Letters to the Editor

Abstract

To the Editor: Stuart Erdheim Originally, William Rubinstein claimed (AJH letters, September 1997) the idea that the Allies should have bombed Auschwitz “first implausibly surfaced in the mid-1960s.” David Wyman responded (AJH letters, March 1998) with a long list of instances in which the bombing idea was, in fact, publicly discussed during the Holocaust itself as well as during the 1950s and early 1960s. Now, Rubinstein (AJH letters, March 1998) presents a new version—he claims it was Wyman himself who was “absolutely central” to stirring public discussion of the bombing idea, with his 1978 article in Commentary on the subject. Rubinstein even goes so far as to falsely claim that the bombing idea was “not mentioned” in the “classic early popular or academic works on the Holocaust . . . by [Raul] Hilberg . . . and many others”—when, in fact, Hilberg explicitly discusses the bombing issue on p. 771 of his The Destruction of the European Jews (First Quadrangle paperback edition, 1967). For further evidence of Rubinstein’s apparent unfamiliarity with much of the basic secondary literature concerning the bombing issue, consider the fact that from the “mid-1960s” (Rubinstein’s initial date of the origins of the debate), until Wyman’s article appeared in 1978 (Rubinstein’s new date for the start of the debate), there were numerous discussions of the bombing idea in books and journals. To cite just a few: Samuel Katz wrote about it in both Hebrew and in English, in the 1966 and 1968 editions, respectively, of his Days of Fire, even including a detailed map showing the number of miles from Allied air bases in Italy to Auschwitz. Arthur Morse discussed the idea of bombing Auschwitz in his 1967 book, While Six Million Died. Nora Levin mentioned it in her 1968 work, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry 1933–1945. Henry Feingold referred to it in American Jewish Historical Quarterly in 1968 (LVIII:1), in his 1969 book, The Politics of Rescue, and in essays he wrote in 1969 for Judaism (18:3, Summer 1969) and for Randolph Braham’s volume, Hungarian Jewish Studies. Aryeh Morgenstern considered the issue in the June 1971 edition of the Israeli scholarly journal Yalkut Moreshet. In 1973, Saul Friedman discussed the bombing idea in his book, No Haven for the Oppressed, and Helen Fein raised the issue in Patterns of Prejudice (September–October 1973). Bela Vago spoke about it at the Second Yad Vashem International Historical Conference in 1974 (and the proceedings [End Page 219] were published in 1977). Israel Television broadcast a documentary, “Why Wasn’t Auschwitz Bombed?,” on February 15, 1975. Herbert Druks discussed it in his 1977 book, The Failure to Rescue. The bombing issue was so widely known by that time that even then-Secretary of State Cyrus Vance spoke about it when he visited Yad Vashem in February 1977. David Wyman’s 1978 article in Commentary was the first in-depth, scholarly analysis of the feasibility of bombing Auschwitz and the reasons the Roosevelt administration failed to do so. But to claim, as Rubinstein does, that Wyman invented the idea out of whole cloth and foisted it upon a gullible public or scholarly community is patently absurd. Stuart Erdheim [End Page 220] To the Editor: Rafael Medoff The document cited by William Rubinstein (AJH letters, March 1998), concerning American Jewish attitudes toward the idea of bombing Auschwitz, does not show what he thinks it does. The document in question is a summary—not a verbatim transcript—of a conversation between John Pehle of the U.S. government War Refugee Board and a handful of American Jewish leaders in August 1944. (The document was first cited in my 1987 book, The Deafening Silence, pp. 158–159.) According to the summary, one of the Jewish leaders raised the idea of sending U.S. airplanes to bomb Auschwitz, to which Pehle replied, first, that such a proposal was “unfeasible” and, second, that the idea of bombing the death camps “had been objected to by Jewish organizations because it would result in the extermination of large numbers of Jews there.” In describing such a bombing raid as “unfeasible,” Pehle was merely repeating what he had been told by...