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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
Rather a coincidence but this appeared today: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1195036610030&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull
