Two very important things in the story of Auschwitz and the Allied response to Auschwitz happen in April 1944.
First, on April 7, 1944, two Slovakian Jews, who had been prisoners in Auschwitz
for nearly 2 years at that point, successfully organized a brilliant and daring escape from Birkenau,
from an area that was a construction site of a new section at Birkenau,
which they understood was going to be the area that would receive Hungarian Jews in the very near future.
As these two escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler, later described it,
the SS guards to this construction site were discussing the imminent arrival of Hungarian Salami
- in other words, Jews from Hungary who were going to be killed.
And, after all, Hungary had just been occupied by the German armed forces a few weeks before this,
on March 19, 1944.
Vrba and Wetzler escaped. They made their way, gradually, towards Slovakia.
They arrived in Bratislava not long after their escape, within a couple of weeks.
They found the Jewish community, the leadership in Bratislava,
and they met with the underground group within the Judenrat (the Jewish Council) in Bratislava, Slovakia,
and told them about where they had been and what they had escaped.
They were told to write down a report. They wrote down a detailed 30-page report in Slovak,
which was then translated into Hungarian and into German,
sent to Hungary in order to warn the Hungarian Jews of their imminent deportation to Auschwitz,
and sent in German to neutral sources in Switzerland,
with the request to pass the report on to Jewish leaders in the West and to Allied leaders in the West.
The report arrived in the West in June 1944.
Parallel to their escape from Birkenau, the American Army air force, stationed in Italy since the fall of 1943,
began photographing from the air over the area of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The aerial photographs were part of the preparation of the Western Allies
to bomb significant military targets that were only a few kilometers from the death camp of Birkenau itself.
In the area known as "Buna", an IG Farben plant that was being constructed and near completion by the Germans
in order to produce synthetic oil and synthetic rubber for the German war effort.
The Allies continued to photograph from the air several more times
over the course of the spring and summer and early fall of 1944,
and following on those aerial photographs, the Allies sent out several bombing missions to bomb in the area.
The bombers were not very successful
in terms of destroying this labor installation and industrial installation,
but, in the course of flying over the area,
the Allies also photographed the death camp from the air a number of times.
The aerial photographs of Birkenau that we know today were actually taken then,
in the course of spring-summer 1944, under the auspices of the American army air force.
However, they were not printed and really understood for more than 30 years after that.
What happened in all this story? When the report of Vrba and Wetzler, the two escapees from Auschwitz,
reached the West via Switzerland in mid-June 1944,
the report arrived together with a request to do two things:
that the Allies bomb the rail lines leading from Hungary in the direction of Auschwitz,
and that the Allies bomb Birkenau itself and destroy the gas chamber and crematoria complexes.
The Allied response to these requests, which were in the report,
and which also came from many Jewish leaders in the West
and in the Zionist movement in Palestine at the time,
The response was three things:
First of all, the Allies said: technically it was impossible.
The camp that was being described was beyond the range of Allied bombers at that time.
The second thing they argued was that such a bombing mission could not really successfully pinpoint
the gas chamber-crematoria complexes. And, therefore, bombing the camp was not really feasible,
because it would not really put the murder installations out of commission,
and would rather run a very high risk of killing the inmates
- which, of course, was not an Allied interest.
In addition to that, bombing the rail lines towards Auschwitz, the Allies argued, was not effective.
Their experience with bombing rail lines during the course of the war until that point
had been rather ineffective.
And they themselves had largely stopped bombing rail lines, except in very rare cases.
Therefore, they said, the bombing was not going to be effective, It would be a symbolic act.
The Allies don't engage in symbolic acts. The Allies said that, if they want to rescue Jews,
the only way to rescue the Jews was to speed up the victory.
And then they would rescue the Jews and everybody else who needed rescue.
Therefore, the Allies argued - this is the third point - the only way to really bring about rescue through victory
obligated the Allies to devote all of their energies to the war effort.
And then they came up with two slogans that related to these last two points:
"No diversion from the war effort" and "Rescue through victory".
That was the only way to do things. And, therefore, the sooner they win,
because they're putting all their energies into the war effort,
the sooner they will be able to rescue the Jews in Birkenau and the Jews everywhere else,
and anyone who needs to be rescued.
When we look at this Allied analysis, as presented to the Jews and to repeated requests to bomb Birkenau,
- the last request was in November 1944, and the response was the same -
when we look at the Allied analysis of the situation, first of all, we know that, technically,
it was possible, because they did bomb the area.
They even bombed the death camp by mistake once,
when they dropped the bombs too soon on the flyover on the way to that labor installation known as Buna.
So, technically, it was possible.
Were the Allies lying when they said it was not possible, when we know that it was possible,
because they were actually doing it?
I would argue that no, it was not a lie. It was, rather, a reflection of disorganization and ineptitude.
The people arguing that it was technically impossible
did not realize that the camp that they were bombing was in exactly the same place.
That's what it seems from the documentation.
The other two arguments are more difficult to deal with,
especially in light of the fact that,
at the very same time that the request to bomb Auschwitz was reaching the Allies,
there was another request that reached the Allies from the same part of the world:
the Polish Underground was planning an uprising in Warsaw.
As the Red Army was advancing towards Warsaw, and was about to push the Germans out of Warsaw,
the armed Polish Underground in Poland decided
that they were going to have a rebellion against the Germans on their own.
They expected that the Red Army would not intervene, and their expectation was accurate.
That's exactly what happened.
And therefore, what they wanted to do was to liberate their capital on their own
as a symbolic act of liberating their own country on their own,
and not having the Soviet regime liberate/conquer Warsaw,
and then enter a power vacuum and take over the country.
Understanding that the Soviets were not going to intervene on behalf of the Poles,
the Poles turned to the British and the Americans and asked for some kind of assistance for their uprising.
The Americans and the British responded very sympathetically to the Poles,
and their sympathetic response was based upon a number of considerations.
The first consideration was moral:
Poland was the first country that had been occupied at the beginning of World War II, in September 1939.
They had suffered terribly, and, indeed, the German occupation of Poland ravaged Poland,
and millions of people suffered, and many were killed, so there was sympathy for the Poles.
And, at the same time, there was also a political calculation:
the Western Allies also understood that the Soviets were not going to intervene on behalf of the Poles.
And, therefore, it was a Western Allied interest that the Poles should know who their friends are after the war.
And, of course, the Poles knew who their friends were. They just took a long time to do something about it.
So what did the Western Allies do?
They parachuted to the Poles in Warsaw, with unmanned parachutes,
all sorts of military supplies, except for weaponry:
radio equipment, medical equipment, uniforms, and things like that.
When they did that, their estimate, the British military intelligence estimate, was that as much as 90%
of all the materiel that was dropped by these unmanned parachutes to the Poles would never reach the Poles.
And much of that materiel would actually not only not reach the Poles, but reach the Germans.
In other words, it would be counterproductive.
Yet, for those moral and geopolitical reasons, the Western Allies decided
that they were going to give this aid to the Poles.
And, of course, this, then, raises the question: Why for the Poles - "yes", and for the Jews in Birkenau - "no"?
There are many reasons. It is a complex story, and I want to raise only a few of those reasons
that seem to point to why the Allies were more positive to the Poles and less to the Jews at this time.
The first point that anyone might raise is, of course, anti-Semitism.
And, of course, there was some anti-Semitism among Allied leaders,
more of the Western-style civic/civil anti-Semitism,
the kind that says: "I would rather my son or daughter didn't marry one of those Jews.
I don't want too many in my neighborhood. They shouldn't join my golf club".
But not the kind of anti-Semitism that found joy in the murder of the Jews,
or any kind of agreement with the Nazis - quite the contrary.
It was an anti-Semitism that was much more subdued,
and it did not really influence Allied policy in the sense of any kind of negative policy towards the Jews.
If the anti-Semitism influenced Allied policy-making,
perhaps it was on the level of not taking the Jews as seriously as they might have taken them otherwise,
had there not been that element. But it's really only one of many elements, and not the major element.
One of the important elements, though, is what I've already mentioned:
and that is: who the Poles were.
Poland was a country, and even during the Cold War,
and in the division of Europe between the two blocs, the Western bloc and the Communist bloc,
Poland was a country, and it was going to remain a country, with all that this entails:
a government, diplomacy, economics, an armed force, and so on.
Which meant that they were a geopolitical unit that needed to be taken into account for future reference.
The Jews, at this time, were nothing.
They had no country, they had no economy, they had no army.
What they were was a tiny minority, ever tinier by the moment, scattered all over,
who had absolutely no political or other significance in the world,
other than the sympathy that people might have felt because they were being killed.
And, therefore, the Jews, in offering nothing in the postwar equation,
did not need to be taken into account in the wartime equation, at least not in geopolitics.
In addition to that, there was an element of the Allies, and you see this particularly with Churchill,
that refused to play the game by the Nazi rules.
In the eyes of Churchill and Roosevelt,
it was very clear that this war was not just a war over territory and natural resources, and things like that.
This was a war to rescue the world from absolute evil, and Nazism, for them, was absolute evil.
And the only way to go about this war was to insist on a complete and unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany
and an absolute defeat.
Otherwise, it would be a disaster for the world.
And if the Nazis had singled out the Jews as being different from other human beings,
and different in a negative way,
the last thing that the Allies, who viewed the world - ostensibly - through humanist lenses:
"All human beings are equal".
The Allies could not play the Nazi game,
and, as they understood it, they were not going to stoop to single out the Jews the way the Nazis did.
The fact that the Nazis were singling the Jews out in any way,
and murdering them based on the way they singled them out,
seems to have escaped the Allies in this kind of thinking.
In a sense, we might say these are the limits of humanist thinking.
But there is another issue. There are many more, but there is one more that I would raise,
and that's the issue of just what the Allies actually understood about Auschwitz,
when they got this information and the request for the bombing.
What did they understand about the camp?
What did they understand about what the Nazis called the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question"?
And here I'd want to wrap it up with one more story, and the story relates to the Polish courier Jan Karski,
who had left Poland in October 1942 and made his way to Great Britain
in order to bring information about what was happening in Poland
- first of all, to his own government, the Polish government-in-exile in London,
and, in addition to that, to the Western Allies -
the British government and American diplomats in Britain with whom he met in order to pass on information.
In the course of his mission, he also passed on information about the Jews.
He had met with Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, he had visited the Warsaw Ghetto,
he had been snuck into a camp and had seen the horrors of the camp,
and he came as an eyewitness, as well as a hearsay witness.
In the end, he didn't return to Poland for a long time,
because the Germans had discovered his secret identity, and would have been able to trace him had he returned.
And he became an employee of the spokespersons department of the Polish government-in-exile.
He traveled to the United States,
and, in the summer of 1943, he met with the Jewish justice of the American Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter,
in the offices of the Polish ambassador in Washington, in July 1943.
And Frankfurter, when he met with Karski
- and now it's already more than 8 months since Karski had arrived in the West -
Frankfurter, when he met with Karski, asked him to tell him the story of the Jews.
He said: "I know all about World War II. I am Roosevelt's friend.
I'm privy to all the secrets about the war. I probably know more than you know.
But the Jews: How do they look? What do they say? How do they feel? What do they need?"
And Karski, as he told the story many years later, said that, by the time he had met Frankfurter,
so many different audiences, such a wide variety of audiences, had asked him about the Jews,
that he had learned which aspects of the story were most important to them,
and he had boiled it down to 16 or 17 minutes.
He launched into that story with Frankfurter.
As he told the story to Frankfurter, Frankfurter became very agitated,
began pacing back and forth across the room.
Karski finished his story, and Frankfurter kept pacing back and forth across the room
for at least 2 more minutes of this very tense silence.
And, finally, Frankfurter stopped pacing, turned to Karski, looked him right in the eye, and said to him:
"When a man like me talks to a man like you, he must be perfectly candid. Young man, I cannot believe you."
And Karski and the Polish ambassador were taken aback. And the Polish ambassador intervened and said:
"But, Felix, how can you say that? My government stands behind every word this man has said.
How can you call him a liar?"
And Frankfuter said: "Oh no, I didn't call him a liar. I merely meant to say that I am unable to believe him."
And it is that element - "unable to believe" - after all, the Holocaust was an unprecedented event.
The "unable to believe" is one of those factors, one of many factors that went into play
in determining the way the Allies reacted to the Holocaust in general,
and to the case of bombing Auschwitz in particular.
When we look at Allied generals, Allied leaders, and their reactions to the liberation of camps in 1945,
we see the shock that they expressed, the immediate, spontaneous, genuine shock and horror
that they expressed when they saw the camps.
And that, too, is a reflection of their not quite understanding what was being said to them.
Even if, intellectually, something had registered, they didn't really quite understand.
And in that element, Frankfurter and Karski, we have another part of understanding the Allies.