Allies knowledge of Holocaust

[CTNana]

Please forgive me if this is in the wrong place.

I have just read Morse's post in "What are You Reading at the Moment", Official Secrets by Richard Breitman and have to confess that I have yet to summon up the courage to read much about the holocaust. He does prompt me to ask two questions though:-

Firstly, when did Churchill make the speech from which he quotes, or more importantly when do you think the Allies really did know what was happening? Or for that matter the Church?

Secondly have people really suggested that the allies should have bombed the camps? I just cringe at the thought that this was viewed (presumably with hindsight) as an humanitarian alternative, besides not appreciating how big a PR coup it would have been for Hitler.

I'd be really interested to hear all of your views.

[Kyt]

[quote=CTNana;6262]Firstly, when did Churchill make the speech from which he quotes, or more importantly when do you think the Allies really did know what was happening? Or for that matter the Church?[quote]

Morse's quote comes Churchill's statement made after he had seen the Belsen liberation photographs in April 1945.

However, Morse would be able to confirm this from his book, Churchill and Allies were made aware of the general situation of the Jews as far back as 1941. Chucrchill made the following speech in November 1941:

"None has suffered more cruelly than the Jew the unspeakable evils wrought upon the bodies and spirits of men by Hitler and his vile regime. The Jew bore the brunt of the Nazi's first onslaught upon the citadels of freedom and human dignity. He has borne and continued to bear a burden that might have seen beyond endurance. He has not allowed it to break his spirit; he has never lost the will to resist. Assuredly in the day of victory the Jew's suffering and his part in the struggle will not be forgotten. "

By the middle of 1942 he stated in stronger terms:

"the most bestial, the most squalid and the most senseless of all their offences, namely, the mass deportation of Jews from France, with the pitiful horrors attendant upon the calculated and final scattering of families. This tragedy fills me with astonishment as well as with indignation, and it illustrates as nothing else can the utter degradation of the Nazi nature and theme, and degradation of all who lend themselves to its unnatural and perverted passions."

However, as the the article in this link highlights, the Allies were able to intercept some specific German messages that alluded to the Jews not just being deprted but killed.

And the Jewish Council also provided proof to the Allies from eye-witnesses as to what was actually happening in some of the camps:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/...t/UKShoah.html

Secondly have people really suggested that the allies should have bombed the camps? I just cringe at the thought that this was viewed (presumably with hindsight) as an humanitarian alternative, besides not appreciating how big a PR coup it would have been for Hitler.

I'd be really interested to hear all of your views.

The possibility of bombing either the camps or other facilities linked to the camps is rather contentious, as shown by these two articles:

Why didn't the Allies bomb Auschwitz?

Could The Allies Have Bombed Auschwitz-Birkenau?

However, personally, I not convinced by either the arguement that the camps could be be reached or that the situation of the Jews could have been made worse as an act of revenge.

Some of the camps were accessible by bombers, and indeed, some war industiries attached to some of the camps were bombed.

As to making the position of the Jews even worse? How much worse could it have got?

As the above links show, the Allies knew that the Jews were being killed, so those who argue that my position is based on hindsight are mistaken. It wasn't just a case that the Allies thought the camps were concentration camps where the Jews were isolated, and so didn't want to inflict unnecessary casualties. They kew the exterminations were happening. The only questionwas the degree and extenet of the murdering

[spidge]

I have always thought long and hard on this and heard pro and anti views on how it could have been done and what the outcome would have been.

I do think that it could have been worse however not rated in death outcomes.

Leave them they die at best in the chambers or shot, at worst from diseases like typhus or just plain starvation.

Bombing of the camps would have caused more deaths. Even if the bombing had been precise and the inmates escaped, (if they were physically able) they would have been shot or just returned to their own camp or another nearby.

The bombing of nearby military targets near the camps would and was justified later however in 42/43 it had to be a token effort. The Nazis would have found another way or taken another option to continue their genocide.

Hindsight does come into the equation because we do not know what those other options would have been.

The only way to relieve their suffering was to defeat their tormentors and that was achieved in 1945. This also went for POW's in known Japanese prisoner of war camps.

[Kyt]

I wouldn't have said bombing the camps but certainly the facilities leading up to them, or even just as part of the overall disruption plan for the German war effort.

What is interesting is the fact that the trians were still being commendered and used for the holocaust when they were urgently needed to move troops and equpment by the armed services.

If not halting the killings in the camps, they would certainly have slowed them down. If the Jews could not be transported to the camps then they would have to have had to have been left in the ghettos. OK, so the conditions there were terrible, and the Germans would have carried on killing them. But it would have been slower, and the bombings wouldn't have affected the Allied war effort that much. So the due process of liberation may have caught up and over run the Jews in the ghettos rather than camps, or in the pits.

[morse1001]

There was some plans to bomb the camps but as most of them were deep in poland or other countries outside the range of the bombers then it would have been difficult. The only ones to have done it was the Russians and that was POW camp where Stalins son was held.

But to carry on to Kyts last point, at its height, over half a million germans and others were invovled in the holocaust and that kept the away from the front line.

[spidge]

Originally Posted by Kyt

I wouldn't have said bombing the camps but certainly the facilities leading up to them, or even just as part of the overall disruption plan for the German war effort.

What is interesting is the fact that the trians were still being commendered and used for the holocaust when they were urgently needed to move troops and equpment by the armed services.

If not halting the killings in the camps, they would certainly have slowed them down. If the Jews could not be transported to the camps then they would have to have had to have been left in the ghettos. OK, so the conditions there were terrible, and the Germans would have carried on killing them. But it would have been slower, and the bombings wouldn't have affected the Allied war effort that much. So the due process of liberation may have caught up and over run the Jews in the ghettos rather than camps, or in the pits.

I do agree that most of what you say is plausible however the commandeering of rail stock and the troops involved showed that they would stop at nothing to achieve their goal of obliteration of the Jewish race.

The "safe haven" that was the ghetto would have eventually disappeared and corralling and mass slaughter would have eventually occurred.

These killers were men & women who ate drank and slept the final solution and had no limitations placed on their actions.

[Kyt]

Originally Posted by morse1001

at its height, over half a million germans and others were invovled in the holocaust and that kept the away from the front line.

That statistic is quite a moral conundrom. If we had to ask people whether they would have preferred those germans to be on the frontlines or involved in the holocaust, what would they say? On the one hand they wouldn't be killing Jews, but on the other, those extra men (even if we were take it as read that only a minority would be capable of combat) could/would have made a difference on the frontlines, impeeding the Allied victory.

Originally Posted by spidge

I do agree that most of what you say is plausible however the commandeering of rail stock and the troops involved showed that they would stop at nothing to achieve their goal of obliteration of the Jewish race.

The "safe haven" that was the ghetto would have eventually disappeared and corralling and mass slaughter would have eventually occurred.

These killers were men & women who ate drank and slept the final solution and had no limitations placed on their actions.

I agree that the way that holocaust developed shows that the Nazis were willing to sacrifice victory for completing their "task".

However, the any delays in transportation, deportation to the camps and/or the emptying of the ghettos would have more of a difference to the surviving Jews than inaction. For every day's delay, the Nazi defeat came closer.

[Kyt]

Rather a coincidence but this appeared today:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satelli...cle%2FShowFull

A senior Zionist official stationed in Switzerland during World War II was likely the first person to receive information from a German source regarding the plan for the systematic extermination of Europe's Jews, according to a new book published by Yad Vashem.

Chaim Pazner, head of the Jewish Agency's Palestine Office in Geneva, immediately forwarded the information to senior British officials and to Jewish officials in British-ruled Palestine, and the report reached the top echelons of the British government, according to the book, Chaim Pazner - The Man Who Knew.

The book - written in Hebrew by Menahem Michelson, with contributions from historian Sir Martin Gilbert - describes a report from a German source in the summer of 1942 about the Final Solution and the British government's refusal to make that information public.

On July 29, 1942, Pazner received a coded message in a telephone call from his former economics professor in Basel, Edgar Salin, telling him that he had received information of "supreme importance." The economics professor, who had converted to Christianity years earlier, was friends with Dr. Arthur Zommer, a German officer and fellow economist who was opposed to the Nazi regime and who had been leaking confidential information about Hitler's plans to his Swiss friend.

Pazner immediately took the night train from Geneva to Basel, arriving in the Swiss city on the morning of July 30, the book relates.

Salin then shared with him the information he had received from the German officer.

"In the East, there are camps being prepared which will be used to destroy all the Jews of Europe and many of the Soviet war prisoners by gas," the message read. "Please pass this message on immediately to Churchill and Roosevelt personally."

"If the BBC broadcasts a daily warning to the Germans not to operate the gas chambers maybe they will not operate them, because the criminals are doing everything they can to prevent the German people from finding out what they are planning to do and it is clear that they will also do this," the terse but bone-chilling message stated.

Salin read out the information to Pazner, instructing him to copy it down word by word.

"Who gave you this information?" a stunned Pazner asked.

"An impeccable source," the professor answered. "The source is German."

Previous reports about the Germans' intentions and the mass killings had already filtered out from Polish intelligence or from Jewish sources, but this information was the first to come directly from Germany itself, said Prof. David Bankier, head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem.

"The information was about a plan, but there was not [just] a plan but implementation," Bankier said.

Pazner then passed on the information to a Swiss Jewish leader, Dr. Benjamin Sagalowitz, who was a friend of the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, Dr. Gerhart Riegner, the book relates.

Next, Pazner rushed the information to Jewish Agency officials in British-ruled Jerusalem.

Then, on August 2, 1942, he met with a British intelligence officer in Geneva who went by the name of Victor Farell, and who worked in the British Passport Control Office in Switzerland. Pazner implored him to pass on the information to Churchill as the German source had requested.

The British official said he would do so, but the report was never broadcast on the BBC, the book recounts.

During a follow-up meeting, the British official assured an anxious Pazner, who had been eagerly waiting to hear the BBC radio broadcasts, that he had indeed passed on the message and that it had reached Churchill, and would again recommend it be broadcast on the BBC, adding that there was only so much he could do.

But still the report - and the warnings to the Germans not to gas the Jews - was not broadcast.

Pazner died in 1981.

"Throughout his life my father always carried this sadness that nothing was done with this information," recalled Avi Pazner, veteran Foreign Ministry diplomat. "He had passed on a message which could have stopped the Holocaust, but nothing was done," he said.

Riegner, the WJC official in Geneva, had been previously credited with being the first to notify the West of the Nazis' plan for the systematic extermination of the Jews in what has become known as the Riegner telegram.

Riegner had received his own information about the Nazi plan to kill all the Jews of Europe during the first days of August that same summer, from a prominent German industrialist, later identified as Eduard Schulte, according to the definitive The Abandonment of the Jews by noted Holocaust historian David S. Wyman.

The Israeli author of the new book said this week that while it had been assumed that Pazner was the first to receive information from a German source of the Nazi plans for the mass extermination of European Jewry, there was no conclusive proof of this, noting that such documentation was never found in the British archives, with wartime messages routinely intercepted by the Gestapo.

In the end, neither Pazner's nor Riegner's message were able to stop the German killing machine.

Riegner's message, which reached the US in August 1942, was not released to the press until late November, at the request of the State Department who viewed the reports with total disbelief and who had asked American Jewish leaders not to publicize the information until it was confirmed.

Even after the belated State Department confirmation, the Nazi extermination of the Jews of Europe continued unabated for another two-and-a-half years.

[Kyt]

Why wasn't Auschwitz bombed? - Haaretz - Israel News