On 4 April 1944 a United States Army Air Force reconnaissance flight flew over the Monowitz industrial complex of the Auschwitz concentration camp on its return from a bombing run on the IG Farben synthetic rubber plant at Heydebreck-Cosel, fifty miles to the north-west. The aircraft was a Lockheed F-5, the photographic version of the P-38 Lightning, of the 60th Reconnaissance Group based at San Severo in southern Italy. The pilot was a twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant from Pennsylvania named Charles Barry. He had been ordered to photograph the IG Farben Buna works at Monowitz as part of the planning for the bombing of the Heydebreck plant; the assignment had not mentioned the Auschwitz concentration camp itself. As his cameras ran during the photographic pass over Monowitz on the return flight, the F-5 happened also to overfly Birkenau, three miles to the west, at an altitude of approximately 27,000 feet. The cameras recorded what was below them. The photographs were developed at the 60th Group’s photographic interpretation unit in Italy three days later. They went into the file. The photographs of the death camp at Birkenau, taken in the precise moment when the Hungarian deportation operation was being planned for May to July 1944, were not examined for the death camp by anyone in the Allied photographic interpretation services. They were filed on the basis of their relevance to the IG Farben target. The photographs sat in the United States Air Force archives until 1979.
What the F-5 had photographed on 4 April 1944, and what subsequent reconnaissance flights between April and August 1944 had photographed in further detail, was the operational reality of Birkenau during the period of its peak killing activity. The photographs showed the four major crematoria, the gas chambers attached to crematoria II and III, the women’s section, the Roma family camp, the men’s quarantine camp, the labour camp, the Birkenau railway ramp, and the rows of barracks. The photographs of August 1944 specifically caught, on the high-resolution prints, columns of prisoners on the path between the disrobing barrack and crematorium II, in the act of being marched to the gas chambers. They caught the smoke from the burning pits where the SS had been forced to burn corpses outside the crematoria during the peak Hungarian deportation period because the crematoria had been unable to handle the volume. They caught the trains parked on the ramp. They caught everything. They were not examined.
The photographic record
The full photographic record of Auschwitz from Allied reconnaissance flights was reconstructed from the Air Force archives in 1978 and 1979 by two American CIA photographic interpreters working in retirement, Dino Brugioni and Robert G. Poirier. The two had been senior figures in the CIA’s photographic interpretation work during the Cold War and had been responsible, among other things, for the analysis of the Cuban missile crisis photographs in October 1962. After their retirement they had taken on the project of finding the Auschwitz reconnaissance photographs. The work took eighteen months. They identified twelve separate reconnaissance missions over the Auschwitz complex between 4 April 1944 and 14 January 1945, undertaken by American and British aircraft for various target-evaluation purposes. The total photographic record came to several hundred individual photographs.
The photographs Brugioni and Poirier identified included missions of 4 April 1944, 26 June 1944, 8 July 1944, 20 August 1944, 13 September 1944, and several others through to the German evacuation of the camp on 18 January 1945. The August and September 1944 photographs were the most detailed and the most operationally revealing. The 25 August 1944 mission, in particular, produced photographs of the IG Farben plant for the bombing planning that was being developed for the autumn of 1944, and incidentally produced the most detailed available photographs of the Birkenau killing operations. The photographs showed crematorium II with the gas chamber roof shadows clearly visible, the disrobing barracks with the columns of prisoners walking towards the gas chambers, and the open-air burning pits in the woods to the north of crematoria IV and V where the SS had been disposing of bodies that the crematoria could not handle.
The photographs were reproduced by Brugioni and Poirier in their 1979 book The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex, published by the Central Intelligence Agency. The book’s publication was the first time the wider Allied photographic record of the camp had been made public. The photographs have been reprinted in every serious work on the bombing-of-Auschwitz debate since.
The bombing-of-Auschwitz debate
The question of why the Allied air forces did not bomb the Birkenau gas chambers or the railway lines leading to them has been one of the most contested questions of the postwar Holocaust debate. The argument is the argument: the photographs the F-5 had taken on 4 April 1944 demonstrated that the Allied air forces had the operational capacity to identify and target the gas chambers; the bombing of the IG Farben plant at Monowitz on 20 August 1944 demonstrated that the air forces had the operational capacity to fly missions to the area; the photographs of the burning pits and the columns of prisoners marching to the gas chambers in the August and September 1944 photographs demonstrated that the operational reality of the killing was clearly visible from the air; the failure to bomb the gas chambers or the railway lines therefore raises the question of whether the failure was a strategic choice rather than an operational impossibility.
The historical debate has produced several interlocking arguments on both sides. The argument that the bombing was operationally feasible was made first in print by the historian David Wyman in his article “Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed” in Commentary magazine in May 1978, and developed at length in his 1984 book The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941 to 1945. Wyman established that the United States Fifteenth Air Force, based at Foggia in southern Italy, had flown bombing missions on the IG Farben plant at Monowitz on 20 August 1944, 13 September 1944, 18 December 1944, and 26 December 1944. The Monowitz plant was three miles from the Birkenau crematoria. The air forces had the photographic intelligence to identify the crematoria. They had the operational capacity to deliver bombs at the relevant range. The bombing missions on the Monowitz plant had been the precise operations that would have been required to bomb the crematoria. They had bombed the synthetic rubber plant. They had not bombed the crematoria.
The argument that the bombing was operationally not feasible has been made by, among others, the historian Richard Levy in The Bombing of Auschwitz Revisited (1996). The argument rests on three points. The first is that high-altitude bombing of the period was operationally imprecise; the bombing of the gas chambers would have been more likely to kill the prisoners in the camp than to destroy the gas chambers themselves. The second is that the air forces of the period did not have a doctrine of bombing for the protection of civilian populations within the territory of the enemy; the doctrine of strategic bombing was directed at military and industrial targets. The third is that the bombing of the railway lines to Auschwitz would have been operationally easy but would not have stopped the killing, because the SS could have repaired the lines or substituted other transport methods.
The argument has gone back and forth for the four decades since Wyman’s original article. The historiographical consensus has settled on a more nuanced version of Wyman’s case: that the bombing was operationally possible, that it would have produced significant tactical benefit by disrupting the killing operations even if it had not stopped them entirely, and that the failure to bomb the camp reflected a combination of operational caution, the absence of any doctrinal framework for bombing for civilian protection, and a wider failure of the Allied governments to give the killing of European Jewry the operational priority it should have had. The wider failure was the principal failure. The operational arguments are the secondary failures.
What the Allied governments knew
The aerial photographs were not the only evidence the Allied governments had. The wider intelligence picture had been clear from at least the beginning of 1942. The Polish underground had been reporting on the killing centres since the autumn of 1941. The Jan Karski mission of November 1942 had brought the first detailed eyewitness account of the killing operations to London and Washington. The Riegner Telegram of August 1942, drafted by Gerhart Riegner of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva and transmitted through Allied diplomatic channels, had given the British and American governments the first official notification of a comprehensive killing programme. The Vrba-Wetzler Report of April 1944, written by two Slovak Jewish escapees from Auschwitz who had reached the Slovak Jewish underground, gave the Allied governments the first full operational description of the camp itself, including the structure of the gas chambers, the operating practice of the Sonderkommando, and the rate of killing during the spring of 1944. The Vrba-Wetzler Report reached London and Washington in May to June 1944. Its contents were summarised in published form in the British and American press in July and August 1944.
The aerial photographs of April to September 1944 therefore arrived in the Allied photographic interpretation services in the context of an intelligence picture that already established what the camp was and what it was doing. The photographs were corroborative of the wider intelligence record. They were not the primary evidence; they were confirmatory of what the diplomatic, escaper-eyewitness, and resistance-source records had already established.
What the photographs would have done, if they had been examined for the killing operations rather than the IG Farben target, was to provide the Allied air forces with the precise targeting data that would have been required to mount a bombing operation against the gas chambers. The targeting data was sitting in the photographic interpretation files in Italy throughout the summer of 1944. It was not used because no one was looking for it. The Allied air forces had not been asked to bomb the gas chambers. The diplomatic representations from the Hungarian Jewish leadership, from the World Jewish Congress, from the British and American Jewish communal organisations, and from the surviving European Jewish underground organisations, asking for the bombing of the camp, had been received in London and Washington from the spring of 1944 onwards. The representations had been considered by the relevant authorities. The representations had been declined.
The Pehle correspondence
The most direct piece of evidence on the Allied decision is the correspondence of John W. Pehle, the executive director of the United States War Refugee Board, with John J. McCloy, the United States Assistant Secretary of War, in June and August 1944. Pehle had received representations from the Jewish Agency for Palestine and from the World Jewish Congress requesting the bombing of the gas chambers and the railway lines. He had forwarded the representations to McCloy on 24 June 1944 with his recommendation for action. McCloy had replied on 4 July 1944 declining the request on the grounds that the bombing would be of doubtful efficacy and would divert air resources from operations elsewhere. Pehle had pressed the question further. McCloy had reaffirmed the position in further correspondence on 14 August 1944.
The McCloy correspondence is the documentary record of the Allied decision. The decision was, on the documents, a War Department decision rather than a higher-level political decision. The President Roosevelt was not personally involved at any point in the decision-making. The Secretary of War Henry Stimson was not personally involved. The decision was taken at the level of the Assistant Secretary of War. The Allied governments did not, on the available record, give the question the level of attention it deserved.
The photographs after 1979
The Brugioni-Poirier reconstruction of the photographic record produced sustained public attention to the bombing-of-Auschwitz question. The 1981 BBC documentary Auschwitz and the Allies, presented by the British historian Martin Gilbert, drew extensively on the Brugioni-Poirier photographs. The 1984 publication of Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews brought the wider question of Allied policy to the centre of American Holocaust historiography. The 2000 publication of The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It?, edited by Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum, provided the consolidated scholarly treatment of the question.
The photographs themselves are now held in the United States National Archives at College Park, Maryland, and are accessible to researchers. They have been reproduced in dozens of subsequent works. They are the foundational visual record of the camp during its operational period. They are also, in a different sense, the foundational documentary record of the Allied failure. They were taken. They sat in the files. They were not used. The fact that they exist is the proof that the bombing of the camp had been operationally feasible. The fact that they were not examined is the proof that the operational feasibility had not been the constraint.
See also
Sources
- Dino A. Brugioni and Robert G. Poirier, The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex, Central Intelligence Agency, 1979
- David S. Wyman, “Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed”, Commentary, May 1978
- David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941 to 1945, Pantheon, 1984
- Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum, eds, The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It?, St. Martin’s Press, 2000
- Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, Michael Joseph, 1981
- Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew, Hill and Wang, 1998
- Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013
- Tami Davis Biddle, “Allied Air Power: Objectives and Capabilities”, in Neufeld and Berenbaum, eds, op. cit., 2000
- Pehle-McCloy correspondence, War Refugee Board records, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York