1944 by Jay Winik
Once more, McCloy did nothing. Did he believe that the mass extermination was being carried out on such a terrifying industrial scale? Probably. Did he comprehend it? This is unclear. But at the same time, it is clear that there was no follow-up from Roosevelt or the White House to force McCloy’s hand or strengthen the WRB’s. So, as he had thus far managed to do on the issue of the Japanese Americans’ internment, McCloy was content to wait out Pehle. Still, as it happened, while the information was flooding into Washington, a summary of the Vrba-Wetzler report was reaching the Foreign Office in London, on July 4. Unlike the Americans, the British moved quickly and publicly. The next day Anthony Eden informed the House of Commons that the “barbarous deportations” had already begun and “many persons have been killed.” And on a grim note he added that “unfortunately” there were no signs that the repeated declarations by the Allies had in any way mitigated “the fury” of the Nazis’ death machine.
This, of course, was the challenge. The next day, Eden sat down with Churchill and raised the matter of bombing the death camps. Head bowed, eyebrows knitted, Churchill listened attentively. Eden explained that the idea had “already been considered” but said that he was now entirely in favor of it. As it turns out, so was the prime minister. In stark contrast to McCloy, the War Department, the State Department, and others in Washington, Churchill immediately grasped the significance of the reports about Auschwitz. He promptly gave his imprimatur for military action against the camps. On July 7, Churchill informed Eden: “You and I are in entire agreement. Get anything out of the Air Force you can, and invoke me if necessary.” Then, in language that one might have expected from Roosevelt—though in truth, the president had remained totally silent on the matter—several days later Churchill eloquently told his foreign secretary: “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 civilized men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races in Europe.” He added that everyone connected with it “should be hunted down and put to death.”
Suddenly, the idea of bombing was gaining support, at least in Britain. Eden wasted little time in following up on Churchill’s declaration. He wrote to the British secretary of state about the “appalling persecution” of Hungary’s Jews, and asked the Air Ministry’s opinion about the “feasibility” of bombing Auschwitz itself. “I very much hope that it will be possible to do something,” he told the secretary. “I have the authority of the Prime Minister to say that he agrees.”
And if ever the case were to be made for bombing the camps, it occurred almost by happenstance. As the sun was setting in Budapest on July 4, Admiral Horthy informed the Nazi ambassador that throughout the day he was being “deluged” with angry calls protesting the deportations and telegrams asking him to halt the killings, including messages from the once silent Vatican and the once hesitant president of the International Red Cross; moreover, in good measure thanks to the WRB, he had received harsh criticism from the Swedish, Turkish, Swiss, and Spanish governments, all of which also added their voices to the fray.
However isolated Hungary may have felt, little of this gave the regime pause. In the blink of an eye, on its watch, nearly half a million Jews were now dead. But what did cause Horthy to think twice was a telegram that the Hungarians intercepted from the American representative in Bern. The cable proposed an Allied air attack on Budapest, and contained “exact and correct street and house numbers” of Hungarian and German institutions involved in the deportations; moreover, seventy individuals directly implicated in the deportations were explicitly named. Horthy may have allowed himself to be browbeaten by Hitler, but he had a strong instinct for self-preservation. More fearful of Allied reprisals than of Germany’s retribution—in a telling coda to the skepticism about bombing Auschwitz, Budapest already had suffered an uncommonly fierce American bomber assault on its marshaling yards and even government buildings and private homes, on July 2—Horthy himself demanded that the deportations be suspended on July 7.
But even though the Hungarians’ deportations ceased, the death trains still monotonously rolled in from other countries. And as the debate about whether to bomb Auschwitz continued, all those lives—some 300,000 more—hovered in limbo.
MEANWHILE, THE WRB HASTILY dispatched a thirty-one-year-old Swedish emissary Raoul Wallenberg, to Budapest under diplomatic cover; he immediately grasped at the first shafts of hope.
Working with another Swede, Iver Olsen, he arrived on July 9, carrying two knapsacks, a revolver (“to give me courage”), a windbreaker, and a sleeping bag. By this stage, the deportations from Hungary had been halted, but no one could say for how long, and the countryside had been cleared. Some 600,000 Jews had eerily vanished, literally within weeks. Wallenberg also knew that more than 300,000 Jews were still in peril. Employing a combination of heroics almost unequaled in the war, he became part diplomat and part spy, in his effort to rescue lives.
A linguist, a world traveler, and an architect, he was at once ingenious and relentless. His courtly manner was deceptive: when needed, he bluffed the Germans; when that didn’t work, he blustered; and when other tactics were called for, he bribed the Germans, using funds funneled through the WRB. He did whatever it took to save lives. He was both meek and tough, petulant and sentimental, charming and emotional. But he was always cool, practical, and absolutely determined. He rented thirty buildings that became safe havens for Jewish refugees; the Spanish and Swiss legations followed his example. He devised an elaborate scheme to give tens of thousands of Jews forged passports or certificates of protection—particularly important for children under ten years of age who needed visas. The ruse worked.
He set up soup kitchens and smuggled food to Jews in the Hungarian ghetto. When armed patrols began seizing and slaughtering Jews, he directly confronted them. When the Arrow Cross, Hungary’s much despised and dreaded pro-Nazi party, threatened to execute the ghetto’s inhabitants, Wallenberg shouted at the SS commander and promised that he and his cohort would hang from lampposts if they carried out the mass executions. The Germans backed off. Wallenberg’s efforts were not without considerable risk. Already Jane Haining—a Scottish missionary, a gentile, and head of a girls’ home in Budapest run by the Church of Scotland—had been deported to Auschwitz, where she perished. Her crime? She had been charged with shedding tears while affixing yellow stars to the clothes of her Jewish girls.
Yet Wallenberg never flinched.
How many lives did Wallenberg save? Tens of thousands, perhaps as many as seventy-five thousand. But whatever the number, on the level of folklore he showed the world—and history—how to save lives. He gave new meaning to the concept of humanitarianism, and he proved that it was not merely a tarnished, fading virtue eclipsed by the fog of war. At his best, he, along with the WRB, provided Americans with an example of rescue that lasts to this day, so that the question lingers: what might have been possible if the WRB had been established by Roosevelt much earlier?
Wallenberg later disappeared mysteriously. It is believed he was killed by the Soviets.
THE DEBATE OVER BOMBING Auschwitz continued. Despite Churchill’s wholehearted support, the British bureaucracy held back. The secretary of state told Anthony Eden that disrupting the railspurs to the death camps “is out of our power.” As to bombing the camps, he maintained that “the distance” from British bases entirely ruled out “our doing anything of the kind.” But, he suggested, the Americans might be able to carry out such raids in daylight, though these would be “costly and hazardous.” Then he added with a touch of Orwellian doublespeak: “Even if the plant was destroyed, I am not clear that would really help the victims.”
Back in Washington, this same hesitant attitude continued to prevail in the War Department. However, activists still pushed for the military option. In early August Leon Kubowitzki, head of the rescue department of the World Jewish Congress, sent McCloy an
Repeating what he had said in the past, McCloy responded that the bombings would require the “diversion of considerable air support . . . engaged in decisive operations elsewhere.” But this time he added a new wrinkle to the government response. While acknowledging the humanitarian motives behind the request, McCloy offered the mindnumbing notion that “such an effort, even if practicable, might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans.” Scratching their heads in despair, proponents of bombing wondered how any “more vindictive action” could be possible, while the inmates of Auschwitz couldn’t have felt more differently from McCloy.
One young man, Shalom Lindenbaum, vividly recalled looking up as the Allied bombers appeared and then disappeared in the sky. “It will be difficult to describe our joy,” he thought. “We prayed and hoped to be bombed by them, and so to escape the helpless death in the gas chambers. To be bombed meant the chance that also the Germans will be killed. Therefore we were deeply disappointed and sad when they passed over, not bombing.”
And once more, the White House was silent on the matter.
ACTUALLY, COMPLICATED BOMBING RUNS were not impossible. On October 29, 1944, the New York Times published a report about Operation Jericho, a dazzling raid by the Royal Air Force that freed one hundred members of the French Resistance from Amiens prison in German-occupied France, where they were awaiting execution.
It was a daunting operation, the first of its kind in the war and extraordinary for its fearlessness and accuracy—more accuracy, in fact, than would be needed to attack Auschwitz. The airmen prepared by carefully examining a model of the prison, a crosslike building in a courtyard surrounded by an imposing wall twenty feet high and three feet thick. The task for the Royal Air Force seemed Herculean: the walls had to be breached and the German quarters destroyed, but with the least amount of explosives so that casualties would be minimal in the adjacent prison buildings.
A thick blanket of snow lay on the airfield—it was February 18, 1944, and the weather was dismal—as three squadrons of Mosquito bombers escorted by Spitfires took off, preparing to attack the prison in three successive waves. They carried eleven-second delayed-action bombs. Beforehand, Captain Percy Pickard had bellowed to his men: “It’s a death or glory job, boys.” En route, because of the foul weather, four Mosquitoes lost contact with the formation and had to return to their base. The rest continued.
At the northeast and northwest perimeter, the planes of the New Zealand squadron zoomed in first. It was one minute past noon when they reached the target. Their bombs fell, and the wall was ruptured. Minutes later came the second wave of bombers; they were the Australians, flying at an altitude of fifty feet. There were earsplitting sounds as the bombs hit the targets, pulverizing the guards’ quarters on each end; they also “divided and slit open” the jail, and a direct hit on the guardhouse killed or disabled a number of the Germans. Smoke bellowed into the sky and fires broke out.
By then the job was done. So as to leave little to chance, elsewhere a diversionary attack was made on the local railway station.
One plane had a camera mounted on it, and made three runs over the prison. It brought back extraordinary film that showed Germans lying dead on the ground, bleeding into the snow; the camera also captured the exhilarating sight of prisoners rushing out through the smoldering holes in the walls and then disappearing across a snowy field outside the prison walls.
A number of the Frenchmen were cut down by the Nazis’ machine-gun fire, and many were eventually recaptured. But a significant number made it to freedom, linking up with members of the underground who had been awaiting them in a nearby wooded area. Tragically, Captain Pickard was killed when the tail of his plane was severed by German flak. Nonetheless, the crewmen were ecstatic. One Australian pilot said, “The feeling of the men in our squadron . . . was that this was a job where it did not matter if we were all killed.” He added, “It was a sort of operation that gave you a feeling that if you did nothing else in this war, you had done something.”
WHATEVER MAY HAVE BEEN the case with the Allies, in bits and pieces there were other stirring stories of those standing up to the Nazi killing machine and coming to the rescue of the Jews. In tiny Albania, which the Nazis had rolled into in September 1943, the seemingly fascist government pretended to collaborate with the Germans; it often did not. In little coastal towns and larger cities, in small mountain villages and even in the capital, ordinary citizens shuffled Jews from basement to basement, barn to barn, and hideout to hideout to help them elude capture. When the Nazi masters often asked for lists of Jews, the Albanian government insisted there were no Jews. A number of the rescues occurred in Nazi-occupied Kosovo, which had a sizable population of ethnic Albanians. False identification papers using Muslim names were issued to the Jews, allowing them to find safe haven in Albania. In one case in Albania itself, a grocer, Arsllan Rezniqi, transported 400 Jews from Macedonia to safety; he hid them in the back of a truck underneath fruits and vegetables.
Overall, Albania saved virtually all of its 200 native Jews, 400 Jewish refugees from Austria and Germany, and help ferry hundreds more through the treacherous Nazi-occupied territories of the Balkans. Remarkably, Albania had more Jews at the end of the war that at the beginning. Why did they do it? Because of a national creed that obligated its citizens to provide safe passage for those seeking protection—even at the risk of forfeiting their own lives.
THE WAR DEPARTMENT WAS against a coordinated bombing attack on Auschwitz. The military was against bombing the camp. And clearly so was the silent White House. Remarkably, it happened anyway.
On September 13, as part of the sustained Allied “oil war,” the American air force made another run at the Monowitz oil plant, just five miles from the Auschwitz gas chambers. But this time a number of the bombs veered slightly off course, accidentally dropping on Auschwitz I. While air-raid sirens wailed, some of the SS barracks were destroyed, either flattened like paper bags or incinerated in a maelstrom of flame and smoke. Dashing for the shelters, or caught completely by surprise, fifteen SS men were killed; twenty-eight more were severely hit and left moaning and writhing. By happenstance, the clothing workshop was also struck. Twenty-three Jews perished, and sixty-five other inmates lay bleeding and badly hurt.
Significantly, in the same errant attack, American bombs fell for the first time on the nefarious Auschwitz-Birkenau itself—where the gas chambers were. Here was a measure of vengeance. Thirty civilian workers died when one bomb hurtled into the crematorium sidings. A second bomb plummeted down on the railway embankment leading into the camp. Still another bomb screamed into the SS bomb shelter. Suddenly, there was mayhem. Guard dogs barked wildly. The German soldiers frantically ran for the shelters. Sirens blared. But the Jews just stood there and watched. For a fleeting moment their own agonies subsided. Barely able to think, barely able to stand, they were nonetheless ecstatic. Never before had they seen the Nazis so vulnerable and so helpless. Never before had they seen the Nazis not in control.
“How beautiful was it to see squadron after squadron burst from the sky, drop bombs, destroy the buildings, and kill also members of the Herre
YET ON THE BATTLEFIELD, the boundaries of hell were being expanded.
The great Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz once pronounced his axiom on the friction of war: Little goes as planned, and tactics constantly change. As the Germans were being driven out of France and Greece and huge swaths of eastern Europe were being overrun by the Red Army, suddenly Warsaw was in revolt. Now, the War Department and Roosevelt were forced to reassess elements of their bombing strategy. It happened this way.
On August 1, the Polish Resistance Home Army began a massive assault against the Nazis in Warsaw. The revolt started as Soviet troops drew within twelve miles of the city, but then stopped. The expected plan was that the uprising, led by the Polish Home Army, would distract the Germans, allowing the Soviet forces to move on Warsaw. But they didn’t advance.
Instead, for sixty-three days, thirty-seven thousand Polish resistance fighters battled the Germans alone. They traveled under the city, moving through the sewers. They had only around two thousand weapons, almost exclusively small arms and homemade gasoline bombs. In the early fighting, the Poles captured a number of buildings, including some governmental offices, and defiantly raised the Polish flag. In response, Himmler gave an order to the German forces to kill, rather than capture, the city’s inhabitants, and to level Warsaw, to make an example of it. German tanks and air support were sent to the city, and twenty-one thousand Germans were eventually dispatched there. Meanwhile, gas was pumped into the sewers. The Luftwaffe dive-bombed the city.
Across the Vistula River, Soviet troops sat idle; their antiaircraft guns did not fire, and their planes remained on the ground. In London, a desperate Winston Churchill began pleading for help for the Polish rebels. Over time, the belief would grow that the Soviets, with Stalin in charge, had halted their offensive to allow the Polish rebels to be wiped out—or at least nearly wiped out—by the Germans, so that the postwar government would be firmly in the Soviet orbit. The Polish rebels had heard the Soviet guns and Moscow Radio had announced that “the hour of action has already arrived.” But it hadn’t. By August 7, German troops had conducted mass executions of more than sixty-five thousand civilians inside the city walls. Citizens were rounded up house by house and shot. But the Resistance continued fighting.