Why Didn't the Allies Bomb the Concentration Camps

No one thought of asking the allies to do this until July of 1944. The request was rejected by the Americans as militarily impractical, if not impossible, due to accuracy and the extreme distances involved. What the Americans wouldn’t say at the time was that all available resources were dedicated to Operation Cobra, the breakout from Normandy, which began in late July 1944 and culminated in an allied victory by late August.

The last train for Auschwitz, carrying Anne Frank and other Dutch Jews, departed the Netherlands in September of 1944.  The train left only days before the allies' Operation Market Garden failed to capture the bridges across the Rhine, which would have captured the Netherlands and cleared the way for an invasion of the German heartland in 1944.  The attempt resulted in 17,000+ British and American casualties.

It’s surprising, but predictable, that no one asks why the Russians didn’t bomb the camps or rail lines. By April of 1944, the Russians were at the Polish border, by August they had overrun Treblinka and were outside Krakow, near Auschwitz. During most of 1944 Auschwitz was well within range of Russia’s Tu-2 bomber, which could carry a heavier bomb load than American B-17s and B-24s operating at extreme range. The Russian response to this question would likely be, after muttering a curse about your stupidity: We were engaged in horrific battles where the outcome was never certain. We threw everything we had into those fights. We captured Treblinka as soon as we could and we were so close to Auschwitz by August of 1944.  The Germans started evacuating the camp in October, stopped gassing people in November and started covering up evidence of their war crimes. What makes you think we didn’t do everything we could to destroy the rail lines in Poland. When they emptied the camp of its last prisoner just before we captured it in January of 1945, the Germans had to march the prisoners back to Germany.  

You say we should have tried harder to rescue the prisoners in Auschwitz?  When we finally got men across the Vistula River outside Krakow after ferocious fighting, the Germans immediately counterattacked with five army divisions, 100,000 soldiers.  They were quickly reinforced by another eight German and Hungarian divisions.  We held on to the west bank of the Vistula until August 16th when the exhausted Germans gave up.  We could not resume the offensive until our own battered divisions and exhausted soldiers had been rearmed or replaced.  136,000 of our boys were killed or gravely wounded in the fight to get from the Polish border to the suburbs of Krakow.

*   *   *   *  *   *   *   *

Marshal Zhukov, the valor of the Red Army is beyond reproach, but the alliance between Stalin and Hitler to divide Poland in 1939 opened the door to all the horror that followed?

"If the nation only knew their hands dripped with innocent blood, it would have met them not with applause but with stones."  Marshal Zhukov

As you know, I was in Mongolia in 1939 leading the armies of the Soviet Union in the fight against the fascist Japanese.   After Stalin died, I personally arrested the rapist Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's Himmler, the criminal who had so much blood on his hands including the murder of the Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, and ordered his execution.  There was no Nuremberg charade about how to deal with the guilty.