A very old debate with no clear winner has been reopened with the release of the RAF’s reconnaissance photos of Auschwitz; the argument has been raging at LGF, and now it has erupted in Germany as well, with the appearance of an article in the top German newspaper Bild: RAF bombers ‘ignored Auschwitz’.

“Why were the concentration camp thugs not bombed?” a headline in yesterday’s Bild asked, above an aerial photograph of Auschwitz in southern Poland, where about one million people - mainly Jews - were murdered.

The numerous wartime photos of Auschwitz taken by RAF reconnaissance pilots have been published on the internet by The Aerial Reconnaissance Archive based at Keele University.

The pictures show thick black smoke rising from crematoriums connected to the gas chambers. Other pictures show smoke billowing from mass funeral pyres. In one, from the summer of 1944, individuals can be made out as they line up for a roll-call.

“It’s certain that the British collators [of the pictures] knew of the existence of the concentration camps at that time,” the tabloid newspaper wrote. “Why therefore were the extermination camps not destroyed after the reconnaissance planes of the Britons and Americans photographed them in such detail? At the very least, the railway tracks on which the Jews were transported into the extermination camp?”

In the past, Bild has denounced the “indiscriminate” nature of Allied attacks against German targets and has quoted historians effectively branding Winston Churchill a war criminal for the wartime bombing strategy.

UPDATE: Some might say—and yes, I’d be one of them—that Germany had forever forfeited its right to hold opinions on matters such as these.

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