Auschwitz and Churchill's Great Lie

By Steve Rodan

For decades, Britain and the United States claimed that their air forces could not stop the German mass killing at Auschwitz, which reached its peak in the spring of 1944. Officials argued that Auschwitz was beyond the range of Allied bombers and that the air forces lacked intelligence data on this facility.

The historical record finally shows this to be a lie.

The Allies knew Auschwitz and other German camps from at least early 1942. The Polish government-in-exile and Allied intelligence were feeding information on the camps and the extermination of Jews. They were given the layout of some of the camps, able to distinguish between the gas chambers and inmate barracks.

By mid-1943, the Allies ruled the skies and were capable of reaching virtually anywhere in occupied Europe. Allied bombers could have destroyed the death camps or the rail lines that in 1944 brought more than 10,000 Jews a day to Auschwitz.

But the Allies insisted that the death camps would not be bombed. And to make sure nobody disagreed, Allied intelligence denied vital information on Auschwitz to the British and U.S. air forces, which eventually bombed targets only a few kilometers away from the death camp.

The policy of concealment was maintained by the political leadership in London and Washington. When detailed information was relayed to British and U.S. leaders, it was filed away and kept from the military.

In August 1944, the Polish government-in-exile sent a map and details of Auschwitz and Treblinka to the Jewish Agency in London. Although agency chairman David Ben-Gurion and many of his colleagues, echoing Britain's position, opposed bombing Auschwitz, the Polish information was relayed to the British Foreign Office. Treblinka had already been liberated by the Red Army.

The Foreign Office received a map of Auschwitz that included the towers, kitchen, canteen, ammunition dump and 28 prisoner blocks. The location of the gas chambers and crematorium were also listed.

The Aug. 18, 1944 document belied the excuse by Ben-Gurion and his allies on the Jewish Agency Executive that bombing the gas chambers would kill Jewish inmates. The map said the death facilities were located in a "wood west of Brezezinski/Birkenau." Brezezinski was a forest along the perimeter of Auschwitz. [1]

This information was vital to the Allies. In 1944, the British Air Ministry wanted to study the feasibility of bombing Auschwitz. The ministry requested a layout of this and other death camps because either they housed or were adjacent to war industrial centers, targeted from August 1944. In April, these facilities were photographed by military aircraft.

But Prime Minister Winston Churchill was determined to deny such information. Churchill had already ruled out any action to save the Jews of Hungary. In a July 11, 1944 note to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, the prime minister dismissed proposed talks with Berlin to stop the gas chambers. Churchill believed that the Germans wanted a separate peace with Britain or the United States that could threaten relations with the Soviet Union.

Eden was comfortable with that decision. In early 1943, he refused a request by Bulgaria to save its Jews through transfer to Palestine. The Germans sent the Jews to Treblinka.

"So far as I can discover these plans never were in fact communicated to Air Ministry," Churchill wrote in a note to his private secretary, Jock Colville, on Sept. 18, 1944. [2]

Churchill was under increasing pressure from both Jews and gentiles to bomb Auschwitz. He was also being pushed by members of the U.S. Congress, who asserted that such an operation was feasible.

But on Sept. 1, Churchill ordered Eden to claim that "in view of the difficulties of the operation of bombing the camps, as represented by the Air Ministry, -- they said they had no detailed information of the topography -- the idea of bombing them might be dropped."

In his note, Churchill then made an admission that he probably believed would never see the light of day. The prime minister told Colville that the premier's argument that the Allies could not bomb Auschwitz was a lie.

"We are therefore technically guilty of allowing the Air Ministry to get away with it without having given them -- tho [sic] we had it -- the inf. [information] they asked for as a prerequisite," Churchill wrote.

And then, the bottom line.

"...I think perhaps -- tho' I feel a little uneasy about it -- we had better let this go by," Churchill wrote.

In all, the Allies struck the Auschwitz area at least 10 times from August through December 1944. In every operation, the death camp was not targeted, rather the German industrial complex in nearby Monowice, as few as four kilometers away.

On Sept. 13, U.S. bombers struck I.G. Farben in Monowice, but several of the bombs landed and exploded in Auschwitz. The Jewish inmates later recalled that they had cheered. In contrast, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt expressed dismay that he might be seen as having provoked the Germans.

Until today, the Zionist narrative has supported the Allied refusal to bomb the death camps. A search of the website of the state-sponsored Yad Vashem shows nothing of the material supplied by the Jewish Agency to the British Foreign Office as well as Churchill's veto note. Yad Vashem has been touted as the leading research center on the Holocaust. [3]

Instead, Yad Vashem, a key element in Israel's foreign policy, continues to propagate Churchill's lie. Yad Vashem senior historian David Silberklang, also editor of Yad Vashem Studies, reviewed the issue in a 2010 video in which he supported London and Washington.

"Were the Allies lying?" Silberklang asked. "I would argue it was not a lie. It was rather a reflection of disorganization and ineptitude. [4]

In contrast, the British National Archives has dismissed the narrative that the Allies were in the dark concerning the German death camps. The British and Americans knew.

"Many Jews tried to escape the Nazis, and many non-Jews helped them," the British National Archives said on its website [5]. "As a result, there was a constant stream of information coming back to Allied commanders and Jewish communities about what was happening in Eastern Europe. The decision not to bomb the camps proved highly controversial then and now."

1.FO 371/42806. https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/.../pdf/ee-camps.pdf

2. ibid

3. "Aerial Photographs of Auschwitz" Yad Vashem. https://www.yadvashem.org/.../auschwitz-aerial-photos.asp

4. "The Auschwitz Bombing Controversy in Context." Yad Vashem. March 7, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBRKjY5i6Dc...

5. "Learning Curve: World War II. Eastern Europe, 1939-1945. The Camps." https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/.../pdf/ee-camps.pdf

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/worldwar2/theatre-assets/eastern-europe/pdf/ee-camps.pdf