A Bomb on Auschwitz
Two weeks ago, I traveled to Oświęcim to attend a journalism seminar on Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp, where, according to Winston Churchill, "probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world" took place. Mass murderers such as Mao and Stalin may have had more deaths on their conscience than our mustachioed dictator, but other governments did not diligently assist in carrying out their crimes.
While researching the history of the Holocaust, I came across an interview with Roy Casagranda. For those unfamiliar with him, Casagranda is an American political scientist and government lecturer at Austin Community College who also prominently presents himself as a historian and public intellectual. He is undoubtedly a gifted storyteller, with a particular fascination for the history of the Middle East.
His statements suggest that he occupies the far left of the political spectrum. And, as is often the case with Marxists, he harbors a certain admiration for Islam, which he defends with a zeal that would make even a sub-Saharan imam raise an eyebrow.
A master of euphemism, he portrays the Islamic world as a cradle of tolerance and knowledge. Arab conquests become civilizational encounters, and child marriages shrink into cultural anomalies. Western civilization receives notably less credit: its scientific achievements are, in Casagranda's telling, little more than recycled versions of ideas Muslims supposedly conceived centuries earlier. His podcast promises to uncover "erased" peoples and truths while challenging conventional historical narratives.
Fair enough. Everyone views history through a particular lens. But sometimes the glass becomes so clouded that one is no longer looking at the past but at a script of one's own making.
That happened when Casagranda turned to the Holocaust. He said nothing about the collaboration of Arab forces with Nazi Germany. Instead, he directed his criticism at the United States for refusing to bomb Auschwitz. Behind this decision, he detected a particularly sinister motive: extremely antisemitic Americans allegedly wanted the Holocaust to become as horrific as possible and to allow "more Jews to die." Only a catastrophe of sufficient magnitude, he argued, could secure international support for the establishment of Israel after the war, and once that state existed, American Jews would finally emigrate there. It is an unsubstantiated scenario, but even more troubling is that he labels these supposedly antisemitic Americans as Zionists.
The correct definition of a Zionist is someone who believes in the Jewish people's right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, not someone who wants Jews to leave for that land because they are tired of having them around. Such a person would be just as content if all Jews were deported to Mauritius. It is regrettable that a historian fails to understand this distinction, but even more regrettable that he fuels the rhetoric of contemporary Jew-haters.
You know the type: the Hamas-admiring laptop revolutionaries draped in Iraqi keffiyehs, who demonize Zionism and thereby conveniently disguise their antisemitism as "anti-Zionism", a multisyllabic term they can barely pronounce but enthusiastically deploy nonetheless. These same useful idiots often minimize or deny the Holocaust. Their preferred practice, however, is Holocaust inversion: "What the Jews are doing to the Palestinians now is just as bad."
To compare a Nazi extermination camp, whether Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor, Majdanek, Westerbork, or Breendonk, to Gaza is not merely an act of ignorance, deliberate or otherwise. It is the most extreme form of antisemitism. Transforming Holocaust victims, or the victims of October 7, into perpetrators of a new Shoah under the name Nakba serves to justify their Judeophobia and soothe their conscience. But it corrodes the soul because it is such a monumental lie. A lie that Casagranda and millions of others now believe.
To his credit, however, he does draw attention to America's refusal to bomb Auschwitz, as well as the other extermination camps and the logistical infrastructure that fed them. The Allies possessed sufficient information. In 1944, escaped prisoners Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler produced an extensive report containing a map drawn from memory and estimates of the death toll. The Slovak rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl forwarded it to the Allies with an urgent plea to destroy the gas chambers, railway lines, and bridges leading to Auschwitz, but Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy rejected the proposal. British codebreakers at Bletchley Park had also intercepted German radio traffic concerning mass executions. Allied reconnaissance aircraft photographed the complex from the air. Yet nobody acted.
Why?
It remains one of the most painful questions of the Second World War. Did they truly fail to understand what was taking place in the camps? That myth persisted for a long time, but it is simply untrue. The British cited "technical reasons," though they never clearly specified what those reasons were. The American objection was somewhat more elaborate: a strike on Auschwitz would divert airpower from operations directed against Germany's war machine. Bombing relatively small targets would also be risky and could result in the deaths of large numbers of prisoners. The doctrine was straightforward: concentrate all available resources on Germany's military defeat, and the persecution would end with it.
That argument sounds rational only if one ignores the reality on the ground. As Vrba later explained, an air raid on the crematoria could have achieved much more than the destruction of a few buildings. It would have demonstrated to the Nazis that the world knew about their genocide. It would have given encouragement to the camp resistance. And amid the resulting chaos, prisoners might have escaped or even sabotaged the extermination machinery itself.
The military arguments appear even less convincing when one considers that, in 1944, American bombers did attack the IG Farben facilities at Monowitz, only a few kilometers away. They knew the details of the Endlösung der Judenfrage, yet they subordinated the rescue of an entire people to other wartime objectives. Historical documentation further reveals that antisemitism played a role that should not be underestimated.
Antisemitism was by no means an exclusively European phenomenon. Why was American refugee policy so restrictive, and why were rescue efforts launched so slowly? Why was saving Europe's Jews never designated an official war aim? The matter goes even further. At the end of 1943, it emerged that officials within the State Department had deliberately obstructed information about the mass murder. Their internal report carried the devastating title Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews. Antisemitism was present within the American state apparatus as well. On that point, Casagranda is correct. But to call such antisemites Zionists is intellectually dishonest.
The only truly valuable aspect of Casagranda's interview is that it reminds listeners of the inertia and moral failure of the American government, which could have disrupted a machinery of death and saved lives, yet consciously chose not to do so.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Who said that again?
And yet, an explosion almost did occur in the largest death camp in Europe. Not thanks to those who could easily have dropped the bomb and had a moral duty to do so, but thanks to the prisoners themselves.
For months, Jewish women smuggled tiny quantities of gunpowder out of the Union munitions factory, where they were forced to manufacture shell components for the Nazis. The powder eventually reached the men of the Sonderkommando, who fashioned primitive explosives from it. During the uprising of October 7, 1944, Crematorium IV was set ablaze and severely damaged. There were also attempts to destroy crematorium installations with explosives, though these did not succeed as planned.
The price was horrific. Four hundred and fifty-one members of the Sonderkommando were killed during the fighting and escape attempts, while another 200 prisoners were executed in retaliation. Róża Robota, Ala Gertner, Ester Wajcblum, and Regina Safirsztajn were tortured and hanged on January 5, 1945, barely three weeks before the camp's liberation.
When I stood in Birkenau myself, I saw the ruins of the crematoria with my own eyes. Toward the end of the war, the Nazis attempted to erase the evidence of their crimes by dismantling the extermination facilities and blowing up the crematoria. They succeeded only partially. Large sections of concrete, walls, and brickwork still remain today. What was intended to destroy the evidence ultimately became evidence itself.
While the free world continued to deliberate and hesitate, people condemned to death risked the last remnants of their lives for something that should have fallen from the sky long before:
A bomb on Auschwitz. Image credits: Auschwitz-Birkenau by Alexandra S. Villars
