Fears intensified in May 1944, when reports from Budapest noted the construction of “special baths” for Jews that were in reality disguised gas chambers arranged for mass murder. Hungary’s Jews were said to be living in fear of imminent annihilation.36 In June 1944 the Czechoslovak state council disclosed it had received reports from Nazioccupied Europe of at least seven thousand Czechoslovak Jews being dragged to gas chambers in the notorious German concentration camp of Auschwitz.37
Grim reports of Nazi gassing galvanized more representatives of world Jewry to intensify their campaign to stop the genocide. On June 21, 1944, John W. Pehle, executive secretary of the War Refugee Board, urgently pleaded with the U.S. War Department to “bomb the railroad line… used for deportation of Jews from Hungary to Poland,” and on November 8 he urged the bombing of Auschwitz itself.
On behalf of the War Department, however, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy rejected both of Pehle’s requests, saying such an operation would divert “air support essential… to decisive operations elsewhere” and would “be of doubtful efficacy.” Besides, said McCloy, “such an effort, even if practicable, might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans.”38
The American failure to bomb Auschwitz is a topic hotly debated among historians, but McCloy’s role in making that decision has come in for persistent criticism from a variety of perspectives.39 Some of McCloy’s arguments to Pehle in retrospect seem to ring hollow. According to McCloy’s biographer, Kai Bird, writing in 1992, at least as early as 1943 McCloy was one of the few Washington officials who had both detailed intelligence information about Hitler’s proposed Final Solution and the power to do something about it. It is possible he could have saved as many as 100,000 Jews from the gas chamber, yet he refused to intervene. The question of whether to bomb Auschwitz was never brought to President Roosevelt. As a result, says Bird, McCloy “bears substantial responsibility for this misjudgment.”40
Jan Karski, a Polish resistance fighter who escaped from Nazi imprisonment to warn Western leaders about the extermination camps, without success, later got to view several American aerial reconnaissance photos showing Auschwitz. “It was the saddest thing,” he later bitterly recalled. “With a magnifying glass we could actually read the names and numbers of the Hungarian Jews standing on line waiting to be gassed. Yet McCloy claimed the target was too far away.”41
Others have argued that the Allies did not have the ability to conduct precision bombing, and even if they had struck Auschwitz, the damage could have been quickly repaired or replaced. According to Peter Novick, “Though Allied intelligence knew about some of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, they had no knowledge of two cottages converted to killing facilities in the woods west of Birkenau, one no longer used and the other used on a standby basis.”42
Eventually the world began to receive independent confirmation that the alarmists’ worst assessments were true. On August 30, 1944, the New York Times published a stunning firsthand account by one of its correspondents, W. H. Lawrence, from Lublin, Poland, where he had toured the just-liberated Nazi death camp at Majdanek, where as many as 1.5 million persons had been killed in the last three years according to Soviet and Polish authorities.43 Lawrence acknowledged he had been skeptical of the veracity of the stories of the atrocities, and particularly of the accounts of Hitler’s systematic extermination campaign against the Jews. After witnessing the scene with his own eyes, however, he admitted, “I have just seen the most terrible place on the face of the earth, inspecting its hermetically sealed gas chambers, in which the victims were asphyxiated, and five furnaces in which the bodies were cremated, and I have talked with German officers attached to the camp, who admitted quite frankly that it was a highly systematized place for annihilation, although they, of course, denied any personal participation in the murders.” Calling it “a place that must be seen to be believed,” he added, “I have been present at numerous atrocity investigations in the Soviet Union, but never have I been confronted with such complete evidence, clearly establishing every allegation made by those investigating German crimes.”
Lawrence noted that a twelve-foot-high barbed-wire fence that was charged with death-dealing electricity encircled the death camp, cutting off escape. “Inside you see group after group of trim green buildings, not unlike the barracks in an Army camp in the United States,” he wrote. “Outside the fence there were fourteen high machine-gun turrets and at one edge were kennels for more than 200 especially trained, savage man-tracking dogs used to pursue escaped prisoners.” Lawrence’s story described scenes of hastily buried bodies, tens of thousands of shoes piled high, huge crematoria, and other searing images. Some newly arrived prisoners, he noted, had been taken directly to a room that was “hermetically sealed with apertures in the roof, down which the Germans threw opened cans of ‘Zyklon-B,’ a poison gas consisting of prussic acid crystals, which were a light blue chalky substance. This produced death quickly.” Near the shower house were two other death chambers fitted to use Zyklon gas or carbon monoxide, one of them measuring seventeen meters square. Lawrence’s report didn’t mention where or how the Germans had gotten their ideas for the execution gas chamber. Nor did he point out where the chemicals had come from, except to say, “We saw opened and unopened cans of Zyklon gas that bore German labels. We were told the victims always received a bath in advance of execution because the hot water opened the pores and generally improved the speed with which the poison gas took effect,” added Lawrence, who also wrote, “There were glass-covered openings in these death chambers so the Germans could watch the effect on their victims and determine when the time had come to remove their bodies.” Based on his personal inspection, he concluded, “I am now prepared to believe any story of German atrocities, no matter how savage, cruel and depraved.” He also stated that German war criminals should be hunted down and severely punished.
Lawrence’s account was not an isolated one. By November 1944 the Jewish underground had clandestinely printed a booklet from Nazioccupied Poland that described the gas-chamber killings in the German death camp at Treblinka.44 Increasingly, oral reports as well circulated about the network of gas chambers and crematoria the Nazis had constructed—so much so that the Allied commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a German American, felt duty-bound to demonstrate to the world that such reports of Nazi brutality were not mere propaganda, and he ordered all available units to tour a captured concentration camp. “We are told the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for,” Eisenhower said. “Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.”45 Eisenhower also encouraged his forces to document what they found when they liberated the camps. William Casey, the head of secret intelligence for the European theater for the Office of Strategic Services, later observed, “The most devastating experience of the war for most of us was the first visit to a concentration camp…. We knew in a general way that Jews were being persecuted, that they were being rounded up… and that brutality and murder took place at these camps. But few if any comprehended the appalling magnitude of it. It wasn’t sufficiently real to stand out from the general brutality and slaughter which is war.”46