Should we have bombed Auschwitz?

[candy]

Watching PBS and I didn't know it had even been considered in 1944.

My first thought was "God,no!", but an interview with a woman who was interned said they wanted it bombed so they would have had a chance to escape.They heard the bombers heading for an I.G.Farben plant and they were hoping they would be bombed at the camp.

Could they have directed the bombs to the gas chambers? How many innocents would have been killed?

War is hell!!!!!!!!

[A-Schwarzenegger]

1. You just bombed the Lounge back to rrrrrrreality.

[evlbstrd]

4. I was going to try a well reasoned answer,

But I'm just not up to it.
My first thought would be, "Be careful what you wish for."

[candy]

6. I never am sure where to post things----

if I screwed up,forgive me.

[A-Schwarzenegger]

10. No, no, just observing, not criticizing.

People can/will respond as they will or not. Peace.

[HawkerHurricane]

2. Bombing accuracy was not the greatest...

assuming your talking about American daylight bombing.

For a daylight raid, they would select a 'aim point' where the bombs would be aimed for. They expected 90% of the bombs dropped to be within 1 mile of that point. So, with a small raid with 100 planes (Boeing B-17) Flying Fortressess, each carrying ten 1000lb 'blockbuster' bombs, you could expect 900 bombs to land within a mile of the gas chambers... and this was called "Precision Bombing".

Night bombing, done the Royal Air Force was even less accurate... but British planes carried more bombs...

Such a raid would be dropping high explosives all over the area of the camp... and the concrete and steel 'gas chambers' would be more likely to survive than the wooden barracks.

A better suggestion (at the time) would be to hit the railroad yards near the camp... less chance of hitting the camp (and inmates), better chance of disrupting the operations... The reason this wasn't done was because it was thought that knocking out the rail yards there would give the Germans no reason to keep the inmates alive.

[elshiva]

3. War is hell, all right! This may not have been a great idea, though,

how could you tell the innocent that the bombs would come, so they would escape?

[Spider Jerusalem]

5. My answer is "no".

The B-17's (USAAF) and Avro Lancasters (RAF) used for the bombing campaign in Europe weren't exactly capable of precision bombing (high altitude, at night, etc), so a lot of the prisoners would have died anyway, and the Nazis would have just sent their prisoners to Treblinka or Belsen or one of the other camps. Not to mention that diversion of bombers to non-priority targets, instead of focus on munitions plants, bridges, railways, and so on might have had the unintended consequence of perhaps lengthening the war in Europe, to some extent. Unfortunate as it is, the best thing the Allies could do to stop the brutal inhumanity of Hitler's regime was to win the war as quickly as possible.

[Jara sang]

7. I.G Farben is Bayer

Everytime you get a headache a Nazi gets a dollar.

[Kathy in Cambridge]

8. Ask your neighbors in Newton what they think

I think the anti-semitism in the US prevented Roosevelt from taking action-despite the fact that Morgenthau and other Jewish leader close to the administration pressured him.

[CatWoman]

9. You know, I watched that special, and wondered the same thing

I still don't have an answer.

But I like Hawker Hurricane's response.

[AngryAmish]

11. I'm against Auschwitz

It think it was bad.