Stop Believing The Allies Could Have Bombed Auschwitz To Save Lives
According to this fallacy - perpetuated, among others, by our Prime Minister - the Final Solution could have been stopped by military means that were easily available to the Allies at the time.
By Asher Izrael | Sep. 9, 2013
It horrifies me every time people raise the false claim that the Allies could have bombed Auschwitz and stopped the mass murders in the Holocaust. I feel particularly distressed when people use that claim for political gain. It was hinted at, without any political context, in Ari Shavit’s article (Hebrew Magazine, September 4) about the Israel Air Force’s flyby at Auschwitz exactly 10 years ago, and it was uttered explicitly for the clearest political reasons during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit there last June.
“When I finally walked into that archive [at Auschwitz] and read through all the files, I discovered further proof of a shocking historic truth - the Allied leaders knew what was happening here,” the prime minister said in his speech.
“They could have easily diverted their planes, which were bombing the nearby chemical plants, to here," Netanyahu said. "They could have bombed the railway tracks that led to Auschwitz-Birkenau. They could have easily bombed the furnaces in Birkenau in order to stop the death machine. The Allied leaders knew about the Holocaust as it was happening. They understood perfectly what was taking place in the death camps. They were asked to act, they could have acted, and they did not.
“The lesson for us, for the Jews, is clear,” he continued. “We cannot be complacent in the face of threats of our annihilation. We cannot bury our heads in the sand or assume that others will do the work for us.”
This was a clear hint that we must act on our own against Iran, and that we can rely on no one - including our ally, the United States.
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http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.545982
