Why Auschwitz was Not destroyed from the Air
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Auschwitz: "Arbeit Macht
Frei" ("Work Relieves") entrance Gate. |
By Gad Nahshon
The subject: "Why Auschwitz was not destroyed from the air" was discussed by scholars of the Holocaust. Some, like Rabbi Wiesmadel from Slovakia, suggested to Jewish leaders in Hungary in 1943, to press the Allies to at least destroy the railroads to Auschwitz. He said that young Jews are willing to bomb the tunnels to the gas chambers.
Today, any scholar who tries to find an answer to this question cannot ignore the excellent article by Dino A. Brugioni, originally published in the magazine Military Intelligence.
Brugioni was in the CIA until 1982. He was an expert in national photographic interpretation. He was a member of a bomber crew during World War II and became an expert of photography interpretation. This field was important during the war. He wrote that Auschwitz was photographed 30 times. He decided to research the subject. Why the gas chambers and the crematorium were not bombed. He looked for this terrible omission. In 1990, Brugioni wrote an important book, Eyeball to Eyeball - The Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis."
In this article Brugioni kept asking: "Why didn't, or couldn't, the World War II photo interpreters identify one of the most terrifying activities perpetrated at this death complex? Why didn't they identify "�an undressing room, a gas chamber and a crematorium?" Brugioni searched WWII records and reached the following answers and conclusions as to the Allied shortcomings and omissions:
- The photos were available at the Allies Central Interpretation Unit in Medmenham, near London. The interpreters needed advance intelligence information on a specific target. They also had a set of priorities "searching for, or doing, detailed analysis on concentration camps was not a specific task." They were looking for 'prison camps.' They were looking for German V-I or V-II rocket sites. They helped the various Allied operations identify German defense lines, waterways, roads and rails.
- As for Auschwitz, or Birkenu camps? The only Allied's target in the vicinity of these camps of death and gas chambers was the I.G. Garben "buna" synthetic fuel and rubber plants. But Brugioni said the death camps "�were covered as well on the same photographic runs." In 1943 and 1944, the interpreters helped all of the major projects like bombing Germany or the landing in Normandy. In 1945, five million prints were in storage. They were used to produce 40,000 reports.
- Brugioni explained: Camps were targets, even concentration camps, but by his research, a unique and unprecedented one, he wrote: "The term 'extermination camp' was never used in any of this reporting."
- We also must keep in mind that this military photo interpretation of the 1940's were not perfect or sophisticated like the ones today.
- Can we suggest an alternative to reality and the ignorance and the omission as to the Holocaust and as to the gas chambers? We are aware of the terrible silence of the world, the Allied and the American Jews to the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis and their many European collaborators.
The conclusion is that a public relation, non-stop crusade, could have changed the reality or at least reduced the Holocaust massacre. In America, only the Revisionist 'Bergson Group' developed such a crusade and it was being tragically attacked by the Jewish establishment itself. Brugioni wrote that the gap between reality and the information available about it caused inaction regarding Auschwitz's continuous extermination of Jews: "It is my professional opinion that had such information been provided to the photo interpreters, they would have no doubt quickly located the gas chambers and crematoriums."
There are stories that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was, at least until 1944, indifferent to the fate of the Jews and as well Churchill did plan to bomb Auschwitz and Birkenau, but they were ignorant to the fact that this complex was already covered by many aerial photographs. Let's assume that Roosevelt had the photos, do you believe that he would have ordered the bombing of the gas chambers?
