"The first proposal to bomb Auschwitz was made on 16 May 1944 by a Slovak rabbi." That was 3 weeks before D-Day (June 6, 1944).
Eisenhower's policy was to defeat Germany, and not get distracted. He had planned to bypass Paris, which wasn't on the route to Berlin.[2] (De Gaulle went off-script and liberated Paris ahead of schedule, but that's another story.) Eisenhower was trying to hold an alliance with different goals together. All the allies were agreed on "defeat Germany", but there were other national goals. Britain was concerned about preserving its empire, for example. To hold the alliance together, Eisenhower focused on "win the war" above all else.
The person this article is about was in the Red Army. "One of just 69 men in his 12,000-strong division to survive the war, Mr Dushman suffered serious injuries during the conflict". The USSR had about 20 million casualties in WWII. Never forget that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_bombing_debate
[2] https://www.historynet.com/the-generals-who-brought-paris-ba...
PBS's "Secrets of the Dead" series did an episode about this last year: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/bombing-auschwitz-wnrzgw/47...
How he woke up safe on his bed in the middle of the courtyard ; There were walls when he had gone to sleep before, but the walls weren't there anymore.
When I became older, I learned that fifty prisoners in his barrack had died this night.
Objectives (such as bridges) were often missed by hundreds of meters.
“Of those aircraft recorded as attacking their target, only one in three got within 5 mi (8.0 km).”
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/worldwar2/thea... has data for later years. It got better, but stayed bad.
https://www.airforcemag.com/article/1008daylight/:
“Bombing accuracy was terrible. The average circular error in 1943 was 1,200 feet, meaning that only 16 percent of the bombs fell within 1,000 feet of the aiming point”
I think the same trains or tracks that carried prisoners carried the (paltry) food for the camps, so I guess it's a trolley problem still.
It might have helped but it’s far from a certainty.
The tools of killing were bullets, disease, and starvation.
The Nazis ran out of many things, towards the end of the war. But never bullets.
Edit: I have no idea why people are doing the drive by downvote thing here? Maybe you think I'm denying that gas chambers were real?
No. I'm saying there were concentration camps without them, where prisoners were mass-murdered as I described above. That statement is not controversial.
I don't think destroying the gas chambers would have been enough to stop Auschwitz.
But how many planes would this have taken? How many would have been lost? No loss was affordable during most of the war; industrial production won it for the Allies as much as anything did.
There were no easy decisions to make.
War is not a video game.
Bombing an enemy concentration camp, especially with WWII-era weapons, would mean killing the people you're trying to save.
[1]https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/theresiens...