Holocaust-US did not do enough

It seems you don't understand the difference between strategic bombers and ground attack planes.

Bombs from a strategic bomber statistically landed at least 800 meters (or something like that, I don't remember) from the point of aim.
But a ground attack plane (exaggerating a little) could have inserted a bomb through a window despite a mass of anti-aircraft fire.
Not without a reason, the Germans called the Il-2 flying death.

And no, death chambers weren't 300 feet long and they were partially underground anyway.

And prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau didn't leave the camp, the majority of them worked inside the camp, the others were quarantined there.
And they had lots of families there.
BIIb was a sector for Jewish families.
BIIe was a sector for Romani families.
BIIf was a hospital - directly in front of the gas chambers.

 

Auschwitz (the red dot) was a major railway junction, 4! railway lines led to it:


And there were numerous lines between Auschwitz and Hungary (Budapest). Here only the main railway lines are shown (the Jews were mostly sent through Kośice):

 

The camp. Gas chambers are KII, KII, KIV, KV.
The nearest prisoners' barracks were about 100 meters from them.
Many prisoners worked in the D sector, between gas chambers.
BIa, BIb were sectors for women.

 

They say well the Americans bombed a nearby target, but its enormous size is never mentioned. It was 3.5 kilometers long! In black below:

 

Michael Burleigh covers the case at some length in Moral Combat - I reproduced his conclusion, that the controversy has been promoted with the aim of playing Americna guilt.
The British did consider bombing Auschwitz in December 1940 at the request of the Polish government when the camp held around 200 Polish political prisoners. They turned the idea down on practical grounds. The Nazi executions of the Jews were known by 1942. The British considered reprisal raids - and rejected the idea, at least partially because it would have appeared to give credit to the Nazi view that the allied war aims were to promote Jewish interests.(*) It would also have had repercussions on the treatment of allied PW. The significance of Aushwitz was underestimated. Photographs from the bombing of the Birkenau synthetic oil plant did capture the camp from the air, but nothing was identified as "gas chambers" it was just a hutted camp.

In principle the Soviets had good reasons to take action . A couple of million of Holocaust victims were Soviet citizens. They had the capability to do something. But they did not.

* Even without direct reprisals, many Germans attributed the attacks on their cities as retribution for the way that the Germans had treated the Jews.

 

I still don't see how bombing alone would have stopped the killings. Railway junctions can be repaired, camps replaced, or the whole site moved to somewhere more convenient.

lots of those Hungarian jews were pitched alive into firepits, so even if by some miracle you could hit the gas chambers and nothing else, the killing would have gone on.

If stopping the killing was the perceived reason for bombing, then no wonder no bombs fell. Bombing could not shut down the greater majority of factory space that it hit. The factories themselves either diversified into many different sites, or went underground.

So, how does bombing alone stop the killing from moving elsewhere?

 

good call..for many reasons
..they bombed Peenemunde and the Germans just moved to safer areas
..we bombed Schweinfurt, and the Germans adjusted
etc

 

Bombing accuracy was terrible. The average circular error in 1943 was 1,200 feet, meaning that only 16 percent of the bombs fell within 1,000 feet of the aiming point.
..
The limited yield of the bombs added to the problem. A 500-pound bomb, standard for precision missions after 1943, had a lethal radius of only 60 to 90 feet. It dug a crater just two feet deep and nine feet wide. With bombing accuracy measured in hundreds of feet, it took a great many bombs to get the job done.
..
AAF bombing accuracy improved. By 1945, Eighth Air Force was operating at much lower altitudes and was putting up to 60 percent of its bombs within 1,000 feet of the aiming point, almost four times better than in the dark days of 1943.
..
The bombardier looked through the telescope of the bombsight to find the target somewhere ahead, then made adjustments to compensate for the effects of wind drift and the speed of the airplane. He then fixed the target in the crosshairs, and flew the airplane to the automatically calculated release point by the link from his bombsight to the autopilot.
..
Historian Stephen L. McFarland has explained the geometry of it, using the example of a B-17 flying at 160 mph at 23,000 feet and dropping a 600-pound bomb. The bomb was released at a distance, measured on the ground, of 8,875 feet from the target. It was in flight for 38 seconds. If the speed calculated for the airplane was off by two mph and the altitude wrong by 25 feet, that made a difference of 115 feet in where the bomb would land.

 

This picture shows the gas chambers in Auschwitz and their size better.

 

..they said the same idiotic thing about the Rwandan/Serbian/etc genocide--the US is always to blame for something
..do a basic search--there are many links

 

You wanna try the short online course I am enduring/enjoying Empire - Online Course
Its about the controversies of the British Empire - or why every thing that ever happened is out fault. If I am absent from this forum it will be because I am correcting misunderstandings in their comments and discussion... .

 

And when we actually go out and do something, we are accused of Imperialism.

 

Great response. Exactly to the point. End the war, end the problem. I was wondering when somebody was going to post this.

 

The Catholic Church also were not helpful when it came to helping Jewish immigration. In fact they turned a blind eye to much of what happened during the Final Solution, and then after the War they setup and maintained the famous Ratlines that allowed the most notorious Nazi War Criminals to immigrate to South America using European Red Cross Passports.

 

In the immediate pre war period the Nazi plan had been to deport all the Jews to a reservation well away from Germany and abandon them so that they could die presumably from illness and starvation. There was significant discussion as to where this reservation could be located. Eventually Madagascar was hit upon. However the failure to subdue Britain and the continued existence of British naval superiority meant that this plan had to be abandoned and thoughts of the 'Final Solution' began to be developed.
US diplomatic cables held by the Office of the Historian and publicly available show that the White House was well aware of the Madagascar plan and FDR was prepared to back it in principle but thought that the reservation should be in Mozambique and Portugal would need to be paid compensation.
This can only have served to encourage the Third Reich to think that they could get away with ethnic cleansing/genocide.

 

Typical Churchillian nonsense. It is code for allowing WSC to order major changes to plans on a whim at the last minute. I would think twice about this as part of your signature!

 

The quote is Winston talking about writing a book...