Balancing Act: Bombing the Auschwitz Rail Lines

The inherent conflict between the strategic and humanitarian concerns of the Allies as the war drew to a close is perhaps best symbolized by certain aspects of the Holocaust. One of the major ethical debates that has arise out of the Holocaust is the decision by the Allied forces not to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz, the single deadliest of the Nazi extermination camps. While a consensus has arisen since the end of the war that bombing the rail lines was impractical and could actually have done more harm than good, a persistent minority of voices has insisted that the Allies should have done anything possible to prevent or delay the extermination process.

The majority position on this question was well stated by Peter Novick, in his book The Holocaust in American Life. He points out that the precision of Allied bombers was such that perhaps as many as a third of the bombs dropped on the camp would have hit prisoners' barracks. Moreover, experience with the strategic bombing had indicated that bombing of rail lines was actually quite ineffective. Novick concludes, "the current received version -- a fruitful opportunity, fervently pressed and frivolously dismissed -- must contend with the strong possibility that this ambivalently presented suggestion was a well-intentioned but misbegotten idea that we can perhaps be grateful was turned down."[1]

The minority position is represented by David Wyman, in his book The Abandonment of the Jews. Wyman focuses much of his argument on the bombing of rail lines specifically to prevent the deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz and elsewhere in the summer and fall of 1944. He lays the blame at the feet of the Roosevelt administration and specifically the War Refugee Board. Conversely, he rejects arguments about the feasibility and efficacy of bombing the rail lines and the preference of the Operational Plans Division to bomb industrial targets. "In reality, Auschwitz was part of those target systems," Wyman writes. "OPD was either uninformed or untruthful."[2]

For my own part, I come down on the side of the majority position as expressed by Novick. In either case, the debate brings to the fore the matter of whether a balance can struck between strategic and humanitarian goals. I don't think that they can: strategic goals or concerns will always override humanitarian goals. In considering this question, I often think of the current situation in North Korea. On the one hand, North Korea is easily the most repressive state in the world today. Its leadership cares so little about its own people that the country has regularly experienced famine while the ruling elite lives in luxury. It is a situation that virtually calls out for humanitarian intervention. On the other hand, North Korea has nuclear weapons, and any attempt to intervene militarily in its affairs would almost certainly be answered with the deployment of these weapons. The strategic concerns must outweigh the humanitarian concerns.

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     [1] Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1999), 58.
     [2] David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 297.

Strategic Bombing: A Moral Hazard?

To say that the Allied campaign of "strategic bombing" during World War II was controversial is ans understatement. With the exception of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it might be the single most debated purely military aspect of the war. While the initial reactions to the strategic bombings of Germany might have been quite positive from the standpoint of military assessments, time has tempered this uniform positivity; moreover, the moral aspect of the bombings has continued to be a concern for analysts.

Before the war was even over, proponents of strategic bombing such as J.M. Spaight, a one-time assistant secretary in the Air Ministry of the U.K., were justifying the tactic. In his widely distributed pamphlet Bombing Vindicated, Spaight relies heavily on tu quoque arguments along the lines of "Germany did x, so we are justified in doing y." Strictly from a logical standpoint, his argument therefore is flawed. Nevertheless, the distinctions he attempts to draw between combatants and civilians are important ones, particularly as it regards civilians working in military industries. Spaight writes, "To spare them might mean, however, that the lives of one's own fighting men were sacrificed. It is to save these men's lives to put a war-plant out of operation or to stop a trainload of munitions from reaching the front."[1]

However, this statement fails to recognize a key distinction in international law between combatants and civilians, i.e., that it is an accepted convention of warfare that combatants' lives are more expendable than those of civilians, if only because the first rule of warfare is that combatants will die, whereas only extraordinarily recently has warfare endangered the lives of large numbers of civilians. A moral calculus that states that one's combatants will suffer fewer deaths than one's enemy's combatants is wholly defensible; one that states that one's combatants will suffer fewer deaths by taking the lives of one's enemy's civilian population is less so.

In an assessment of strategic bombing written 40 years after the war was over, Kenneth P. Werrell of the U.S. Naval Institute offered some specifics of the strategic bombing campaign while specifically avoiding a moral justification. He noted that nearly one-quarter of bombs were dropped on non-strategic targets,[2] that the losses suffered by the RAF, particularly of officers, was hard to justify,[3] and that German production actually peaked during the strategic bombing,[4] although the latter point was perhaps a consequence of late full mobilization of the Nazis, which was not until after Stalingrad. The chief benefits, Werrell notes, besides negative effects on morale,[5] were the defeat of the Luftwaffe, the need of Germany to divert forces in response to the bombing, and the economic effects.[6] From his standpoint, the strategic bombing was clearly worth the lives that were lost -- military and civilian included.

That said, I can't help but wonder how assessments of strategic bombing such as Spaight's and Werrell's would have been affected had the Allies not won the war. If the U.K. had lost the Battle of Britain, would Spaight and Werrell justify the Blitz as one of the factors in that defeat? If the Axis powers had won, would Tojo and Momma have put Stimson and Macarthur on trial and hanged them? Certainly, to the victors go the spoils, but the mere fact that some of the people sentenced at Nuremberg committed crimes no more serious than those committed by the Allies (e.g., Doenitz serving 10 years for unlimited submarine warfare) is troublesome. In the end, it seems that, from a strictly military point of view, the strategic bombing campaign was justified, but I don't think it can ever be morally justified.

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     [1] J.M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1944), 116.
     [2] Kenneth P. Werrell, "The Strategic Bombing of Germany in World War II: Costs and Accomplishments," Journal of American History, 73, no. 3 (1986): 707.
     [3] Ibid, 708.
     [4] Ibid, 711.
     [5] Ibid, 712.
     [6] Ibid, 709.