The final order to release those remaining in the camps was made by the army on December 17, 1944, one day before the announcement by the Supreme Court that the War Relocation Authority had no right to detain citizens who were “concededly loyal”—a ruling that would require the release of all detainees who could not be proved to be disloyal.
But in June 1944 and beyond, the administration attitude of “wait and delay” would have profound and deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands of others besides Japanese Americans and their children. In large measure, this was because the man given the task of managing the Japanese internment, John J. McCloy, was about to become the point man for the War Department regarding what, if anything, was to be done to try to save the Jews trapped inside, or bound for, the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
IN LATE MAY, THE New York Times published another report, this time stating that the first group of Jews had been removed from the Hungarian countryside to “murder camps in Poland.”
In mid-June, activists spearheaded a concerted effort to prod the American government into helping Hungary’s Jews. Jacob Rosenheim of the Agudas Israel World Organization wrote a series of plaintive letters (“I beg to approach you”) to high-ranking administration officials, asking them not just to utter strong words but to take concrete action. In the past, activists like Stephen Wise and Gerhart Riegner had often deferred to the government, but this time Rosenheim outlined specific policy suggestions. He asked that the Allies bomb the rail junctions at Presov and Kosice along the main railway route to Auschwitz. Such a measure, he argued, would “paralyze” the Nazis’ extermination efforts. He noted that time was of the essence: “The bombing has to be made at once,” he wrote, “because every day of delay means a very heavy responsibility for the human lives at stake.”
Rosenheim’s information was not speculative. He had had access to the Vrba-Wetzler report, which for the first time gave a specific name to the extermination camp—Auschwitz—and which in the course of thirty pages laid out in minute, chilling detail the inner-workings of the death camp, including the gas chambers themselves. After the report reached Budapest and the leadership of the Hungarian Jews in early May, it was relayed to Allen Dulles in Switzerland by mid-June—Dulles would later become the first civilian director of the Central Intelligence Agency—and then sent on to Roswell McClelland, the WRB’s representative in Geneva. McClelland made a snap decision: Vrba and Wetzler’s testimony was so gruesome and so strong, that McClelland decided to compose a longer cable outlining its implications. But knowing that haste mattered, on June 24 he dispatched an overview—a three-page cable to Pehle at the WRB in the capital.
With a heavy heart, he summarized: “There is little doubt that many of these Hungarian Jews are being sent to the extermination camps of Auschwitz (Oswiecim) and Birkenau (Rajska) in Western upper Silesia where according to recent reports, since early summer 1942 at least 1,500,000 Jews have been killed.”
He added that a more detailed report would soon be cabled.
He also graphically described the circumstances of the deportations from Hungary: the grueling three-day journey to Poland, on which hundreds perished from lack of food and little air. And he passed on the request from the sources in Slovakia and Hungary that the railway lines, “especially bridges,” be bombed as the only possible means of slowing down or stopping future deportations. Bureaucratically, McClelland understood that the WRB was not authorized to sanction military measures. Thus his memo stated that he could not “venture” an opinion on the utility of the proposed bombing. But the simple fact that he attached the proposal clearly signaled his own support for taking direct action against the transport routes to Auschwitz.
That same day, a worried Pehle sat down with McCloy in his spacious office at the War Department and discussed Rosenheim’s suggestion. This was murky territory for Pehle, and he knew it. The WRB’s initial mandate was to rescue Jews in imminent danger of death “consistent with the successful prosecution of the war.” Did this mean the WRB could propose measures that entailed military force to rescue Jews? No and yes. In a sense, it came down to what the White House thought. Whatever Roosevelt’s inclinations were, the president well knew that war had its own imperatives—and policies frequently gave way in response to change, improvisation, or duplication. “A little rivalry is stimulating, you know,” he once said to Frances Perkins. “It keeps everybody going to prove he is a better fellow than the next man.”
Still, Pehle intimated that he had “several doubts about the matter.” He was reluctant to ask for military personnel, and he wondered aloud whether the rail lines would be incapacitated long enough to make a measurable difference to the functioning of the death camps. At this stage, Pehle was clearly feeling his way. Afterward he wrote a memo in which he made it “very clear” to McCloy that he was not specifically asking the War Department to take any action on the proposed bombing other than to “appropriately explore it.” Yet he added one important proviso: “at this point at least.” In other words, he was, at a minimum, hedging his bets, leaving the door open for a firmer request down the road.
McCloy, a master at working the system, told Pehle that he was taking this seriously and would “check into the matter.” For his part, Pehle now sought to increase the pressure on McCloy. Within the week he sent McCloy a copy of McClelland’s cable, underlining the injunction to bomb “vital sections” of the rail lines. Meanwhile, the machinery at the War Department was in motion, already generating a response to Rosenheim’s original request. Here was institutional behavior reminiscent of the State Department. Absent further pressure from above, no actual study of the military feasibility of bombing the rail lines, or of any comparable measures to slow the deportations, was conducted. Instead, Lieutenant General John E. Hull, who had the onerous task of answering the cable, simply employed Roosevelt’s public statements as well as the War Department’s internal memorandums of February 1944. He gave the stock reply that “the most effective relief which can be given victims of enemy persecution is to ensure the speedy defeat of the axis.”
When McCloy received Hull’s response, he promptly signed off on it, and instructed Gerhardt, his personal aide, to “kill” the matter.
On July 3, 1944 Gerhardt wrote to McCloy. “I know you told me to ‘kill’ this but since those instructions, we have received the attached letter from Pehle. I suggest that the attached reply be sent.”
As if everything had changed and nothing had changed, the response said: “The War Department is of the opinion that the suggested air operation is impracticable. It could be executed only by the diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations and would in any case be of such very doubtful efficacy that [it would] not amount to a practical project.” McCloy scarcely gave it a second thought, and signed Gerhardt’s draft response.
This was cant, and Gerhardt must have known it. At the WRB, one of the staffers, Benjamin Akzin, was livid. He knew it was untrue that bombing the rail lines could be carried out only through the “diversion” of extensive air support. Since the spring, when the Allies had seized the Foggia air base in Italy, long-range American bombers had been consistently flying over the camp complex or nearby; also, the Allies’ airpower had reduced Hitler’s air force to a mere shell of itself. And as early as April 4 aerial reconnaissance photos had been taken of the Auschwitz camp—Vrba himself later vividly remembered the roar of the planes overhead—as well as of the neighboring IG Farben petrochemical plant. Photos were again taken on June 26, 1944, just a few days before McCloy informed Pehle that the bombing run was not possible.
In fact, the United States would conduct an intense air war against Germany’s synthetic fuel plants in that same region in the weeks to come; frequently these attacks were close to the death camps themselves. So effective were the bombing raids that German production of synthetic oil fell from more than 1,000 tons a day on July 1 to only 417 tons on July 25; by al
l accounts, the Third Reich’s military operations were being strangled by this loss of oil. In Germany itself, the minister of armaments, demoralized and desperate to ration fuel, requested that Hitler cease all air courier services, a measure that was once almost unthinkable. The same with passenger planes. The Allies had no such restrictions.
On August 7, a fleet of seventy-six bombers and sixty-four fighters of the U.S. Air Force set their sights on their targets and struck the refineries at Trzebinia, only thirteen miles northeast of Auschwitz. Then, at 10:32 p.m. on August 20, the Fifteenth U.S. Air Force bombed the Monowitz camp just three miles east of Auschwitz-Birkenau, causing “considerable damage.” For twenty-eight earsplitting minutes, 127 Flying Fortresses, escorted by 100 Mustangs, dropped a total of 1,336 five-hundred-pound explosive bombs from an altitude of about twenty-seven thousand feet. The depleted German defenses were able to bring down only one plane. On the ground, there were casualties. Over three hundred slave laborers were injured; and although SS guards “ran away,” scurrying into the bunkers, nonetheless a number of these guards themselves were also wounded. Monowitz, one of the subcamps of Auschwitz, produced synthetic oil and rubber.
The campaign continued. On August 27, 350 heavy bombers took to the skies and pounded Blechhammer, and two days later 218 bombers followed suit, assaulted Bohumín, again within range of Auschwitz.
United States planes flying reconnaissance above Auschwitz took aerial photographs of the camps on numerous other occasions in addition to April 4 and June 26, including August 9, 12, and 25. Had these images been carefully examined—they were not—the analysts could have pinpointed the gas chambers, the crematoriums, the railway sidings, the trains and the platforms, the huts in the women’s camp, and even the specially landscaped gardens created to conceal the gas chambers. Taken in bright sunlight, the photographs of August 25 particularly stand out—hundreds of bomb craters are readily discernible, as are 151 different buildings including the camp housing for some thirty thousand Jews transferred from Birkenau to Auschwitz III. Also visible is something quite startling: a snaking line of Jews trudging on their way from a cattle car to a gas chamber. Moving across the frame, they are hauntingly visible.
AS FOR THE HUNGARIANS arriving at Auschwitz by the hundreds of thousands, there was little doubt that most of them were fervently hoping for the Allies’ bombers to come, even if it meant that they themselves perished in the raids. Watching the passage of Allied aircraft far overhead en route to their more distant targets, or hearing “the tremendous rumble” of bombers, deeply affected the inmates of Auschwitz. “We saw many times the silver trails in the sky,” one prisoner, Erich Kulka, later recalled. “All the SS men would go into the bunkers but we came out of our huts, and prayed that a bomb will fall, or soldiers and weapons will be parachuted, but in vain.” Hugo Gryn, a fifteen-year-old Hungarian boy, would later note that “one of the most painful aspects of being in the camp was a sensation of being totally abandoned.” The Nobel Peace Prize winner and Auschwitz survivor, Elie Wiesel, would later explain, “We are no longer afraid of death, at any rate, not of that death.” According to one of Edward Murrow’s broadcasts, “At Buchenwald they spoke of the president just before he died.” No doubt it was the same at Auschwitz. And Primo Levi, an Italian partisan imprisoned at Auschwitz, and future renowned novelist, wrote, “As for us, we were too destroyed to be really afraid. The few who could still judge and feel rightly, drew strength and hope from the bombardments.”
But in Washington, Pehle himself was still nursing some doubts about the utility of bombing, cautiously navigating the bureaucratic maze. However, members of his own staff had no such hesitation. One of his aides, Benjamin Akzin, was so horrified by the graphic descriptions in the abbreviated Vrba-Wetzler report contained in Roswell McClelland’s cable of June 24 that he sat down and wrote a memo unflinchingly arguing for bombing the gas chambers themselves. Presaging a debate that would continue until this very day, it laid waste to the notion that bombing the camps is simply a twenty-first-century concept based on twenty-first-century values. In any case, although it was written in the heat of the moment, it was a masterpiece of morality, strategy, and tactics.
Akzin pointed out that bombing the gas chambers would cause the “methodical German mind” to devote extensive time and resources to reconstructing them, or force it “to evolve” equally efficient procedures of mass slaughter; in any case, he rightly noted that German manpower and material resources were “gravely depleted” and that German authorities might no longer be in a position to devote themselves to the task of equipping “new large-scale extermination centres.” Therefore, “some appreciable saving of lives” would be the outcome, “at least temporarily.” Akzin also insisted to Pehle that this was a moral imperative, or what he called a “matter of principle.” Marking the camp for destruction, he noted, would constitute the most tangible “evidence of the indignation aroused by the existence of these charnel houses.”
Moreover, the bombings would, he contended, have sound military logic as well. For a start, they would cause many deaths among “the most ruthless and despicable of the Nazis.” Akzin pointed out that the bombings would also be consistent with current military objectives, inasmuch as the Auschwitz complex was a crucial military target that contained “mining and manufacturing centres” playing an important part in the industrial armament of Germany. And he wrestled forthrightly with whether the Allies should be deterred by the fact that a large number of Jews would be killed by such a military operation. Resoundingly, he said no. Pointing out that these Jews were “doomed to death anyhow,” he wrote that “refraining from bombing the extermination centres would be sheer misplaced sentimentality, far more cruel a decision than to destroy the centres.” Actually, however, in the confusion created by the bombing some of the inmates might be able to hide and escape.
So here, finally, was a powerful, persuasive case for bombing Auschwitz. It was now clear to Akzin, as it was increasingly clear to much of the world, that some fifteen thousand Hungarian Jews were being shipped every twenty-four hours to Auschwitz. And as the days went by, evidence mounted that some twelve thousand Jews were being gassed each day in the camps, a figure that would rise in August to twenty-four thousand a day—a record even for the Nazis. Nevertheless, for the next couple of weeks Pehle remained unsure how to proceed. He was decisive on numerous issues facing the WRB, but when it came to bombing Auschwitz, he was in a box. Should he go to the War Department again? Enlist Morgenthau’s aid? Approach the White House?
Instead, he waited in his office in the Treasury Department—and read the river of cables that came across his desk outlining the Auschwitz death machine in gut-wrenching detail. On July 1, his representative in Sweden, Iver Olsen, sent him a lengthy description of Auschwitz that left little question about the atrocities taking place—and the results of doing nothing. He read slowly, and would later comment that the news was “so terrible that it is hard to believe,” adding, “There are no words to qualify its description.” And the figures alone were equally unfathomable: some 600,000 Jews were now already dead or deported.
Olsen’s account continued: “According to the evidence, these people are now being taken to a place across the Hungarian frontier in Poland where there is an establishment at which gas is being used for killing people. . . . These people of all ages, children, women, and men are transported to this isolated spot in boxcars packed in like sardines and . . . upon arrival many are already dead. Those who have survived the trip are stripped naked, given a small square object which resembles a piece of soap and told that at the bathhouse they must bathe themselves. The ‘bathhouse’ does in fact look like a big bathing establishment. . . . Into a large room with a total capacity of 2,000 packed together closely the victims are pushed. No regard is given to sex or age and all are completely naked. When the atmosphere of the hall has been heated by this mass of bodies a fine powder is let down over the whole area by opening a contraption in the ceiling. Whe
n the heated atmosphere comes in contact with this powder a poisonous gas is formed which kills all occupants of the room. Trucks then take out the bodies, and burning follows.”
Interestingly, this cable was also later passed on to Winston Churchill, not by Franklin Roosevelt or the WRB but by Churchill’s son, Randolph.
On July 8, Pehle received another cable from his representative in Switzerland, a lengthier eight-page summary of the Vrba-Wetzler report. It would still be some months before he would see the complete thirty-page text, but between the cable from Olsen and this one, he was shaken enough to again raise the issue of military action. This time he wrote a long report to the other members of the WRB and sent copies to the secretary of war, Henry Stimson, as well as to the assistant secretary, McCloy. Pehle proposed a number of audacious military actions, including bombing the camps, air-dropping weapons to the inmates of Auschwitz, and parachuting troops to help bring about the “escape of the unfortunate people.”