The gates of Auschwitz, with the slo­gan "Arbeit Macht Frei." (Wiki­me­dia Commons)

In the Jan­u­ary issue of Com­men­tary, Hil­lel Halkin penned an inter­est­ing piece, “The Jew­ish State & Its Arabs,” which resulted in a flurry of reader com­ment on the Com­men­tary web­site.

One reader had the impres­sion that Churchill “over­re­acted” to the 1944 assas­si­na­tion of Lord Moyne by mem­bers of the Jew­ish Lehi (Stern Gang). Another wrote some­thing I just could not let pass with­out rejoinder:

…had Churchill given an order to bomb Auschwitz, rather than sim­ply rec­om­mend that it be bombed, it would have been bombed. He did not do so, pre­sum­ably, because he was loath to quar­rel with his gen­eral staff and did not wish to stand accused of risk­ing British pilots and air crews in order to save Jew­ish lives that had no mil­i­tary value.

To the Edi­tor of Com­men­tary:

Churchill was no more “over­re­act­ing” to the assas­si­na­tion of Lord Moyne by the Stern Gang than he was able to assure the bomb­ing of Auschwitz. Churchill deplored ter­ror­ism regard­less of its source; and, while he quar­reled with his gen­eral staff fre­quently, he did not have ple­nary author­ity over the U.S. Army Air Force—the respon­si­ble agency for bomb­ing in the Auschwitz sector.

1) From Churchill by Him­self, World Pol­i­tics chap­ter, page 442, Win­ston S. Churchill in the House of Com­mons, 17 Novem­ber 1944 (source: Sir Mar­tin Gilbert, Win­ston S. Churchill, VII: 1052):

If our dreams for Zion­ism are to end in the smoke of assas­sins’ pis­tols, and our labours for its future to pro­duce only a new set of gang­sters wor­thy of Nazi Ger­many, many like myself will have to recon­sider the posi­tion we have main­tained so con­sis­tently and so long in the past. If there is to be any hope of a peace­ful and suc­cess­ful future for Zion­ism, these wicked activ­i­ties must cease, and those respon­si­ble for them must be destroyed root and branch.

Editor’s note: “Churchill was a friend of Jews, but not an uncrit­i­cal friend. Out­raged when his friend Lord Moyne (Wal­ter Guin­ness), the Min­is­ter Res­i­dent in Cairo, was shot with his dri­ver by mem­bers of the ter­ror­ist Stern Gang on 5 Novem­ber 1944, Churchill sug­gested the Colo­nial Sec­re­tary, Oliver Stan­ley, should impress upon Zion­ist leader Chaim Weiz­mann “that it was incum­bent on the Jew­ish Agency to do all in their power to sup­press these ter­ror­ist activities.”

2) From Mar­tin Gilbert, “Churchill and the Holo­caust,” United States Holo­caust Museum, Wash­ing­ton, 1993 Inter­na­tional Churchill Conference:

Five pris­on­ers escaped from Auschwitz in order to bring news to the West of what was hap­pen­ing to the Jews there. Four were Jews. One was a Pol­ish Catholic med­ical stu­dent. The moment their infor­ma­tion reached the West, the moment the “unknown des­ti­na­tion” was revealed as Auschwitz, and the truth of the gas cham­bers there made clear, there was a tremen­dous and under­stand­able out­cry. (The first thing that has always struck me is: what would have hap­pened if these escapees had made their way West in 1943 or even at the end of 1942?) The impact of their report on the Jew­ish and non-Jewish world was dra­matic, and traumatic….

On 6 July 1944, in a meet­ing with Anthony Eden, Weiz­mann and Sher­tok made five urgent and des­per­ate sug­ges­tions [the fifth of which was] “that the rail­way line lead­ing from Budapest to Birke­nau, and the death camp at Birke­nau and other places, should be bombed.”

When Churchill was shown this request by Eden, he did some­thing I’ve not seen on any other doc­u­ment sub­mit­ted to Churchill for his approval: He wrote on it what he wanted done.

Nor­mally, he would have said, “Bring this up to War Cab­i­net on Wednes­day,” or, “Let us dis­cuss this with the Air Min­istry.” Instead, he wrote to Eden on the morn­ing of 7 July: “Is there any rea­son to raise this mat­ter with the Cab­i­net? Get any­thing out of the Air Force you can, and invoke me if necessary.”

I have never seen a minute of Churchill’s giv­ing that sort of imme­di­ate author­ity to carry out a request….I sup­pose it is a great tragedy that all this had not taken place on 7 July 1943 or on 7 Octo­ber 1942. For when all is said and done, by 7 July 1944 it was too late to save all but a final 100,000.

There is a vast sub­text, of which I have writ­ten in my book, Auschwitz and the Allies. The British offi­cials did not know on 9 July that the depor­ta­tions had ceased, so they had to deal with the Prime Minister’s request on the assump­tion that it still had some valid­ity, and in the course of deal­ing with it, some of them revealed con­sid­er­able dis­taste for car­ry­ing out any such instruction.

It is inter­est­ing, how­ever, to note that when the request was put to the Amer­i­can Air Force Com­man­der, Gen­eral Ira C. Eaker, when he vis­ited the Air Min­istry a few days later, he gave it his full sup­port. He regarded it as some­thing that the Amer­i­can day­light bombers could and should do. But as you also know, from the let­ter which is put up in the Museum, when the request reached Washington—indeed, on the five sep­a­rate occa­sions when the request reached Washington—it was turned down. On the sec­ond occa­sion that it reached the Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of War, John J. McCloy, he told his assis­tant to kill it; and it was then effec­tively killed. The debate about bomb­ing those par­tic­u­lar lines con­tin­ued for more than a month after the lines were no longer in use.

I spoke to a num­ber of those who would have been involved in bomb­ing the lines, as Churchill had wished, and even bomb­ing the camp instal­la­tions, had the depor­ta­tions not stopped. One thing which greatly heart­ened me, from my per­spec­tive, from my win­dow as a Jew, was that all the pilots and air crew I spoke to, who would have had to do the work, were emphatic that they would have done it, and were ashamed and angry that they had not been asked to do it.

Aer­ial pho­to­graph of Auschwitz, Decem­ber 1944.

I even found the young man who had taken that aer­ial pho­to­graph of the camp which is dis­played in the Museum, a South African photo recon­nais­sance pilot. He was in extreme dis­tress at the thought that, on the four sep­a­rate occa­sions when he flew over the camp with his cam­era, he had no idea what it was he was fly­ing over. He flew only an unarmed plane, but as he said to me very touch­ingly, “Had I known, I could at least have tipped my wing to show the peo­ple there that some­one knew they were there.”

Churchill had no doubt that a ter­ri­ble crime had been com­mit­ted. As he wrote to Anthony Eden on the day that the escapees’ account of the truth about Auschwitz and the “unknown des­ti­na­tion” reached him:

“There is no doubt that this is prob­a­bly the great­est and most hor­ri­ble crime ever com­mit­ted in the whole his­tory of the world, and it has been done by sci­en­tific machin­ery by nom­i­nally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the lead­ing races of Europe. It is quite clear that all con­cerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, includ­ing the peo­ple who only obeyed orders by car­ry­ing out the butcheries, should be put to death after their asso­ci­a­tion with the mur­ders has been proved. Dec­la­ra­tions should be made in pub­lic, so that every­one con­nected with it will be hunted down and put to death.”

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Tagged as: Anthony Eden, Aushwitz, Birkenau, Chaim Weizmann, Churchill Conference, Commentary, General ira Eaker, Hillel Halkin, Holocaust Museum, Jewish Agency, John J. McCloy, Lehi, Lord Moyne, Moshe Shertok, Oliver Stanley, Sir Martin Gilbert, Stern Gang, Zionism