What If the Allies Tried to Disrupt the Holocaust - through bombing the railways to the death camps, or through Covert Sabotage Tactics?
By Rupert Read and Joseph Eastoe
In 2004, after the release of RAF photos taken by British reconnaissance planes of Auschwitz in 1944, the World Jewish Congress in New York declared that ‘this proves beyond doubt that Britain and the Allies knew about the killings long before the end of the war, but chose to do nothing.’ A what-if that is often mentioned, but rarely explored in any detail, is: What if the Allies had tried to stop the Holocaust, by bombing the railways into the extermination camps, during World War II? So, in this counterfactual history, we actually explore this.
Usually when this counterfactual idea is mentioned, it is assumed that this - bombing the railway lines - is what the Allies ought to have done. It turns out, matters are rather less straightforward. The Allies had some good reasons not to put resources into doing this, as we explore a little below. They knew that it would be technically unstraightforward to pull off, partly because of the inaccuracy of bombing in those days, and partly because even if rail lines were badly damaged, the Germans could quickly fix them since they had independently become quite adept at repairing damaged railway lines; and the Allies reasoned that simply ending the war as quickly as possible might be as effective as targeting the Holocaust’s machinery of death directly at minimising the numbers killed. In our scenario below, we investigate how they could nevertheless have sought efficaciously to go ahead with seriously disrupting the Holocaust directly, and what the consequences might have been. This is a nuanced counterfactual history: it is very unclear that the Allies could have massively reduced the numbers murdered, and it is less clear than many have assumed that they should have tried. Read on, to find out what the gains and losses could have been, from an endeavour to terminate the Holocaust through direct military intervention…
Before we get started, we note that our experience has long been that thinking seriously about genocides can take a heavy psychological toll. Rupert in particular has at times experienced significant depression, having done so (especially after reading Browning’s Ordinary Men, the argument of which influences the counter-factual history told below). There is nothing ‘fun’ about this ‘What if’ in the way that sometimes counter-factual history can be fun. We note further that there are of course harrowing accounts of what those finding out about the Holocaust at the time went through, psycho-socially. For example, accounts of soldiers marching upon concentration/extermination camps and being unable to process the sheer cruelty and evil that humans could inflict on their fellow man. Owen Smart, a British Sergeant involved in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, wrote that he ‘had never heard of Bergen-Belsen’ and that he had heard of atrocities but didn’t realise really what they were. American soldier, Andrew Kiniry, was involved in the liberation of Buchenwald, on which he wrote ‘I can’t really describe it, to tell you how horrendous it was to see these people treated like animals’ and that ‘I don’t think they [the commanding officers] told us what we were getting into.’
Even if the soldiers were unaware of the horrors of the holocaust, the elites at the top of the chain-of-command amongst the Allies had received reports of Nazi-led genocide for many months - years, in fact - before their own troops began to liberate the camps, and decided to not deviate the war effort in response. What follows below is an account of how the war may have played out differently had the Allies responded to the reports of Jewish extermination with what we consider the most plausible mode of actually reducing the carnage: a wide-scale, covert, well-resourced and -maintained sabotage and rescue operation, supplemented by air raids targeting weak links in the chain of Holocaust-death. How many lives could have been saved by such a policy? How would it have affected the wider Allied war efforts? Most importantly, would the outcome of such a sabotage operation ultimately have been better than focusing on winning the war as quickly as possible?