re: #256 Sergey Romanov

Again, “it’s hard” is not a reason, it’s an excuse. If it’s hard, try harder. The point is, no nation actively tried to save those Jews who were in immediate danger, and that’s a counter-point to Beck’s argument. I’m not saying that the Allies look like bad guys because of this. I understand the intricacies of the situation, and that the Allied perspective was marred by incomplete information, fog of war, limited resources and whatnot. Still, Beck is dead wrong.

It’s true that, strictly speaking, the Soviets stopped the Holocaust with the Allied help (if Beck wants to ascribe the “stopping” to anyone), but it wasn’t their intention - nor the Allied intention. Their intention was to win the war. They thought that whatever massacres there were would be stopped by winning, and formally speaking that’s correct, but…

There is, moreover, the fact that no one at RAF Bomber Command or at US 8th or 20th Air forces (the organizations that controlled the strategic bomber campaign) knew what Auschwitz really was. The intelligence received regarding the murder of the Jews was not passed to the officers who controlled the bombers for reasons of information compartmentalization. And the aerial photographs that with modern magnification show the locations of the crematoria at Auschwitz did not show those details under the magnification available in 1944. The bomber officers did not support bombing Auschwitz in large part because they did not know what the situation really was.

I guess my point is that saying “bombing raids were denied” was a bit too simplistic for me, given my recent reading. It was much more complicated than that.

Burleigh makes his best point when asking why the USSR did not bomb Auschwitz. It was far closer to Soviet bases and they did have bombers with the range for the strike.