JustOneMinute: What If?

What If?

Could the Allie s have realized the Holocaust was underway? Could they have prevented, or ameliorated it?

Posted by Tom Maguire on July 31, 2005 | Permalink

Comments

I don't know, Mein Kampf and the rise to power of Hitler should have given them an indication...

Posted by: Seixon | July 31, 2005 at 01:04 PM

The trouble with Mein Kampf is that virtually every politician with a populist streak in Europe - and many in the US - were raving anti-Semites in those days, and many of them had published tracts in which they vowed to do nasty things to Jews. Hitler was pretty much the only politician who actually followed through on his "campaign promises" in this regard.

About the only way we could have known would have been to have better intelligence, and I'd imagine that our only options to do anything would have been to change military strategy to do an enormously risky D-Day style attack into Poland first, maybe from Sweden or something? Commando raids of the camps themselves may have slowed down things - and probably gotten lots of highly-trained special forces types killed - but only actually closing the camps by conquering and holding them would have actually stopped their use.

Posted by: Foobarista | July 31, 2005 at 02:57 PM

Why do discussions of what the Allies could have done about the Holocaust, always "nonchalantly" mention air raids on the camps or rail lines - as if Allied commanders have the right to risk the lives of those airmen on targets of no tactical or strategic importance. Flying in bombers, in WW2, was the single worse combat duty, with a higher loss ratio to troops involved in combat than Marines hitting the beaches of the Pacific.

Why does a European - of any stripe - have some special claim on the life of some American kid from Iowa? Why should that kid have been sent all the way across the skies of Europe - fighting flak and fighters all the way there and back - on a "rescue mission". To put it simply, I feel sorry for those who ended up in the camps; but I don't feel they, or those who support their point a view, have any right to demand that others be sent to die on their behalf.

Posted by: Michael D. Giles | July 31, 2005 at 03:56 PM

While this question is useful as an academic study, it has no worth as a practical lesson in the current political climate of the world. We have no moral authority to pass judgment on the actions of those who brought the Holocaust to an end. The unwillingness of the world to act in a swift and decisive manner in places such as the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq, North Korea, and others even as genocide and mass slaughters were/are being documented in the worldwide media has revealed the cry “Never again” to be nothing more than empty words.

Posted by: Mike C. | July 31, 2005 at 06:12 PM

During World War II, Arthur Koestler, using only publicly available information, found out about the murder of the Jews and published on it in his novel Arrival and Departure. The Allies knew what was happening. They also knew that they didn't want any more Jews in their countries, and didn't feel like doing anything about it. I mean, it isn't like their lives were important in any way. Much better to let them get killed, and then hang Nazis for it. And don't ever mention that Hitler would have let them leave Germany alive, if the Allies would have taken them. I mean, really, let Jews in?

As for the "I'm all right, Jack" attitude so many display here, I sincerely hope that one day you need help, and I'm there, so I can laugh and walk away.

THE SAUDS MUST BE DESTROYED!

Posted by: Stephen M. St. Onge | August 01, 2005 at 01:37 AM

It's more than a little ironic that the linked article is from the nyt. See "Buried by the Times : The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper".

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521812879/103-0184924-9894244

A quote from one review on Amazon:

"But the problem with this book is that it focuses on the Times as if it somehow committed this sin for the first time in misleading the American public. I agree with her thesis that the Times has been hoisted as the most influential paper in the world among lazy elites, including those who have reviewed her book, but that is rapidly changing now, primarily due to the fact that the paper has failed so miserably in many areas, including the latest diversions of small change like Jason Blair. But the biggest holocaust of the last century did not occur in the ovens built by the Nazis, it was committed in the Ukraine when Stalin's forced collectivization starved far more Ukrainians to death than Hitler killed with his Zyklon-B. And the Times had a reporter, Walter Duranty, in Moscow at the time who won a Pulitzer Prize for mis-reporting this horror. Duranty was "Stalin's apologist" in many ways, dismissing honest reporters who covered the biggest holocaust as "overwrought" when they filed stories about the millions murdered by Stalin, filing stories about the "show trials" of Stalin as if they were legitimate trials that led to the deaths of millions more, and many other atrocities. Most serious scholars now have to acknowledge that the starvation of 8 million Ukrainians was not just an "unintentional consequence" of collectivization, and it really remains the NY Times most outrageous attack on the truth, the Nazi death camps notwithstanding. There are many stories in the NY Times that reveal the lie that is it's masthead of "All the news that's fit to print." The Times fought mightily to keep Duranty's prize last year when serious reporters wanted to take it away because it was gained by fraudulent means. Of course the paper has done a great job of condemning the awarding of Olympic medals by drug-enhanced athletes, but can't see the hypocrisy of its own efforts to keep Duranty's decades of duplicity being rewarded with a Pulitzer."

Posted by: max | August 01, 2005 at 08:09 AM