To the Editor:
I find David S. Wyman’s article, “Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed” [May], quite correct and the result of very thorough research. Something more might have been said about the attitude of the State Department and the British government. It was my feeling at the time that it was they who stood behind the War Department and largely inspired its negative stand. But possibly these influences were exercised in the course of oral conversations and could not be traced in the written material available to Mr. Wyman.
Benjamin Akzin
Jerusalem, Israel
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To the Editor:
David S. Wyman’s “Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed” is a significant contribution to Holocaust studies. Mr. Wyman refutes English and American assertions that the bombing of Auschwitz would have presented “undeniable technical difficulties” and proves that the annihilation plants could have been destroyed without too much difficulty. I witnessed the December 1944 bombing in which the SS hospital barracks at Birkenau, about a mile from the crematoria, was hit. At that time I was a member of the prisoner-maintenance squad at Auschwitz, and the SS man who guarded us was killed in the raid.
But the essence of the problem remains: why weren’t the killing installations bombed? The answer, in my opinion, is to be found in the social and political sphere, especially in the wavering reactions of the representatives of some Jewish organizations and their insufficient activity in convincing the Allied governments to declare bombing the death factories at Auschwitz a war priority. . . .
Erich Kulka
Yad Vashem
Jerusalem, Israel
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To the Editor:
“That the terrible plight of the Jews did not merit any active response remains a source of wonder, and a lesson, even today.” So ends David S. Wyman’s exposé of United States government indifference to the fate of Jews in Auschwitz. His final words—“even today”—are especially cogent because the more things change, the more they remain the same.
I submit that for the past thirty years the U.S. government has been indifferent to the ever-looming destruction of Israel. It may be difficult for American Jews, as Americans, to perceive this callousnous on the part of their own government; it is easier for other Jews to see it. Relentlessly, determinedly, inflexibly, the State Department has sought, after every Israeli victory (remember the dismay among State Department spokesmen after the Six-Day War?), to return Israel to Square 1 and so give the Arabs another chance at politicide. . . . This policy makes it inevitable that the Arabs will eventually win, and then the U.S. government will express shock and dismay, list all that it had done for Israel, and heave a sigh of relief; it will be so much easier to win the Arab world away from Russia without the Israeli complication. . . .
S. Levin
Johannesburg, South Africa
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David S. Wyman writes:
As Benjamin Akzin surmised, I found no documentation indicating that either the State Department or the British government was involved in the War Department’s refusal to look seriously into the bombing requests. I did learn, as I noted in my article, that the British government opposed any inclusion of Allied military forces in rescue efforts. My forthcoming book on America’s response to the Holocaust will deal at length with the State Department’s role and to some extent with Great Britain’s role in the failure to rescue Jews during World War II. As Mr. Akzin implies, the policies of both were abysmal.
Erich Kulka raises the complex question of why the killing installations weren’t bombed. On one level, the answer is that the War Department had determined, long before the bombing requests came, that it would have as little as possible to do with rescuing Jews and other refugees. This policy appears to have taken shape in 1943, when the invasion of Italy opened clear opportunities for rescue. It solidified in late January 1944, as sketched in my article. But Mr. Kulka is quite right in looking at the question from another perspective; namely, why wasn’t sufficient pressure put on the Roosevelt administration to force it to order the bombing? This is part of a broader question: why weren’t public pressures strong enough to force the Roosevelt government to institute a timely, large-scale rescue campaign? (The War Refugee Board was established only in January 1944 and was restricted in its scope and activities.) The leadership in building pressures for rescue would presumably have come from the Jewish organizations. They did supply leadership, but Mr. Kulka is correct that their actions were too often “wavering” and “insufficient.” Most of the groups did not assign top priority to rescue. Worse, the history of American Jewish organizations during the Holocaust years is one of disunity, frequent infighting, and at times obstruction of one another’s efforts. Despite this, Jewish organizations did provide some direction and Jewish popular pressure did grow, though not as quickly or as strongly as it might have.
Unfortunately, Jewish activity for rescue kindled very little response in non-Jewish Americans. For the most part, America’s Christian leaders turned away from the issue. Lacking leadership from their churches and their government, most American non-Jews knew little of the Holocaust and cared little. The press never featured the extermination story, and many people who did hear of it dismissed it as atrocity propaganda. In addition, the high level of American anti-Semitism at that time harmed the chances for the development of concern for the trapped Jews of Europe. Thus, a broad current of American public pressure for action to save the Jews was not forthcoming.
