The Auschwitz Volunteer

Stupid question, but wouldn't the bombing have injured or killed a good number of the captives there?

Near the end the camp was murdering something like 60K people a day. Bombing the camp would have created chaos and an opportunity for people to escape.

Yeah, some innocent people would undoubtedly been killed, but the odds of them surviving the war weren’t exactly high to begin with.

Whilst there is some evidence that the Allied governments knew what was up with the attempted genocide, Allied commanders were shocked to find the extent of what was going on in the camps, so the purpose of the camps wasn't common knowledge.

Bombing a camp where you know 60K people are dying a day is very different to bombing a camp where most folk just think people are being detained/enslaved.

It depends upon what government you're talking about. There was a Nazi sympathizer who was in charge of preparing reports for FDR about what was going on in places like the camps and he sanitized things before they got to FDR. Pilecki's reports, however, were sent directly to the Polish government in exile and the Brits. Reportedly, they didn't believe them as the accounts were too horrific to believe.

The Soviets liberated the first of the death camps in July of '44. I don't know if they shared what they found there with the other Allies, but it was certainly bad enough to indicate that somebody needed to do something.



It'd be another six months before they liberated Auschwitz. US forces liberated Buchenwald in April of '45. At this point, the location of other death camps was well-known by the Allies thanks to aerial photography. None of them were bombed in response. Sure, the war would be over in Europe in about a month, but that doesn't change the fact that the camps were committing mass murder basically up until the point that Allied forces showed up at the gates. One can argue that prior to April of '45, the Allies didn't have enough witnesses to actually believe the horrors that were being unleashed in Nazi territory. After that, well...

Even assuming that Allied commanders did know the death rate ...

One, bombing accuracy was crappy. They probably could have figured out where the headquarters buildings were, and theoretically, a bombing campaign that targeted the admin buildings and the fences could minimize prisoner deaths while creating maximum chaos and chances to escape. But no bomber had the precision to actually pull that off.

Two, if they had good enough intel to know that 60,000 people a day were being killed, they also would have known that the inmates were weakened, starving, and in no condition to escape. (And escape to where? Outside the camp was still Nazi-occupied territory.)

I don't know what discussions the Allied leaders had about this, but liberating the camps with ground troops was likely the only way to do any good.

Cause I saw the Wannseekonferenz mentioned up-thread: there's a German movie from 2022 that, as far as I know, has been internationally sold as "The Conference"... I really recommend it to anyone interested in that subject. If you somehow have a chance to stream it and don't mind a talk-centered chamber play, give it a shot. Really highlights the role that
ambitious career burocrats (as opposed to your stereotypical mad comic book villain) played in the Holocaust and Nazi Germany in general.

This assumes that they would have believed the numbers were they given them. Because it was pretty incomprehensible. Still is, even though we know that it happened and actual numbers might have been higher.

Yet many in the military believed that they actually had this capability. The pickle barrel tales of the Norden bombsight were well-shared, and heartedly embraced by the US military. I assume that you've seen, at least, the movie Patton where Karl Malden as Omar Bradley talks to Patton about his plan for Operation Cobra? That battle is a real interesting read because he was trying with it (the USAAF fucked things up, though) to do what we would consider a fully-modern military campaign. As in, we probably wouldn't think that they would have attempted this something way back when, but they did. Essentially, the plan was to start carpet bombing just far enough in front of staged Allied forces that they wouldn't have to worry about getting hit by shrapnel and could start rolling forward once the bombs started hitting the ground.

Yeah, absolutely no way the Allies could have hit the camps with any kind of precision but they could have seriously fucked things up. And I don't know about you, but even dying by bleeding out from injuries over several hours sounds better than dying by slow starvation over a period of months, to me.

Occupied Poland. And while the Poles were happy to be antisemitic at times, they really hated the fucking Nazis. So much so that the Polish Underground undertook efforts that they knew would result in massive retaliation against the average Pole but this was considered an "acceptable loss" by the leaders. We (in the US) don't think much about the Poles in WWII, but goddamn, when you read what they did (as opposed to what they had to suffer through) during that war, you really get why they're happy to back Ukraine.

People laugh at the Poles for sending horse-mounted calvary against the Nazis when they moved in on September '39, but the guys who saddled up that day knew they were on a suicide mission. Their goal was simply to buy the government enough time to flee to the Allied-controlled territories. Seriously, dude, that's fucking hard-core. You're basically throwing yourself into a literal meat grinder in the hopes that other people will be able to escape and warn the rest of the world. How bleak of a future is that?

No way of knowing what percentage of Poles would have been willing to risk their lives to hid an escapee from a camp (and remember, it wasn't just Jews being sent to those camps, anyone the Nazis didn't like wound up there, so not everyone fleeing from such a thing would have had to worry about falling into the hands of someone who was an antisemite) but some would have been saved.

Define "good." If the Allies bombed the camps in April of '44 and as a direct result of those bombings the same number of people died as died over the subsequent months and the actual liberation of the camps by ground forces, what's been gained by waiting? If more people died a quick, and relatively painless death, than died slowly (and subjected to all kinds of torture) over a longer period of time, what's the better option? And there's the PTSD factor to think of. Which is worse? Spending X amount of time in a concentration camp until such a time as ground forces show up? Or spending less time in one of the camps but having to flee as bombs fall all around you? Again, I don't know, but I can see a case to be made for it being spending less time in such camps.

And if you admit that bombing the camps then was a slightly better option than waiting for ground forces to liberate such camps, what's that mean for the similar kinds of camps we know to exist today in places like North Korea?

^^^I agree with the rest of your post, but I'm not clear that North Korea runs a network of extermination camps.

Can't say that their camps are much better, even if they're not actual death camps.

There's an interesting review on the Amazon web page that @Tuckerfan linked to.

It calls into question the entire story. Sadly, it's not sourced at all so who knows whether it's true or not.