re: #277 Sergey Romanov

I don’t know why what the bombers knew is relevant. We’re talking of state-level failure.

The crematoria are visible without magnification, and the aerial photos are only relevant to the issue of how to locate the bombing targets. Of course no one can see merely from the photos that Birkenau was an extermination camp - that was only known from intelligence and from witnesses. Witnesses’ testimony was indispensable - the escapees from Auschwitz could have pointed to the part of the camp where the gas chambers and the pyre pits were, they could have asked people like Vrba, Wetzler, Mordowicz, Rosin.

The Soviet failure is really analogous to the Allied one. To repeat, the Allies took time and resources to bomb the buna plant at Monowitz, but didn’t even try anything at Birkenau.

And here we come to it at last: The production of synthetic oil was a point the Allies were focused on, while for a number of reasons they were less focused on the Nazi death camps. Other matters were seen to have greater priority for the use of bombers, and the witnesses who knew what was really going on didn’t get to tell the actual decision makers. No one with the authority to do so felt a need to pound the table and say “Get this done!” and without that sort of pressure, bombing Auschwitz was not going to happen. Without that pressure, it was seen as not worth the risks to bombers and aircrews for what it might achieve.