine, upstanding folks in the West were (are) known to be anti-semitic to one degree or another. Our leaders - Roosevelt and Churchill weren't about to bet the farm on a rumor involving some dead Jews..
The Russians are a different story. The Einsatzengruppen (sp?) had been at it in the East for years. They most likely hated the Jews more than the Nazis and figured they'd let the Germans take care of it for them.
There was no such thing as precision bombing in '44-'45. We would have ended up killing more Jews than the Nazis. My best option would be bombing the railheads. If we had totally screwed up their transportation system, it might have helped. We did our best when it came to military targets. The primary reason Auschwitz was placed where it was was because of the rail lines already running to there.
But again, no precision bombing. Many civilians and Jews would have been killed had we bombed the Camp - see the Dresden reference.
Even if we had leveled Auschwitz, those b's would have had it up and running again in a week - using slave labor to rebuild it.
Murdering Jews was the Nazi's highest priority. It's one of the primary reasons they lost the War.

Answer 3

I guess leaving Germany in a pile of rubble and winning the war wasn't good enough?

I think maybe you're asking, why didn't we jump into the war sooner to stop the holocaust???

Attacking continental Europe and winning earlier than June 1944 was not possible. Attacking sooner would've meant tactical defeats and prolonged the war at least another year. The US strategy of building up an overwhelming force was the strategy in WWII.

In 1943, the US & western allies were landing in Sicily and making their way up the boot of Italy. Building up the force that attacked the Atlantic Wall required a June 1944 attack date.

Several setbacks in 1944 also prolonged the war, inluding the little gamble known as the Battle of the Bulge.

"why didn't we conquer the German's sooner?" ....that question is a little out of context, as the Allies went about the invasion of the Atlantic Wall and the Eastern Front as fast as they could...although i see that the Red Army stopped just short of Warsaw during the Polish uprising, causing more Poles to die than there should have.

Some people wonder why the railways leading into Auswitz weren't bombed. I have to believe that the extent of the state-sponsored genocide was not known and that the few reports that did get out were too fantastic to believe. Targeting railways only stopped them for a few days, remember, there were no smart bombs in WWII. High level bombing raids rarely hit their targets (some say only 1 in 5 bombs were even close). This was why carpet bombing had such high collateral deaths...look at Dresden. The railways were up and running within a week of the firebombing of dresden, but the civilians paid the high price for inaccurate bombing.

Answer 4

Bombing Auschwitz would have resulted in even more dead Jews. That was never an option. We didn't have the accuracy of bombs that we have today.

Bombing the rail lines going in and out of Auschwitz would have kept more Jews from being delivered, but it was likely they would have been abandoned to die in cattle cars. That happened anyway in a few cases.

If they couldn't be loaded into cars at all, they would have ended up in mass graves. Some of those are still being found today.

The only solution was a land attack so powerful that they could sweep all the Germans away and hold the territory after. That's what the Allies did.

Answer 5

Bombing Auschwitz would definately have saved thousands of lives.
The only reason the nazis were able to kill so many jews (6 million) was their incredible logistical abilities. Auschwitz wasn't built in a day - it took many years and a lot of work before the camp got as terribly effective as it was.
Had it been bombed, the killing of the jews would have been severely hampered, especially the killing of the Hungarian jews (1 million dead, 95% of the entire jewish population, of which the large majority died in Auschwitz).
Auschwitz was the nazis biggest and most effecient death-camp and other camps did not have the capacity to take over from Auschwitz if it had been put out of action. The nazis would have been forced to slow down the deportations and thousands of lives would have been spared.

But this is easy to see and say in retrospect. Things were not as clear back in 1944. And both politics and (misguided/hypocritical) ethics played a major role in the decision not to bomb. As well as the practical difficulties, of course.

The theory of the western allies conspiring against the jews by not bombing Auschwitz is ridiculous. But the Russians (Stalin - who was as much a mass-murderer as any of the nazis) were not above such behaviour. Antisemitism was very widespread in Russia at that time. And they did a very similar thing when the Polish resistance movement rebelled against the nazis in Warsaw in 1944.
Russian troops waited outside the city for many weeks while crack troops from the SS crushed the polish freedom fighters and only moved in when the battle was all but over and after heavy political pressure from the western allies.
The russian logic: If the germans killed off the polish underground forces the russians wouldn't have to worry about them themselves when they occupied the country after the war. Cynical as hell.

Answer 6

It's important to keep in mind that death camps were a generally accepted phenomenon in the histories of most of the nations involved. France was still maintaining one in the Carib well into WW II, calling it a prison. The UK, within living memory also maintained a few. As did the Soviets, a plethora.

What made the German holocaust unique for the time was the fact it focused on people of Jewish and Gypsy ancestral background, as opposed to political activity, criminal behavior, and whatnot.

But the Catholic world shouldn't even have found that objectionably. They'd burned the last Jew under the Inquisition only 150 years earlier.

Human history's a bloody place. Selective horror over our behavior because it happens to involve a particular ethnic group might be self-satisfying and produce a nice feeling of guilt, but it doesn't help much in the understanding of human history.

Answer 7

Um..ok. At the first part of the war there wasn't a lot known about the concentration camps. If they had bombed the camps they would have been killing thousands upon thousands of innocent ppl that were trapped there. The only way for the allies to free the camps was to do exactly what they and get into Germany and remove Hitler so that they could free those that were imprisoned.

Answer 8

There seem to be varied views on this subject. Evidently there was talk about bombing Auschwitz but there was a moral issue of killing innocent and possibly healthy civilians. The Jews didn't want to be put in the spotlight and the military said they couldn't afford to go there and didn't have bombing accuracy for such a target.

Answer 9

There was some anti-semitism on the Allied side also.
Many American, Brits, and Russians wrongly blamed part of the War on the Jewish population. The Allied forces also were not having much success until the last two years of the war.
If they made a commando strike deep in German territory to free the prisoners, how would they have gotten them out? The military prisoners were more of concern and they were not able to help them until the end of the War.

Answer 10

i wouldn't say that they did nothing. You'll piss off a lot of vets with a remark like that. Don't be lazy and do your research. Google search the subject from a variety of points of view.You should be aware of the fact that the Nazi's were pimping one of their one visible slaughterhouse as a"resort".They fooled a lot of people because it had art and exercise activities. Those images were what they were showing to to the world so few in other countries were suspicious. It's only recently that they've found large mass graves on the property. I was told that people really didn't understand the level of destruction until it was too late because that scumbag Hitler rarely allowed anyone to survive the experience of the hell that he created. He touted his Hitler youth group trying to make it's members think it was something good like the Boy Scouts. A lot of people were fooled and we only know more now because of the stories from the remaining survivors of that tragedy.