Teaching With Documents, Volume 2

Contents:

Correspondence Urging Bombing of Auschwitz During World War II

When students confront the horrors of the Holocaust, they often question the Allies’ failure to bomb the notorious concentration and death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau during World War II. These camps were part of a system of hundreds of slave labor camps and six main death camps established by the Nazis as part of their policies for "inferior" races. By the end of the war, Nazi racism led to the death of approximately six million Jewish men, women, and children (about two-thirds of all European Jews), a large number of whom died at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

In 1944 John W Pehle, Executive Director of the U.S. War Refugee Board, sent a forceful appeal to Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy urging the bombing of railroads and buildings in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. McCloy’s response presented the arguments for the War Department’s decision not to bomb the camps. That correspondence is featured in this article.

Discussion about potential Allied military strikes against the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps and others must be predicated on what was known about the camps, when it was known, and by whom. Accounts of the Holocaust filtered out of Nazi-occupied Europe from eyewitnesses who served in the German military or had escaped from the camps. In his 1979 Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture entitled "The First News of the Holocaust," Professor Walter Laqueur documented through selected sources that evidence of the Holocaust was known in Europe in 1941 and worldwide in 1942. British newspapers published the first reports of systematic massacres in the London Daily Telegraph on June 25 and 30, 1942, indicating that between 700,000 and one million Jews had already been killed, many by poison gas. The Daily Telegraph articles were the basis of the first U.S. reports published in the New York Times on June 30 and July 2, 1942.

As the ghastly news spread, it was difficult to convince people that the reports were true. Such cruelty was almost impossible to comprehend. After the war ended, when the "Wannsee Protocol" that outlined the "final solution" became known, the Nazi plot to eradicate the Jewish population in Europe was clear to see. Their plan to exterminate millions of Gypsies, Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and others seen as racially inferior also became known, but not before millions were killed.

Why were the reports not fully believed? Why were rescue attempts not made? Professor Laqueur argued that the initial isolated reports did not create an "overall picture" that could be understood. He reasoned that people may have thought that

perhaps the atrocities were, after all, only sporadic? Perhaps they would be limited to the area occupied after June 21, 1941? Perhaps the Nazis would stop; perhaps they wanted to use able-bodied Jews for the war effort? By mid-1942 it should have been clear that this was not the case. But there still was widespread reluctance to accept the stark truth, simply because murder on such a scale was unprecedented .... It cannot be repeated too often that the fact that a message had been conveyed and was published does not mean that it had registered.

When Pehle wrote McCloy in 1944, the U.S. Government had been aware of the existence of the camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau since at least the fall of 1942, but it did not view their immediate destruction or disruption as a higher priority than the ruination of Germany’s industry and ability to wage war. There is much debate today about what could have, or should have, been done to destroy the camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the featured document, McCloy states the official position as presented in 1944that victory over Germany would be the surest and swiftest means to end the deaths in the camps. When U.S. troops liberated various concentration camps in Germany and Austria, they were horrified to find those places of atrocity and the skeletal survivors of those dark days.

The Pehle-McCloy correspondence dated November 8, 1944, and November 18, 1944, is found at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, NY, a Presidential library administered by the National Archives and Records Administration.

HOLOCAUST EDUCATION RESOURCES

The personal account of a liberator describing his initial view of a camp provides the first glimpse of the Holocaust for visitors at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Teachers interested in educational materials or tours of the museum should write or call Education Department, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place. SW, Washington, DC 20024; 202-314-7810.

In addition to the records related to Holocaust topics available for research at the National Archives facilities, a 17-poster set entitled "Holocaust: The Documentary Evidence, a related booklet with the same tide, and a 123-page hardcover guide entitled The Holocaust, Israel, and the Jews: Motion Pictures in the National Archives are available for purchase. For ordering information, call Product Sales at 1-800-234-8861.

TEACHING ACTIVITIES

1. Distribute copies of the documents to your students, and begin a class discussion with the following questions:

a. What type of documents are these?
b. What are the dates of the documents?
c. Who created the documents?
d. Who received the documents?

2. Ask your students to explain why Pehle felt it was an appropriate time to "urge the destruction" of the camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

3. Ask your students to compare and contrast the limitations of conventional weaponry during World War II as described in McCloy’s letter with the "high-tech" ordnance of the present day. Discuss what military response to the camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau may have occurred if today’s armaments had been available to the Allies at the beginning of World War II.

4. Ask your class to propose a plan to address the existence of the concentration and extermination camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau in response to Peel’s letter.

5. Ask several students to research the issue of what the Allies knew about concentration camps and extermination camps and when they knew it. Then lead the class in a discussion to evaluate the action (or inaction) taken by the Allies in response to the camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

6. Select students to prepare an exhibit for your classroom or the school library on the Holocaust. Students should contact the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for assistance.

7. Holocaust survivors are sometimes willing to discuss their experience with students so that firsthand knowledge of the atrocities will be passed on to future generations. Arrange for a school assembly or classroom presentation by a Holocaust survivor.


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Chicago: "Correspondence Urging Bombing of Auschwitz During World War II," Teaching With Documents, Volume 2 in Teaching With Documents: Using Primary Sources from the National Archives, ed. Wynell B. Schamel (Washington, D.C.: National Archives Trust Fund Board for the National Archives and Records Administration and National Council for the Social Studies, 1998), 202–207. Original Sources, accessed March 29, 2024, http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=7SEM8FTHRACWFVH.

MLA: . "Correspondence Urging Bombing of Auschwitz During World War II." Teaching With Documents, Volume 2, in Teaching With Documents: Using Primary Sources from the National Archives, edited by Wynell B. Schamel, Vol. 2, Washington, D.C., National Archives Trust Fund Board for the National Archives and Records Administration and National Council for the Social Studies, 1998, pp. 202–207. Original Sources. 29 Mar. 2024. http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=7SEM8FTHRACWFVH.

Harvard: , 'Correspondence Urging Bombing of Auschwitz During World War II' in Teaching With Documents, Volume 2. cited in 1998, Teaching With Documents: Using Primary Sources from the National Archives, ed. , National Archives Trust Fund Board for the National Archives and Records Administration and National Council for the Social Studies, Washington, D.C., pp.202–207. Original Sources, retrieved 29 March 2024, from http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=7SEM8FTHRACWFVH.