Examining History: Why weren’t Auschwitz and the other concentration camps bombed by the Allies during WWII?

On Quora, Eitan Krokowski asks:

Why weren’t Auschwitz and the other concentration camps bombed by the Allies during WWII?

My reply:

There are several reasons why the Anglo-American Allies did not use the Eighth Army Air Force or British Bomber Command to bomb German extermination camps such as Auschwitz or Treblinka during World War II.

First, there was a great deal of skepticism among military and political leaders in Washington and London when European Jews began reporting on what the Germans were doing in Poland and the Soviet Union. A few American publications, including LIFE magazine, had published several illustrated articles about the plight of Poland’s Jewish population under Nazi occupation, but most newspapers of the day (the New York Times included) tended to publish “atrocity” stories in the back pages. (Editors, reporters, and publishers of the day still remembered the often-false or wildly exaggerated stories of German atrocities in France and Belgium during World War I and didn’t want to be accused after the war of publishing unconfirmed rumors or even fabricated stories.) Some of the skepticism was genuine: how could the country that gave the world Beethoven, Schiller, and Goethe descend to such barbarism? And, of course, some of that skepticism had its roots in anti-Semitism.

Second, for much of the period in which the camps were operating at high capacity (1942–1944), they were located in remote areas of Hitler’s Reich. B-17 and B-24 bombers had enough range to reach and bomb Auschwitz-Birkenau. but long-range fighter escorts with “legs” that would accompany the bombers weren’t available till 1944.

American bombers did bomb some of Auschwitz-Birkenau’s industrial facilities at least once during 1944. Here’s an aerial photo that was taken during the raid:

Photograph of Auschwitz concentration camp taken during a U.S. bombing raid on an I.G. Farben facility. Captions were added in 1978 by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Second, as Quora member Kelly La Rue pointed out, once the leadership of the Allied high command realized that the camps weren’t mere labor camps but instead were death factories, a decision was made to not bomb the camps or the rail lines that led to them. The camps could be bombed, of course, especially once the P-51Ds with drop tanks entered service in March of ‘44. However, if the Eighth Air Force had bombed Auschwitz and caused hundreds, even thousands of deaths among the inmate population, the Nazis could have said, “We didn’t kill any Jews in the resettlement camps! The Allies did, with their terror bombing raids!”

Third, no one then in a position of authority ever imagined the scope of Hitler’s Final Solution. It wasn’t until the camps were overrun by the Soviets that the world learned of the evils that went on in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and other death camps in Poland and other conquered territories.