Auschwitz:
The forgotten evidence
When an Allied photo-reconnaissance plane flew over southern Poland in the summer of 1944, following a bombing raid on 20 August, it took extraordinary images of the Nazis' most evil extermination camp: Auschwitz–Birkenau. From these photos, it is possible to see in detail how the SS organised their factory of death in which about 12,000 people were being murdered daily. But the pictures were not analysed at the time. Instead they were simply filed away.
This is a composite of a number of adjoining images taken on 25 August 1944 and shows Auschwitz–Birkenau in great detail. For instance, on the left-hand side of the camp, plumes of smoke can be seen rising from behind one of the gas chambers. By this time, with the killing of the Hungarian Jews in full swing, the extermination process is over-stretched. To cope, the SS have had pits dug in which surplus corpses are being burned in the open.
This photograph shows Crematoria IV and V (the dark T-shaped buildings on the right). The straight light-coloured line that runs horizontally across the image contains a railway line. A train has just arrived, bringing more victims for the gas chambers.
Another view of Auschwitz–Birkenau, taken from a bomber that has just carried out a raid on the nearby I G Farben synthetic oil factory, which was part of the Auschwitz complex. On the left-hand side of the image, you can see a cluster of bombs about to fall on the camp, dropped by the bomber by mistake. They kill some 40 inmates and 15 Nazi guards, but do little material damage. They don't interrupt the Nazis' own killing process.
To bomb or not to bomb?
At the time these photographs were taken, the Allies knew that Auschwitz was more than a slave labour camp. Winston Churchill, appalled at the reports of the mass murders there, called Auschwitz 'probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world'. He implored the RAF to bomb the camp, but this was never done. It has been passionately argued about ever since.
On the one hand, the Allies felt that a precision bombing raid – one that would destroy the gas chambers but leave the inmates unharmed – had almost no chance of success. Coupled with this was the belief that they had the Germans on the run, and so all Allied military effort should be directed towards bringing about the enemy's destruction. That, the Allies thought, was the best hope for those imprisoned and dying in Auschwitz.
On the other hand, the Jewish Agency and others (including, as it turned out, most of the camp's survivors) felt that even an unsuccessful attempt to bomb Auschwitz would have done much for Allied morale (and that of the inmates). In addition, many believed that the Allies had a moral duty to try to wipe this terrible place off the face of the earth.
However, more than four months would pass from the time the photographs were taken before the extermination camp was finally liberated by the Soviet army in January 1945. In that time, many thousands of people – Jews, Gypsies, socialists, gay men and others – were murdered.