1944: Boben auf Auschwitz? (2019) - full transcript
In April 1944, with the outcome of
World War II hanging in the balance,
two Jewish prisoners lay hidden near
the outer fence
of Auschwitz concentration camp.
It was almost impossible to escape
from Auschwitz.
So many people were caught almost
immediately, and tortured
and killed.
The dogs didn't sniff them out,
because they put tobacco soaked
in petrol around the hiding place.
They managed to stay there
undetected for three days.
On the 10th of April 1944, they
abandoned their hiding place
and cut through the fence.
They had to be audacious.
They had to be brave.
They escaped in order to warn the
world
that Auschwitz was a killing
mechanism.
Their eyewitness account of the mass
extermination of European Jews
would lead to one of the greatest
moral questions of the 20th century.
This killing complex can turn
several thousands of human beings
into ash in just 24 hours.
The failure to bomb Auschwitz...
No-one gave a damn.
They didn't care. They didn't want
to do it.
Auschwitz should have had the most
outrageous response
while it was happening.
And that's a moral failure of the
West.
Why was the greatest crime of modern
history allowed to proceed unimpeded
for almost two years?
A million Jews perished there by
gas.
It wasn't because of lack of
evidence.
Keep going, keep going...
Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler fled
through Nazi-occupied Poland
to the Slovakian town of Zilina,
where they made contact with the
Jewish Underground.
Slovakia is aligned with Nazi
Germany
and it is the first country
to voluntarily deport its Jews.
Vrba and Wetzler made it to a safe
house.
They were desperate to complete
their mission to let the world know
what was happening to Jews in
Poland.
The extermination of the Jews was
carried on in great secrecy.
It wasn't advertised.
Therefore, until then, we had no
cogent
or clear description of what went on
at Auschwitz.
Oskar Krasnansky of the Jewish
Underground was sent to interview
Vrba and Wetzler.
My name is Krasnansky, from
Bratislava.
How do I know you're not fantasists
wasting my time?
Four, four, zero, seven, zero.
I asked him, "Why have you put this
tattoo on your arm?"
And then he looked at me and he
said,
"Where did you think I have been?
"In a sanatorium?"
And that's when he told me that he
has been to Auschwitz.
Why are you tattooed on your arm and
you on your chest?
The chest tattoos are imprinted with
huge brutality.
Many people fainted.
Is that why they started tattooing
people on their arms?
No.
No, they did that because the chest
tattoos faded too quickly.
You must tell me everything.
Every detail that you know about
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Yes.
Auschwitz is a killing centre.
Not here, not now.
Separately.
If you don't know who these men are,
you want to interrogate them
to make sure that they're not
telling you a bullshit story.
Auschwitz is not a household name
in early 1944.
There's a lot of confusion over,
"What is this place?"
And so, at the beginning, people
just knew that Jews were being taken
to Nazi-occupied Poland.
The Polish Underground had managed
to smuggle some information
about the camp outside, but, on the
whole,
this information is fragmentary
and sometimes contradictory.
Vrba and Wetzler's interrogation was
meticulously recorded,
as in a court of law.
How did you escape?
Well, we kept to the forest,
travelling only by night.
How long?
It took us 11 days. No, no.
How long were you in Auschwitz?
I arrived there on the
30th of June 1942.
We've heard rumours that there is
gas.
That Jews are killed there by gas
machines,
and by mass electrocution.
When you look at the way he did it,
the professionalism,
it reflects that this was someone
who knew the information he was
getting
was potentially a game-changer.
The interview was done with the idea
of, "We might bring legal charges,
"and we are going to get nothing but
the facts."
The, er...
the perimeter wire is electrified.
There are gas installations.
Gas chambers.
Go on.
Four gas chambers with crematoria
for burning.
The first crematorium opened in
March 1943, when prominent guests
from Berlin arrived to see the new
installation.
That day, they were able to witness
8,000 Jews from Krakow
gassed and burned.
They were very pleased with that
result.
How do you know all this?
I worked as a registrar in the
Birkenau section of the camp.
My daily duties included registering
the survivors
of each transportation,
meaning those who had survived the
train journey and had not,
on arrival at Auschwitz, been
selected for the gas.
Clerks can move around the different
sectors of the camp a little bit
more freely than most other
prisoners.
And, in this way, pick up
even-more-detailed information
about what exactly is happening
there.
I also got information about the
precise operation
of the gas chambers and crematoria,
from one of the Sonderkommando.
Sonderkommando?
You really know nothing, do you?
The prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau
who knew best what happened
at the gas chambers and the
crematoria, were the members
of the so-called Sonderkommando.
These were prisoners who were forced
by the SS to assist in the killing
and cremation at the crematoria
itself.
Rudy and Freddy felt that they
needed to have facts
that would convince people that this
really is happening.
And it was their idea
to write a report
that could be distributed
and shown as evidence.
Vrba and Wetzler wanted to include
as much granular evidence
as they could in that report,
and that included some drawings.
Auschwitz is a massive place and it
builds up over time
and in different ways.
So, the first camp is Auschwitz I,
which opens in 1940.
Later, they add Birkenau, a few
miles away,
which is where the gas chambers and
the crematorium are located.
This is an approximate sketch of the
dark heart
of Auschwitz's main camp and
Birkenau.
This is one of the gas chambers and
crematoria that the SS
constructed in Birkenau.
It's striking how much Vrba and
Wetzler got right
about the layout of the camp,
the mechanics of mass extermination
and even down to the names of
individual prisoners.
At the end of January, a large
convoy of French and Dutch Jews
arrived at Auschwitz.
But only a small proportion of those
reached the camp.
What happened to the rest of them?
They went straight from the trains
to the gas chambers.
Did you see these the selections
yourself?
Yes.
I belonged to a work command that
took me to a place called
"the ramp" which is where the trains
came in, sometimes one a day,
sometimes five, sometimes through
the night.
My job was to deal with the personal
property of those Jews
who'd been selected for the gas, and
to collect any dead bodies
from the cattle carts.
He sees how Jews are
forced off the trains.
He sees how they have to line up.
He sees how the SS selects them and
sends those
deemed to be weak and ill and not
fit for work
towards the gas chambers.
And this really gives Vrba a direct
insight,
he becomes an eyewitness of the
Holocaust.
Women, children, old people, people
they considered unfit,
sent straight to the gas chambers.
The fittest were separated out and
kept for labour.
How many? It varied.
A small percentage, 5 or 10%.
All this was done with force?
Sometimes, but usually without.
These people had no idea where they
were going.
I want to emphasise this.
A train would pull in,
and those getting off would have no
conception of what had just happened
to those who'd arrived a few hours
before.
They were describing the details of
genocide.
How was it done?
You are asking people to believe
something that was literally
beyond belief.
You can't put it into words.
Numbness.
Fright, anger, fury.
Rage!
And then a feeling of...
"Oh, my God."
And probably a sense of incredulity,
"Are these guys out of their mind?"
How did the SS deal with these
arrivals?
I told you already.
They were sent to the gas.
To the gas at Birkenau.
Some of the groups would be
frightened and disorientated.
Others would be almost relieved,
depending on how they'd been greeted
by the SS.
Sometimes they could be harsh,
using the sticks, dogs, lots of
shouting.
Other times it would be, "How nice
that you have arrived.
"We are sorry it was not too
comfortable.
"Things will change now."
Vrba's testimony had a horrifying
climax.
The Nazis new plan for
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
They are preparing for the
extermination
of the Hungarian Jews.
How do you know that?
That is why they have built the new
crematoria
and extended the ramp.
I said, how do you know the intent
to kill the Hungarian Jews?
- The SS. They talk.
- To you?
I am dirt.
To each other.
I heard it more than once.
They would always take the best food
from the trains for themselves.
They had a cosmopolitan diet.
I overheard one officer saying that
he was tired of Dutch cheese,
and looked forward to the arrival of
Hungarian salami.
Are you certain you heard this?
I have to ask.
Are you certain?
I heard it more than once.
It is why I knew I had to escape.
To warn people of what is to come.
Auschwitz becomes the centre of the
Holocaust and the catalyst for that
is the German invasion of Hungary in
March 1944.
Hungary had the largest mostly
intact Jewish community in Europe,
and the persecution starts almost
immediately.
On April 27th 1944, Vrba's warning
comes true.
The first 4,000 Jews were sent by
train from Hungary to Auschwitz.
It was a dress rehearsal for the
planned annihilation
of all 800,000.
I would argue that the Nazis are
losing the war and therefore
they're trying to win the genocide.
The crime that was being committed
was so horrific, so unique,
so outrageous, so evil, so awful.
The Nazis kept their extermination
programme a closely guarded secret,
to avoid resistance and disruption
on the trains.
But it was no longer secret.
Vrba and Wetzler's harrowing
testimony
was turned into a detailed report.
The Auschwitz Protocol.
The Auschwitz Protocol is very
scientific.
There isn't a lot of emotion and I
think that was a deliberate
choice on the part of the escapees.
They weren't going to express their
horror.
The horror is there.
Thanks to the Protocol, Jewish
activists in Slovakia
learnt of the Nazis' plans for the
Hungarian Jews.
So the duty to act was theirs.
Everybody who worked as a courier
had to be prepared to lose
their own life.
They would have been tortured to
reveal where they'd gotten it.
The last thing in the world Germany
wanted to happen
was that this information got out.
In the first week of May 1944,
the Protocol reached
Michael Weissmandl,
who worked secretly for the Jewish
Underground
in the Slovakian capital.
Rabbi Weissmandl was a very
passionate man.
He's in Slovakia to rescue people.
His sole goal is to take care of his
community...
and he does it with whatever means
he possibly can.
Weissmandl was not only among the
first to read these documents,
but he was the first to fully
believe these documents.
The Protocol had a devastating
effect on Weissmandl.
He had witnessed deportations.
He now realised the full horror that
awaited those who had gone.
Getting the information was one part
of the task.
Disseminating the information was
the other.
It had to be done with great
secrecy.
Weissmandl is sending this report
everywhere he can think of.
He's trying to get it to the
Jewish Agency in Jerusalem.
He's trying to get it to London,
hopefully to the United States.
He's sending them all in the hopes
that one cry in the darkness
will be heard.
Our bedroom door is knocked down
and two gendarmes are in our
bedroom...
yelling and screaming,
"You have two minutes to pack
a bundle.
"We are taking you away."
"Give up your jewellery.
"Give up anything you have in
possession."
My father looked at us as though
he wanted to save this picture
in his memory, of the family.
They said, "Get out of the house."
And certainly this sentence...
"Just stay calm.
"Remember, calmness is strength."
And they hit him, pushed him through
the door and he was out.
The rabbi was an elderly gentleman
with a white beard.
He was made to walk in the front of
the columns.
He was symbolic. "The Jews are
leaving town."
In spring 1944,
the world had little knowledge
of what was happening
to the Jews of Hungary.
Most were looking elsewhere, because
the war had reached
a critical juncture.
What was going on at that very time
in the United States and Britain
was the preparations for D-Day,
which the total outcome of the war
depended on.
Now, this took precedence over
everything.
The Pacific War was going on for the
Americans,
and that was an immense Herculean
effort.
They knew that as they moved closer
to Japan, the fight was going to get
harder and harder, because the
Japanese
were terrifically fierce fighters.
On the other side of Europe,
the Soviet Army at the time was
working full steam.
Stalin basically destroyed the
entire German Army
in some of the greatest battles of
modern history.
While the Allies were focused
on the battlefront,
the Protocol gained momentum.
Weissmandl's transmission reached
Roswell McClelland
at the War Refugee Board in neutral
Switzerland.
Is this it?
The War Refugee Board was established
by Roosevelt in early 1944,
and it was the only body anywhere in
the world which specifically
had the task of rescuing Jews.
They were selected...
for gassing.
It gives the impression of the
antechamber
of a bathing establishment.
It holds 2,000 people.
From there, a door and a few steps
lead down into the very long and
narrow gas chamber.
Roswell McClelland had a very
personal reaction
because he had gone to southern
France working with Jews
in internment camps in 1942,
and he knows intimately who these
people are.
He had watched them go to Auschwitz,
and now he's reading about what
happened to them.
When Rabbi Weissmandl sent the
Protocol,
he added a dramatic postscript.
It was an appeal for help but also a
rebuke for those who might refuse.
And you, our brothers in
all the free lands,
what are you doing about the
extermination
which swallows 10,000 every day?
For God's sake, do something now and
quickly.
He turned the question of what to do
about the death camp
into one of the great moral issues
of the 20th century.
He demanded that the Allied air
forces bomb Auschwitz.
He was the first to do so.
His call to bomb Auschwitz was
essentially a call of desperation
and a call of despair.
When people first hear about the
request of bombing of Auschwitz,
it's quite remarkable because they
are demanding
that they bomb a camp where their
own people
are being held prisoner?
It seemed very strange.
Let's set the whole goddamn thing
aflame,
let's destroy the entire thing.
Then we have accomplished something
and we've done
something enormously significant.
The clock was ticking.
McClelland sent a summary of the
Protocol to Washington.
Switzerland is completely surrounded
by Nazi territory.
You can't have a courier go in and
out.
So Roswell McClelland sends a cable
and said, "As soon as I can,
"you'll get the whole thing."
Since early summer 1942,
at least one and a half million
Jews have been killed.
There is evidence that from January
1944, preparations were being made
to receive and exterminate Hungarian
Jews in these camps.
For three days and three nights,
we were locked into that box.
Every morning we were travelling,
they opened those shutters
and they said,
"Throw out dead bodies."
With a tiny window for air
and one pail for bodily needs,
which...
turned out to be...
very, very...
embarrassing and unpleasant.
Something has always been going
around in my mind,
and I can't get rid of it and I feel
so ashamed.
Tell me, how can a 14-year-old
child...
hope people should die...
so he'll have room where to sit
down?
It was early in the morning that we
arrived.
The door opened and screams.
"Rasch! Rasch! Schnell! Schnell..."
And through the slits of the cart
that we were in,
I saw we were at Auschwitz. I didn't
have a clue what it was.
Nazi soldiers standing there with
rifles pointing at us,
others holding back snarling, big
dogs that were barking at us.
The first thing was - you breathe in
and there's a very strange smell.
It was, sort of, sweetish and
burning.
I thought, "It's a bakery,
"and they're baking bread."
And then I noticed that, to the
left, were people...
older and with glasses, and
children and women.
My mother...
my two little brothers...
and my baby in my mother's arm,
my grandfather, grandmother and my
aunt.
My mother went to the left.
With a flick of his hand to the
left,
they were walked off.
We didn't even have time to say
goodbye.
And that's when I saw my father the
last time.
He was 60 years old.
Roswell McClelland's cable
containing the summary of the
Auschwitz Protocol
and the plea to bomb the camp,
travelled from Switzerland
to the headquarters of the
War Refugee Board in Washington.
"It is urged by all sources of this
information in Slovakia
"and Hungary, that vital sections of
the rail lines be bombed.
"They also urge that the camps of
Auschwitz and Birkenau,
"especially the gas chambers and
crematoriums,
"recognisable by their high
chimneys,
"be bombed from the air."
The director of the War Refugee
Board was a lawyer
called John Pehle.
The decision about what to do with
this startling information
fell on his shoulders.
John Pehle was very measured, and he
was very diligent and dogged.
He is not cynical.
He really does believe that the
United States
can try to save people.
Would you please ask Dr Akzin to
step through to my office?
Oh, and hold all incoming calls
until he leaves.
When people saw the level of detail
of this atrocity,
they recognised that this was
something different.
This was something horrifying.
Ben.
I want you to take a look at this.
It's from Roswell McClelland.
Owsahitz?
I think he means Auschwitz.
Benjamin Akzin is a lawyer.
He grew up in Latvia and was an
incredibly intelligent man.
He's Jewish.
He certainly still had family and
friends back in Europe.
He sees the War Refugee Board as a
place where he can do some good.
This is...
It's inconceivable?
Incredible?
Unbelievable?
125,000 a month?
You can go straight to the President
with this.
What's so funny?
It doesn't work that way, Ben.
There are procedures.
There are rules.
There are no rules for this, surely?
If it's true.
We have to be sure, that's all.
It's very easy for us these days to
close our eyes
and imagine Auschwitz.
We've seen photos, many of us may
have even visited Auschwitz.
And so it's really hard to
reconstruct how chaotic
information about Auschwitz was.
There are eyewitnesses, two of them.
It is unusual, I grant.
It's unprecedented, John.
And Roswell McClelland seems to
think it's true.
That's quite something, isn't it?
It is.
Take a look at this.
It came in with the cable.
It's a list of suggestions made by
Jewish groups
from Slovakia and Switzerland.
Fielded by Roswell.
There is a logic to it, isn't there?
I mean...
If you accept this, then...
it kind of follows that you must
do this.
You know, my first thought is
they're right.
We should bomb, send them some
airmail.
I don't think the response...
"Let's bomb this place, can we react
to this atrocity?"
...was at all unusual.
I think all of us would have liked
to have thought
that's exactly the response we would
have.
This thing, John, it speaks of
industrial slaughter.
For a lot of people, it was the
Protocol that changed their mind.
That, in order to stop this mass
killing, you had to take out
the instrument of killing.
And the only way to take out the
instrument of killing
was to bomb the camp.
You see, I don't recall ever reading
about...
or hearing about a proposal like
this one.
And I'm talking about in any war.
To bomb friendly civilians?
Civilians we're committed to
rescuing?
That's a moral leap into...
I don't know what it is.
Pehle perceives that there's not
much that we can do.
The War Refugee Board is constantly
trying to get information
about what's going on in Europe, and
I think he sees this
as, as information but not
actionable intelligence.
I'll make the suggestions to
the War Department
but I know what they'll say.
It's a diversion.
On June 24th 1944, Pehle passed
the recommendations to bomb
up the chain of command to
John McCloy,
the Assistant Secretary of War.
But McCloy is not inclined to divert
resources from the war,
because the war was at such a
critical moment
at that point in time.
Allied forces had landed
successfully in France on D-Day.
The supreme effort now was to drive
towards Germany,
reach Berlin, and force the
unconditional surrender
of the Nazis.
Round-the-clock bombing missions
against German cities,
military and industrial targets,
were intensifying.
On the Eastern Front,
the Soviet Army was advancing
westwards towards Poland.
The focus is on winning the war.
We can't be diverted by Auschwitz.
No-one really grasps that this was
part of an effort to wipe out
an entire people from one end of
Europe to the other, and beyond.
Once you understand that Jews are
being killed every day,
you can't go on with business as
usual,
you can't imagine not doing
something about it.
You can't say, "We shall win the war
and then we'll worry
"about the refugees."
This is the period in the whole
history of Auschwitz
where the killing reaches its
frenzied climax.
Never before have so many Jews been
killed so quickly
in Auschwitz-Birkenau as in the
period between May and July 1944.
437,402 Jews were shipped
primarily to Birkenau on 147 trains.
147 trains during 54 days meant
an average of 2.7 trains a day,
an average of 2,975 Jews per train.
I didn't know what a crematorium
was.
I didn't know what a gas chamber
was.
I didn't have a clue.
But we soon found out.
It didn't take us long to find out.
Somebody asked me, "Is your mother
with you?"
I said, "No, she, she went left.
"Probably with the older women now,
in another block."
And we learned finally what
happened.
All those who went to the left...
We didn't want to believe it.
And he said only this sentence,
"This way, she burned.
"She went through the chimney."
So we all look back at these
chimneys.
And I keep thinking, "How does a
person go through a chimney?"
What, they're going to burn my
mother? My brother?
I didn't believe it.
We were absolutely incredulous.
"It's not true, it's not true.
"It can't be."
We got to know next day that it is
true.
They were burning the families.
The Protocol may have stalled in
America,
but it reached the desk of Foreign
Secretary Anthony Eden in London.
The Jewish Agency representatives in
London,
Chaim Weizmann and Moshe Shertok,
fixed an urgent meeting to make
their plea directly.
Chaim Weizmann was the president of
the World Zionist Organisation,
and Weizmann understood very well
the situation of the Jews.
Moshe Shertok was later the second
Prime Minister of Israel.
And we think some kind of reprisal
needs to be considered,
something that will act as a
deterrence to Germany.
If the Auschwitz camp continues to
function as a killing centre,
then... You bomb.
The aim being to dislocate the
machinery of annihilation
and hope to save the remaining
300,000 Hungarian Jews
from extermination.
It's bold, it has imagination.
It may even work.
And Mr Churchill?
Also in favour, in principle.
What we should need to do now is
examine its feasibility
with the Air Ministry.
Yes. Yes, of course.
In a memo to Eden, Winston Churchill
wrote about Auschwitz,
"There is no doubt that this is
probably the greatest and most
"horrible crime ever committed in
the whole history of the world."
Churchill's instincts are genuine.
He was one of the first to
recognise the full gravity
of what had been going on.
He said to Eden, "We should do
something."
Then he said, "Get anything out of
the Air Force you can
"and invoke me if necessary."
Eden would have interpreted it as,
"Act quickly, act decisively,
"and you have my blessing."
Two of the most powerful men in
Britain now supported
the bombing of Auschwitz.
Eden summoned the head of the Air
Ministry, Sir Archibald Sinclair,
to discuss the feasibility of the
raid.
Well, it was quite a surprise
receiving this.
I mean, it hasn't been raised at
Cabinet, so far as I know.
Unnecessary, according to Winston.
Well, there's a feeling in the
Ministry
that we shouldn't be disrupting the
Normandy campaign right now
with an operation of this nature.
There is?
Yes, yes, there's quite a strong
feeling.
Also, isn't this a thing for our
Soviet allies, anyway?
Being much closer to the intended
target than us, I mean.
Stalin was as likely to bomb
Auschwitz
as he was to stand on his head
in Red Square in the middle of
winter for a week.
He wouldn't have done it.
This is all very interesting,
Archie, but I asked you to examine
the feasibility of a bombing raid on
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
That's what I've done, Anthony.
Well, no, you haven't done that, you
see.
You've merely listed the objections
the Air Force might have
to such a mission and come up with a
couple of fanciful
suggestions of your own.
What we need to discover, you and I,
is whether the bombing raid on
Auschwitz is actually feasible.
I think you should co-ordinate your
thinking with the Americans.
Sinclair was very much playing the
role that he was in
as secretary of state for air,
which was to protect the resources
of the Air Force, focus them on the
war itself.
I think he did look at it and said,
"Better hand it off to the
Americans.
"They're in a better position to do
it than we are."
Eden's request for a feasibility
study into bombing Auschwitz
reached General Carl Spaatz,
one of the most powerful men in the
allied Air Force.
Spaatz says, "Yes.
"It sounds like something I would be
willing to do."
I can't imagine that anyone like
Carl Spaatz would not have
been outraged and would not have
wanted some kind of retribution
or attempt to get at this with the
instrument that was available
to him, which was the
long-range bomber.
The moral question of "Should we
bomb Auschwitz?"
became a technical one.
"COULD we bomb Auschwitz?"
Every target that was attacked, was
attacked
after specialised intelligence was
applied to it.
Where is it located?
What does it look like?
What would be the best routes?
The Allies had been gathering
intelligence about the area
since spring 1944.
Spy planes flew over
Auschwitz-Birkenau,
but they were looking for factories,
not a death camp.
They had been photographing all
around IG Farben,
in order to support hitting the
industrial areas
that were producing synthetic fuel
for the Germans,
which was a critically important
target.
The photos were taken to
RAF Medmenham,
where they were analysed in 3D.
By chance, three of them showed
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
These were the images General Spaatz
desperately needed.
The photographs covered a wide area.
More than just the IG Farben site
itself.
They were picking up Birkenau.
They had the crematoria in
photographs.
They just didn't know they had them.
By August 1944, the tide of war was
turning.
The Allies finally had supremacy in
the air.
American bombers were attacking
targets
deep in Eastern Europe, including
Poland.
They were flying to many targets
right in the vicinity of Auschwitz.
So, these airplanes were in fact
within range of attacking
the crematoria at Birkenau.
One must remember that the idea
of bombing Auschwitz is to destroy
the gas chambers without killing the
people.
Now, this is extremely difficult.
The gas chambers at Auschwitz were
the size of a tennis court.
There was nothing even remotely like
precision bombing
in the Second World War.
The American B-17s flew over 30,000
feet at 300mph.
And the bombs they had then were
extraordinarily primitive.
If one bomb was going to hit each of
the crematoria,
you would need to send
roughly 220 bombers,
each of them dropping ten bombs
each,
to have a high chance of one bomb
landing on that building.
It's very hard.
It's very hard to do this.
The words they used were,
"Bombs away."
And where they land, nobody knows.
And, consequently, there were
mistakes.
All the options were bad options,
in a way,
because even a small miss could have
killed a lot of people.
Despite the risks,
General Spaatz was ready to carry
out the raid.
He needed the aerial photographs
but they'd been overlooked.
No-one realised they showed the
death camp.
Meanwhile, pressure to act came from
a new source.
Rumours about Auschwitz was stoking
public outrage.
Rabbi Stephen Wise, the head of the
World Jewish Congress,
organises a rally in Madison Square
Park in New York City,
on July 31st 1944,
and about 40,000 Americans attend
this rally.
It's a call for the bombing of
Auschwitz,
and I think it's a striking
commentary on the level of public
knowledge and the level of public
concern.
Trains to Auschwitz continued
relentlessly.
Thanks to the Protocol,
Jewish leaders now knew the fate of
the deportees.
They demanded a meeting with John
Pehle at the War Refugee Board.
Mr Kubowitzki.
Leon Kubowitzki of the
World Jewish Congress
and Bezalel Sherman of the Jewish
Labour Committee
had very different views on the
bombing of Auschwitz.
They were divided and they were
fearful.
One fear that they had was they
didn't want to turn the war
into a Jewish war because the future
of the world was at stake.
We are faced, it seems, with a
monstrous determination
from Nazi Germany to pursue this
criminal murder of the Jews
of Europe to its bitter end.
Hence the call to bomb these
installations ourselves.
The War Refugee Board fully
appreciates the motives
behind the idea.
We know it wasn't suggested lightly.
But the fact is that the War
Department still believes that such
a bombing mission can be achieved
only with considerable diversion
of resources... Then, divert.
I'm sorry, Mr Sherman? Divert.
We've read the testimony of these
two men who escaped
from the Auschwitz camp.
The things they saw.
We've been given corroborative
evidence, too.
As have we. So, we all know!
A picture is forming of something
off the human scale!
Isn't that so?
The Germans have created a factory
in Poland whose sole purpose
is the eradication by gas of an
entire race of people.
I say, divert.
All right.
Let's just say for a minute that the
United States
or Great Britain bombs this place.
Can we know how many... How many
Jews will be killed by our bombs?
That's right, Mr Sherman.
Hell, if we miss the gas chambers,
we destroy 30,000 prisoners instead.
Wouldn't that give the Nazis a great
alibi?
I can hear it now.
"The Western Allies hate the Jews
more than we do."
The Germans took anything they could
grasp for propaganda
purposes, so there would have been a
struggle
over the narrative of who was being
more brutal.
I believe in...
I believe in saving those actually
living.
I don't understand what follows
from that.
You cannot kill the innocent in
order to prevent a catastrophe.
There was a genuine debate that went
on.
There were very good people who were
directly affected
by the Holocaust, who had lost
members of their family,
who weren't sure that the bombing
was a good thing.
Thank you.
Mr Sherman.
All the excuses for not bombing
Auschwitz omit the most compelling
reason for bombing Auschwitz.
It would have been recognition that
what was happening
there was totally evil and
unacceptable to the world itself.
We keep repeating the line that
bombing Auschwitz
would constitute a diversion.
But how do we know that?
Pehle might have said to himself,
"He may be right.
"And now the ball's in my court."
And that's an awesome
responsibility.
I would bomb this infernal place,
you know I would!
And the railroads, too.
That's what my gut is telling me
also.
But we know it's not about the gut,
is it?
It's about what the War Department
wants.
Then bypass them!
Go tell the President, acquaint
Roosevelt with the facts,
and he'll act.
There is no evidence that Roosevelt
was ever approached
about the question of whether the
United States
should bomb Auschwitz.
FDR was not well, to begin with.
He was fighting polio.
He was very subject to the flu.
He had congestive heart failure.
He didn't stop working but he had
to, kind of,
come out of the public eye for
periods.
At the same time, Churchill's
support for the plan was going cold.
Chaim Weizmann, of the Jewish
Agency, was informed
by the British Foreign Office
that technical difficulties
prevented the bombing.
One official dismissed the idea as
"fantastic"
and concluded it should be dropped.
Another complained that, "a
disproportionate amount of time
"is wasted dealing with these
wailing Jews."
"We're not going to believe atrocity
stories.
"These stories are just being told
to get us to let refugees in,
"to get us to let children in."
And that level of anti-Semitism that
creeps into so many decisions.
"Oh, those Jews are carping again."
Despite being written off as a
diversion from the war effort,
on the 13th of September 1944, the
Allies did bomb Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Some 2,000 or so bombs rained down.
The bombs don't distinguish between
prisoners and SS.
Dozens of prisoners are killed,
hundreds more are injured.
However, it wasn't intentional.
The target was the nearby
IG Farben factory.
Auschwitz was never a priority.
Synthetic rubber was a priority.
Synthetic gas and oil was a
priority.
IG Farben was a priority.
If the target that they intended to
bomb
was four miles away, and they
inadvertently bombed Auschwitz,
it shows how, you know, how
amateurish the bombing was.
All of a sudden, the air is full of
noise.
I'm sure that some people were
hoping they're going to bomb us
or at least the gas chambers.
But I... I can't say I did.
We didn't care.
We were hoping that they should bomb
that place.
And I said, "My God."
You know, "Finally, they've
arrived."
And I said, "Keep bombing the hell
out of this place,
"no matter what happens."
In April 1944,
Vrba and Wetzler had escaped from
Auschwitz to warn the world
about the extermination of the
European Jews.
By September, still nothing had been
done.
The American Army reaches the border
of Switzerland at the end
of September, freeing, for the first
time, all of the people
inside Switzerland who can now send
messages to the wider world.
John Pehle at the War Refugee Board
finally received the full Protocol
in early November.
What he read shocked him to the
core.
This version of the Protocol is much
longer.
It reads more like a testimony.
This is what Auschwitz is.
It is a place where horrific things
are happening.
The difference, when the full report
is released, is stunning.
It's undeniable.
You can put them side by side and
you see a striking difference.
Gassing took place as follows...
The unfortunate victims were brought
into the hall,
where they were asked to undress.
Each person receives a towel and a
small piece of soap,
issued to them by two men clad in
white coats.
They are then crowded into the gas
chambers in such numbers
that there is only standing room.
When they were all inside,
they closed this heavy door.
And there was a short pause.
After which, SS men in gas masks
climb the roof,
open the traps,
and shake down a preparation in
powder form
from tin cans labelled, "Zyklon. For
use against vermin",
manufactured by a Hamburg concern.
It's this cyanide mixture that turns
to gas at certain temperatures.
And after three minutes...
everyone in the chamber was dead.
When Pehle saw the entire report,
his conscience could no longer allow
him
to be tentative or to sit quietly.
Mr McCloy.
Good morning, sir. John Pehle here.
I have something I think you must
see.
It's a report from Auschwitz.
His reaction was, "It's worse than I
thought.
"I thought it was extraordinarily
evil.
"This is, by a magnitude,
"even more than that."
He goes back to John McCloy.
He sends him a copy of the Protocols
with a cover note that says,
"I am now convinced that we need to
use direct bombing action
"to destroy the gas chambers and
crematorium in Auschwitz-Birkenau."
Pehle was told conclusively by
Assistant Secretary of War
John McCloy that bombing Auschwitz
was not feasible
from a military standpoint.
He says there is considerable
opinion to the effect that such
an action, even if practicable,
might provoke a more vindictive
response on the part of the Germans.
What's more vindictive than
Auschwitz?
The officials who made the decision
that this shouldn't be done,
they weren't concerned about the
people in the camp.
From everything we know, the vast
majority of them
just sloughed it off.
Pehle couldn't force the
War Department to act.
So instead, he leaked the full
version of the Protocol
to newspapers, with a covering
letter.
"So revolting and diabolical
"are the German atrocities that the
minds of civilised people
"find it difficult to believe
they've actually taken place."
Pehle understood his
responsibilities
and that was his greatness.
I regard John Pehle as one of the
great American heroes.
And he said, "We did too little and
we did it too late."
Pehle knew what he was doing,
and he played the media card very,
very well.
It got a great deal of attention.
It was all over the newspapers.
This is front page news nationwide.
The Washington Post publishes an
editorial entitled "Genocide".
It's the first time that word
appears in a national newspaper.
The day that this information is
released to the American people,
the Nazis destroy the gas chambers.
It was an attempt to destroy the
evidence,
but it didn't work.
Two months later, on the 27th of
January 1945,
Auschwitz was liberated by the
Red Army.
The Soviet soldiers who entered
Auschwitz were moved and shaken
by what they saw.
They understood that they had come
across something unique,
that they had seen something
horrific beyond the imagination.
I wish the British or the Americans
had pushed for this target
to have been bombed - as a statement
of principle, as a statement
to the Nazis that this is atrocious
and we, as the human species,
will not stand for it.
It's one of the most emotive things
that's ever happened
in modern history.
You could say this is a great
failure, but one has to understand
that we were fighting a world war,
and the fate of the surviving Jews
of Europe largely depended
on liberating Nazi-occupied Europe
and destroying the Nazi regime.
I would advocate bombing as a
statement
of profound moral outrage.
But do I think it would have solved
the problem?
No.
And I think the critics who say that
it would have,
haven't read the history well.
But moral protest in the wake of
genocide...
is much better than nothing.
Much, much better than nothing.
I think it's important when people
have been subjected to genocide,
for the world to say,
"We do give a damn."
Because you don't know where it's
going to happen next.
We came to the position that we had
to recommend this,
and that it should be done,
and not only should the rail lines
be bombed
but the crematoria should be bombed,
too.
It's tragic that we didn't take this
position in the first place,
but that is the fact.
World War II hanging in the balance,
two Jewish prisoners lay hidden near
the outer fence
of Auschwitz concentration camp.
It was almost impossible to escape
from Auschwitz.
So many people were caught almost
immediately, and tortured
and killed.
The dogs didn't sniff them out,
because they put tobacco soaked
in petrol around the hiding place.
They managed to stay there
undetected for three days.
On the 10th of April 1944, they
abandoned their hiding place
and cut through the fence.
They had to be audacious.
They had to be brave.
They escaped in order to warn the
world
that Auschwitz was a killing
mechanism.
Their eyewitness account of the mass
extermination of European Jews
would lead to one of the greatest
moral questions of the 20th century.
This killing complex can turn
several thousands of human beings
into ash in just 24 hours.
The failure to bomb Auschwitz...
No-one gave a damn.
They didn't care. They didn't want
to do it.
Auschwitz should have had the most
outrageous response
while it was happening.
And that's a moral failure of the
West.
Why was the greatest crime of modern
history allowed to proceed unimpeded
for almost two years?
A million Jews perished there by
gas.
It wasn't because of lack of
evidence.
Keep going, keep going...
Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler fled
through Nazi-occupied Poland
to the Slovakian town of Zilina,
where they made contact with the
Jewish Underground.
Slovakia is aligned with Nazi
Germany
and it is the first country
to voluntarily deport its Jews.
Vrba and Wetzler made it to a safe
house.
They were desperate to complete
their mission to let the world know
what was happening to Jews in
Poland.
The extermination of the Jews was
carried on in great secrecy.
It wasn't advertised.
Therefore, until then, we had no
cogent
or clear description of what went on
at Auschwitz.
Oskar Krasnansky of the Jewish
Underground was sent to interview
Vrba and Wetzler.
My name is Krasnansky, from
Bratislava.
How do I know you're not fantasists
wasting my time?
Four, four, zero, seven, zero.
I asked him, "Why have you put this
tattoo on your arm?"
And then he looked at me and he
said,
"Where did you think I have been?
"In a sanatorium?"
And that's when he told me that he
has been to Auschwitz.
Why are you tattooed on your arm and
you on your chest?
The chest tattoos are imprinted with
huge brutality.
Many people fainted.
Is that why they started tattooing
people on their arms?
No.
No, they did that because the chest
tattoos faded too quickly.
You must tell me everything.
Every detail that you know about
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Yes.
Auschwitz is a killing centre.
Not here, not now.
Separately.
If you don't know who these men are,
you want to interrogate them
to make sure that they're not
telling you a bullshit story.
Auschwitz is not a household name
in early 1944.
There's a lot of confusion over,
"What is this place?"
And so, at the beginning, people
just knew that Jews were being taken
to Nazi-occupied Poland.
The Polish Underground had managed
to smuggle some information
about the camp outside, but, on the
whole,
this information is fragmentary
and sometimes contradictory.
Vrba and Wetzler's interrogation was
meticulously recorded,
as in a court of law.
How did you escape?
Well, we kept to the forest,
travelling only by night.
How long?
It took us 11 days. No, no.
How long were you in Auschwitz?
I arrived there on the
30th of June 1942.
We've heard rumours that there is
gas.
That Jews are killed there by gas
machines,
and by mass electrocution.
When you look at the way he did it,
the professionalism,
it reflects that this was someone
who knew the information he was
getting
was potentially a game-changer.
The interview was done with the idea
of, "We might bring legal charges,
"and we are going to get nothing but
the facts."
The, er...
the perimeter wire is electrified.
There are gas installations.
Gas chambers.
Go on.
Four gas chambers with crematoria
for burning.
The first crematorium opened in
March 1943, when prominent guests
from Berlin arrived to see the new
installation.
That day, they were able to witness
8,000 Jews from Krakow
gassed and burned.
They were very pleased with that
result.
How do you know all this?
I worked as a registrar in the
Birkenau section of the camp.
My daily duties included registering
the survivors
of each transportation,
meaning those who had survived the
train journey and had not,
on arrival at Auschwitz, been
selected for the gas.
Clerks can move around the different
sectors of the camp a little bit
more freely than most other
prisoners.
And, in this way, pick up
even-more-detailed information
about what exactly is happening
there.
I also got information about the
precise operation
of the gas chambers and crematoria,
from one of the Sonderkommando.
Sonderkommando?
You really know nothing, do you?
The prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau
who knew best what happened
at the gas chambers and the
crematoria, were the members
of the so-called Sonderkommando.
These were prisoners who were forced
by the SS to assist in the killing
and cremation at the crematoria
itself.
Rudy and Freddy felt that they
needed to have facts
that would convince people that this
really is happening.
And it was their idea
to write a report
that could be distributed
and shown as evidence.
Vrba and Wetzler wanted to include
as much granular evidence
as they could in that report,
and that included some drawings.
Auschwitz is a massive place and it
builds up over time
and in different ways.
So, the first camp is Auschwitz I,
which opens in 1940.
Later, they add Birkenau, a few
miles away,
which is where the gas chambers and
the crematorium are located.
This is an approximate sketch of the
dark heart
of Auschwitz's main camp and
Birkenau.
This is one of the gas chambers and
crematoria that the SS
constructed in Birkenau.
It's striking how much Vrba and
Wetzler got right
about the layout of the camp,
the mechanics of mass extermination
and even down to the names of
individual prisoners.
At the end of January, a large
convoy of French and Dutch Jews
arrived at Auschwitz.
But only a small proportion of those
reached the camp.
What happened to the rest of them?
They went straight from the trains
to the gas chambers.
Did you see these the selections
yourself?
Yes.
I belonged to a work command that
took me to a place called
"the ramp" which is where the trains
came in, sometimes one a day,
sometimes five, sometimes through
the night.
My job was to deal with the personal
property of those Jews
who'd been selected for the gas, and
to collect any dead bodies
from the cattle carts.
He sees how Jews are
forced off the trains.
He sees how they have to line up.
He sees how the SS selects them and
sends those
deemed to be weak and ill and not
fit for work
towards the gas chambers.
And this really gives Vrba a direct
insight,
he becomes an eyewitness of the
Holocaust.
Women, children, old people, people
they considered unfit,
sent straight to the gas chambers.
The fittest were separated out and
kept for labour.
How many? It varied.
A small percentage, 5 or 10%.
All this was done with force?
Sometimes, but usually without.
These people had no idea where they
were going.
I want to emphasise this.
A train would pull in,
and those getting off would have no
conception of what had just happened
to those who'd arrived a few hours
before.
They were describing the details of
genocide.
How was it done?
You are asking people to believe
something that was literally
beyond belief.
You can't put it into words.
Numbness.
Fright, anger, fury.
Rage!
And then a feeling of...
"Oh, my God."
And probably a sense of incredulity,
"Are these guys out of their mind?"
How did the SS deal with these
arrivals?
I told you already.
They were sent to the gas.
To the gas at Birkenau.
Some of the groups would be
frightened and disorientated.
Others would be almost relieved,
depending on how they'd been greeted
by the SS.
Sometimes they could be harsh,
using the sticks, dogs, lots of
shouting.
Other times it would be, "How nice
that you have arrived.
"We are sorry it was not too
comfortable.
"Things will change now."
Vrba's testimony had a horrifying
climax.
The Nazis new plan for
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
They are preparing for the
extermination
of the Hungarian Jews.
How do you know that?
That is why they have built the new
crematoria
and extended the ramp.
I said, how do you know the intent
to kill the Hungarian Jews?
- The SS. They talk.
- To you?
I am dirt.
To each other.
I heard it more than once.
They would always take the best food
from the trains for themselves.
They had a cosmopolitan diet.
I overheard one officer saying that
he was tired of Dutch cheese,
and looked forward to the arrival of
Hungarian salami.
Are you certain you heard this?
I have to ask.
Are you certain?
I heard it more than once.
It is why I knew I had to escape.
To warn people of what is to come.
Auschwitz becomes the centre of the
Holocaust and the catalyst for that
is the German invasion of Hungary in
March 1944.
Hungary had the largest mostly
intact Jewish community in Europe,
and the persecution starts almost
immediately.
On April 27th 1944, Vrba's warning
comes true.
The first 4,000 Jews were sent by
train from Hungary to Auschwitz.
It was a dress rehearsal for the
planned annihilation
of all 800,000.
I would argue that the Nazis are
losing the war and therefore
they're trying to win the genocide.
The crime that was being committed
was so horrific, so unique,
so outrageous, so evil, so awful.
The Nazis kept their extermination
programme a closely guarded secret,
to avoid resistance and disruption
on the trains.
But it was no longer secret.
Vrba and Wetzler's harrowing
testimony
was turned into a detailed report.
The Auschwitz Protocol.
The Auschwitz Protocol is very
scientific.
There isn't a lot of emotion and I
think that was a deliberate
choice on the part of the escapees.
They weren't going to express their
horror.
The horror is there.
Thanks to the Protocol, Jewish
activists in Slovakia
learnt of the Nazis' plans for the
Hungarian Jews.
So the duty to act was theirs.
Everybody who worked as a courier
had to be prepared to lose
their own life.
They would have been tortured to
reveal where they'd gotten it.
The last thing in the world Germany
wanted to happen
was that this information got out.
In the first week of May 1944,
the Protocol reached
Michael Weissmandl,
who worked secretly for the Jewish
Underground
in the Slovakian capital.
Rabbi Weissmandl was a very
passionate man.
He's in Slovakia to rescue people.
His sole goal is to take care of his
community...
and he does it with whatever means
he possibly can.
Weissmandl was not only among the
first to read these documents,
but he was the first to fully
believe these documents.
The Protocol had a devastating
effect on Weissmandl.
He had witnessed deportations.
He now realised the full horror that
awaited those who had gone.
Getting the information was one part
of the task.
Disseminating the information was
the other.
It had to be done with great
secrecy.
Weissmandl is sending this report
everywhere he can think of.
He's trying to get it to the
Jewish Agency in Jerusalem.
He's trying to get it to London,
hopefully to the United States.
He's sending them all in the hopes
that one cry in the darkness
will be heard.
Our bedroom door is knocked down
and two gendarmes are in our
bedroom...
yelling and screaming,
"You have two minutes to pack
a bundle.
"We are taking you away."
"Give up your jewellery.
"Give up anything you have in
possession."
My father looked at us as though
he wanted to save this picture
in his memory, of the family.
They said, "Get out of the house."
And certainly this sentence...
"Just stay calm.
"Remember, calmness is strength."
And they hit him, pushed him through
the door and he was out.
The rabbi was an elderly gentleman
with a white beard.
He was made to walk in the front of
the columns.
He was symbolic. "The Jews are
leaving town."
In spring 1944,
the world had little knowledge
of what was happening
to the Jews of Hungary.
Most were looking elsewhere, because
the war had reached
a critical juncture.
What was going on at that very time
in the United States and Britain
was the preparations for D-Day,
which the total outcome of the war
depended on.
Now, this took precedence over
everything.
The Pacific War was going on for the
Americans,
and that was an immense Herculean
effort.
They knew that as they moved closer
to Japan, the fight was going to get
harder and harder, because the
Japanese
were terrifically fierce fighters.
On the other side of Europe,
the Soviet Army at the time was
working full steam.
Stalin basically destroyed the
entire German Army
in some of the greatest battles of
modern history.
While the Allies were focused
on the battlefront,
the Protocol gained momentum.
Weissmandl's transmission reached
Roswell McClelland
at the War Refugee Board in neutral
Switzerland.
Is this it?
The War Refugee Board was established
by Roosevelt in early 1944,
and it was the only body anywhere in
the world which specifically
had the task of rescuing Jews.
They were selected...
for gassing.
It gives the impression of the
antechamber
of a bathing establishment.
It holds 2,000 people.
From there, a door and a few steps
lead down into the very long and
narrow gas chamber.
Roswell McClelland had a very
personal reaction
because he had gone to southern
France working with Jews
in internment camps in 1942,
and he knows intimately who these
people are.
He had watched them go to Auschwitz,
and now he's reading about what
happened to them.
When Rabbi Weissmandl sent the
Protocol,
he added a dramatic postscript.
It was an appeal for help but also a
rebuke for those who might refuse.
And you, our brothers in
all the free lands,
what are you doing about the
extermination
which swallows 10,000 every day?
For God's sake, do something now and
quickly.
He turned the question of what to do
about the death camp
into one of the great moral issues
of the 20th century.
He demanded that the Allied air
forces bomb Auschwitz.
He was the first to do so.
His call to bomb Auschwitz was
essentially a call of desperation
and a call of despair.
When people first hear about the
request of bombing of Auschwitz,
it's quite remarkable because they
are demanding
that they bomb a camp where their
own people
are being held prisoner?
It seemed very strange.
Let's set the whole goddamn thing
aflame,
let's destroy the entire thing.
Then we have accomplished something
and we've done
something enormously significant.
The clock was ticking.
McClelland sent a summary of the
Protocol to Washington.
Switzerland is completely surrounded
by Nazi territory.
You can't have a courier go in and
out.
So Roswell McClelland sends a cable
and said, "As soon as I can,
"you'll get the whole thing."
Since early summer 1942,
at least one and a half million
Jews have been killed.
There is evidence that from January
1944, preparations were being made
to receive and exterminate Hungarian
Jews in these camps.
For three days and three nights,
we were locked into that box.
Every morning we were travelling,
they opened those shutters
and they said,
"Throw out dead bodies."
With a tiny window for air
and one pail for bodily needs,
which...
turned out to be...
very, very...
embarrassing and unpleasant.
Something has always been going
around in my mind,
and I can't get rid of it and I feel
so ashamed.
Tell me, how can a 14-year-old
child...
hope people should die...
so he'll have room where to sit
down?
It was early in the morning that we
arrived.
The door opened and screams.
"Rasch! Rasch! Schnell! Schnell..."
And through the slits of the cart
that we were in,
I saw we were at Auschwitz. I didn't
have a clue what it was.
Nazi soldiers standing there with
rifles pointing at us,
others holding back snarling, big
dogs that were barking at us.
The first thing was - you breathe in
and there's a very strange smell.
It was, sort of, sweetish and
burning.
I thought, "It's a bakery,
"and they're baking bread."
And then I noticed that, to the
left, were people...
older and with glasses, and
children and women.
My mother...
my two little brothers...
and my baby in my mother's arm,
my grandfather, grandmother and my
aunt.
My mother went to the left.
With a flick of his hand to the
left,
they were walked off.
We didn't even have time to say
goodbye.
And that's when I saw my father the
last time.
He was 60 years old.
Roswell McClelland's cable
containing the summary of the
Auschwitz Protocol
and the plea to bomb the camp,
travelled from Switzerland
to the headquarters of the
War Refugee Board in Washington.
"It is urged by all sources of this
information in Slovakia
"and Hungary, that vital sections of
the rail lines be bombed.
"They also urge that the camps of
Auschwitz and Birkenau,
"especially the gas chambers and
crematoriums,
"recognisable by their high
chimneys,
"be bombed from the air."
The director of the War Refugee
Board was a lawyer
called John Pehle.
The decision about what to do with
this startling information
fell on his shoulders.
John Pehle was very measured, and he
was very diligent and dogged.
He is not cynical.
He really does believe that the
United States
can try to save people.
Would you please ask Dr Akzin to
step through to my office?
Oh, and hold all incoming calls
until he leaves.
When people saw the level of detail
of this atrocity,
they recognised that this was
something different.
This was something horrifying.
Ben.
I want you to take a look at this.
It's from Roswell McClelland.
Owsahitz?
I think he means Auschwitz.
Benjamin Akzin is a lawyer.
He grew up in Latvia and was an
incredibly intelligent man.
He's Jewish.
He certainly still had family and
friends back in Europe.
He sees the War Refugee Board as a
place where he can do some good.
This is...
It's inconceivable?
Incredible?
Unbelievable?
125,000 a month?
You can go straight to the President
with this.
What's so funny?
It doesn't work that way, Ben.
There are procedures.
There are rules.
There are no rules for this, surely?
If it's true.
We have to be sure, that's all.
It's very easy for us these days to
close our eyes
and imagine Auschwitz.
We've seen photos, many of us may
have even visited Auschwitz.
And so it's really hard to
reconstruct how chaotic
information about Auschwitz was.
There are eyewitnesses, two of them.
It is unusual, I grant.
It's unprecedented, John.
And Roswell McClelland seems to
think it's true.
That's quite something, isn't it?
It is.
Take a look at this.
It came in with the cable.
It's a list of suggestions made by
Jewish groups
from Slovakia and Switzerland.
Fielded by Roswell.
There is a logic to it, isn't there?
I mean...
If you accept this, then...
it kind of follows that you must
do this.
You know, my first thought is
they're right.
We should bomb, send them some
airmail.
I don't think the response...
"Let's bomb this place, can we react
to this atrocity?"
...was at all unusual.
I think all of us would have liked
to have thought
that's exactly the response we would
have.
This thing, John, it speaks of
industrial slaughter.
For a lot of people, it was the
Protocol that changed their mind.
That, in order to stop this mass
killing, you had to take out
the instrument of killing.
And the only way to take out the
instrument of killing
was to bomb the camp.
You see, I don't recall ever reading
about...
or hearing about a proposal like
this one.
And I'm talking about in any war.
To bomb friendly civilians?
Civilians we're committed to
rescuing?
That's a moral leap into...
I don't know what it is.
Pehle perceives that there's not
much that we can do.
The War Refugee Board is constantly
trying to get information
about what's going on in Europe, and
I think he sees this
as, as information but not
actionable intelligence.
I'll make the suggestions to
the War Department
but I know what they'll say.
It's a diversion.
On June 24th 1944, Pehle passed
the recommendations to bomb
up the chain of command to
John McCloy,
the Assistant Secretary of War.
But McCloy is not inclined to divert
resources from the war,
because the war was at such a
critical moment
at that point in time.
Allied forces had landed
successfully in France on D-Day.
The supreme effort now was to drive
towards Germany,
reach Berlin, and force the
unconditional surrender
of the Nazis.
Round-the-clock bombing missions
against German cities,
military and industrial targets,
were intensifying.
On the Eastern Front,
the Soviet Army was advancing
westwards towards Poland.
The focus is on winning the war.
We can't be diverted by Auschwitz.
No-one really grasps that this was
part of an effort to wipe out
an entire people from one end of
Europe to the other, and beyond.
Once you understand that Jews are
being killed every day,
you can't go on with business as
usual,
you can't imagine not doing
something about it.
You can't say, "We shall win the war
and then we'll worry
"about the refugees."
This is the period in the whole
history of Auschwitz
where the killing reaches its
frenzied climax.
Never before have so many Jews been
killed so quickly
in Auschwitz-Birkenau as in the
period between May and July 1944.
437,402 Jews were shipped
primarily to Birkenau on 147 trains.
147 trains during 54 days meant
an average of 2.7 trains a day,
an average of 2,975 Jews per train.
I didn't know what a crematorium
was.
I didn't know what a gas chamber
was.
I didn't have a clue.
But we soon found out.
It didn't take us long to find out.
Somebody asked me, "Is your mother
with you?"
I said, "No, she, she went left.
"Probably with the older women now,
in another block."
And we learned finally what
happened.
All those who went to the left...
We didn't want to believe it.
And he said only this sentence,
"This way, she burned.
"She went through the chimney."
So we all look back at these
chimneys.
And I keep thinking, "How does a
person go through a chimney?"
What, they're going to burn my
mother? My brother?
I didn't believe it.
We were absolutely incredulous.
"It's not true, it's not true.
"It can't be."
We got to know next day that it is
true.
They were burning the families.
The Protocol may have stalled in
America,
but it reached the desk of Foreign
Secretary Anthony Eden in London.
The Jewish Agency representatives in
London,
Chaim Weizmann and Moshe Shertok,
fixed an urgent meeting to make
their plea directly.
Chaim Weizmann was the president of
the World Zionist Organisation,
and Weizmann understood very well
the situation of the Jews.
Moshe Shertok was later the second
Prime Minister of Israel.
And we think some kind of reprisal
needs to be considered,
something that will act as a
deterrence to Germany.
If the Auschwitz camp continues to
function as a killing centre,
then... You bomb.
The aim being to dislocate the
machinery of annihilation
and hope to save the remaining
300,000 Hungarian Jews
from extermination.
It's bold, it has imagination.
It may even work.
And Mr Churchill?
Also in favour, in principle.
What we should need to do now is
examine its feasibility
with the Air Ministry.
Yes. Yes, of course.
In a memo to Eden, Winston Churchill
wrote about Auschwitz,
"There is no doubt that this is
probably the greatest and most
"horrible crime ever committed in
the whole history of the world."
Churchill's instincts are genuine.
He was one of the first to
recognise the full gravity
of what had been going on.
He said to Eden, "We should do
something."
Then he said, "Get anything out of
the Air Force you can
"and invoke me if necessary."
Eden would have interpreted it as,
"Act quickly, act decisively,
"and you have my blessing."
Two of the most powerful men in
Britain now supported
the bombing of Auschwitz.
Eden summoned the head of the Air
Ministry, Sir Archibald Sinclair,
to discuss the feasibility of the
raid.
Well, it was quite a surprise
receiving this.
I mean, it hasn't been raised at
Cabinet, so far as I know.
Unnecessary, according to Winston.
Well, there's a feeling in the
Ministry
that we shouldn't be disrupting the
Normandy campaign right now
with an operation of this nature.
There is?
Yes, yes, there's quite a strong
feeling.
Also, isn't this a thing for our
Soviet allies, anyway?
Being much closer to the intended
target than us, I mean.
Stalin was as likely to bomb
Auschwitz
as he was to stand on his head
in Red Square in the middle of
winter for a week.
He wouldn't have done it.
This is all very interesting,
Archie, but I asked you to examine
the feasibility of a bombing raid on
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
That's what I've done, Anthony.
Well, no, you haven't done that, you
see.
You've merely listed the objections
the Air Force might have
to such a mission and come up with a
couple of fanciful
suggestions of your own.
What we need to discover, you and I,
is whether the bombing raid on
Auschwitz is actually feasible.
I think you should co-ordinate your
thinking with the Americans.
Sinclair was very much playing the
role that he was in
as secretary of state for air,
which was to protect the resources
of the Air Force, focus them on the
war itself.
I think he did look at it and said,
"Better hand it off to the
Americans.
"They're in a better position to do
it than we are."
Eden's request for a feasibility
study into bombing Auschwitz
reached General Carl Spaatz,
one of the most powerful men in the
allied Air Force.
Spaatz says, "Yes.
"It sounds like something I would be
willing to do."
I can't imagine that anyone like
Carl Spaatz would not have
been outraged and would not have
wanted some kind of retribution
or attempt to get at this with the
instrument that was available
to him, which was the
long-range bomber.
The moral question of "Should we
bomb Auschwitz?"
became a technical one.
"COULD we bomb Auschwitz?"
Every target that was attacked, was
attacked
after specialised intelligence was
applied to it.
Where is it located?
What does it look like?
What would be the best routes?
The Allies had been gathering
intelligence about the area
since spring 1944.
Spy planes flew over
Auschwitz-Birkenau,
but they were looking for factories,
not a death camp.
They had been photographing all
around IG Farben,
in order to support hitting the
industrial areas
that were producing synthetic fuel
for the Germans,
which was a critically important
target.
The photos were taken to
RAF Medmenham,
where they were analysed in 3D.
By chance, three of them showed
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
These were the images General Spaatz
desperately needed.
The photographs covered a wide area.
More than just the IG Farben site
itself.
They were picking up Birkenau.
They had the crematoria in
photographs.
They just didn't know they had them.
By August 1944, the tide of war was
turning.
The Allies finally had supremacy in
the air.
American bombers were attacking
targets
deep in Eastern Europe, including
Poland.
They were flying to many targets
right in the vicinity of Auschwitz.
So, these airplanes were in fact
within range of attacking
the crematoria at Birkenau.
One must remember that the idea
of bombing Auschwitz is to destroy
the gas chambers without killing the
people.
Now, this is extremely difficult.
The gas chambers at Auschwitz were
the size of a tennis court.
There was nothing even remotely like
precision bombing
in the Second World War.
The American B-17s flew over 30,000
feet at 300mph.
And the bombs they had then were
extraordinarily primitive.
If one bomb was going to hit each of
the crematoria,
you would need to send
roughly 220 bombers,
each of them dropping ten bombs
each,
to have a high chance of one bomb
landing on that building.
It's very hard.
It's very hard to do this.
The words they used were,
"Bombs away."
And where they land, nobody knows.
And, consequently, there were
mistakes.
All the options were bad options,
in a way,
because even a small miss could have
killed a lot of people.
Despite the risks,
General Spaatz was ready to carry
out the raid.
He needed the aerial photographs
but they'd been overlooked.
No-one realised they showed the
death camp.
Meanwhile, pressure to act came from
a new source.
Rumours about Auschwitz was stoking
public outrage.
Rabbi Stephen Wise, the head of the
World Jewish Congress,
organises a rally in Madison Square
Park in New York City,
on July 31st 1944,
and about 40,000 Americans attend
this rally.
It's a call for the bombing of
Auschwitz,
and I think it's a striking
commentary on the level of public
knowledge and the level of public
concern.
Trains to Auschwitz continued
relentlessly.
Thanks to the Protocol,
Jewish leaders now knew the fate of
the deportees.
They demanded a meeting with John
Pehle at the War Refugee Board.
Mr Kubowitzki.
Leon Kubowitzki of the
World Jewish Congress
and Bezalel Sherman of the Jewish
Labour Committee
had very different views on the
bombing of Auschwitz.
They were divided and they were
fearful.
One fear that they had was they
didn't want to turn the war
into a Jewish war because the future
of the world was at stake.
We are faced, it seems, with a
monstrous determination
from Nazi Germany to pursue this
criminal murder of the Jews
of Europe to its bitter end.
Hence the call to bomb these
installations ourselves.
The War Refugee Board fully
appreciates the motives
behind the idea.
We know it wasn't suggested lightly.
But the fact is that the War
Department still believes that such
a bombing mission can be achieved
only with considerable diversion
of resources... Then, divert.
I'm sorry, Mr Sherman? Divert.
We've read the testimony of these
two men who escaped
from the Auschwitz camp.
The things they saw.
We've been given corroborative
evidence, too.
As have we. So, we all know!
A picture is forming of something
off the human scale!
Isn't that so?
The Germans have created a factory
in Poland whose sole purpose
is the eradication by gas of an
entire race of people.
I say, divert.
All right.
Let's just say for a minute that the
United States
or Great Britain bombs this place.
Can we know how many... How many
Jews will be killed by our bombs?
That's right, Mr Sherman.
Hell, if we miss the gas chambers,
we destroy 30,000 prisoners instead.
Wouldn't that give the Nazis a great
alibi?
I can hear it now.
"The Western Allies hate the Jews
more than we do."
The Germans took anything they could
grasp for propaganda
purposes, so there would have been a
struggle
over the narrative of who was being
more brutal.
I believe in...
I believe in saving those actually
living.
I don't understand what follows
from that.
You cannot kill the innocent in
order to prevent a catastrophe.
There was a genuine debate that went
on.
There were very good people who were
directly affected
by the Holocaust, who had lost
members of their family,
who weren't sure that the bombing
was a good thing.
Thank you.
Mr Sherman.
All the excuses for not bombing
Auschwitz omit the most compelling
reason for bombing Auschwitz.
It would have been recognition that
what was happening
there was totally evil and
unacceptable to the world itself.
We keep repeating the line that
bombing Auschwitz
would constitute a diversion.
But how do we know that?
Pehle might have said to himself,
"He may be right.
"And now the ball's in my court."
And that's an awesome
responsibility.
I would bomb this infernal place,
you know I would!
And the railroads, too.
That's what my gut is telling me
also.
But we know it's not about the gut,
is it?
It's about what the War Department
wants.
Then bypass them!
Go tell the President, acquaint
Roosevelt with the facts,
and he'll act.
There is no evidence that Roosevelt
was ever approached
about the question of whether the
United States
should bomb Auschwitz.
FDR was not well, to begin with.
He was fighting polio.
He was very subject to the flu.
He had congestive heart failure.
He didn't stop working but he had
to, kind of,
come out of the public eye for
periods.
At the same time, Churchill's
support for the plan was going cold.
Chaim Weizmann, of the Jewish
Agency, was informed
by the British Foreign Office
that technical difficulties
prevented the bombing.
One official dismissed the idea as
"fantastic"
and concluded it should be dropped.
Another complained that, "a
disproportionate amount of time
"is wasted dealing with these
wailing Jews."
"We're not going to believe atrocity
stories.
"These stories are just being told
to get us to let refugees in,
"to get us to let children in."
And that level of anti-Semitism that
creeps into so many decisions.
"Oh, those Jews are carping again."
Despite being written off as a
diversion from the war effort,
on the 13th of September 1944, the
Allies did bomb Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Some 2,000 or so bombs rained down.
The bombs don't distinguish between
prisoners and SS.
Dozens of prisoners are killed,
hundreds more are injured.
However, it wasn't intentional.
The target was the nearby
IG Farben factory.
Auschwitz was never a priority.
Synthetic rubber was a priority.
Synthetic gas and oil was a
priority.
IG Farben was a priority.
If the target that they intended to
bomb
was four miles away, and they
inadvertently bombed Auschwitz,
it shows how, you know, how
amateurish the bombing was.
All of a sudden, the air is full of
noise.
I'm sure that some people were
hoping they're going to bomb us
or at least the gas chambers.
But I... I can't say I did.
We didn't care.
We were hoping that they should bomb
that place.
And I said, "My God."
You know, "Finally, they've
arrived."
And I said, "Keep bombing the hell
out of this place,
"no matter what happens."
In April 1944,
Vrba and Wetzler had escaped from
Auschwitz to warn the world
about the extermination of the
European Jews.
By September, still nothing had been
done.
The American Army reaches the border
of Switzerland at the end
of September, freeing, for the first
time, all of the people
inside Switzerland who can now send
messages to the wider world.
John Pehle at the War Refugee Board
finally received the full Protocol
in early November.
What he read shocked him to the
core.
This version of the Protocol is much
longer.
It reads more like a testimony.
This is what Auschwitz is.
It is a place where horrific things
are happening.
The difference, when the full report
is released, is stunning.
It's undeniable.
You can put them side by side and
you see a striking difference.
Gassing took place as follows...
The unfortunate victims were brought
into the hall,
where they were asked to undress.
Each person receives a towel and a
small piece of soap,
issued to them by two men clad in
white coats.
They are then crowded into the gas
chambers in such numbers
that there is only standing room.
When they were all inside,
they closed this heavy door.
And there was a short pause.
After which, SS men in gas masks
climb the roof,
open the traps,
and shake down a preparation in
powder form
from tin cans labelled, "Zyklon. For
use against vermin",
manufactured by a Hamburg concern.
It's this cyanide mixture that turns
to gas at certain temperatures.
And after three minutes...
everyone in the chamber was dead.
When Pehle saw the entire report,
his conscience could no longer allow
him
to be tentative or to sit quietly.
Mr McCloy.
Good morning, sir. John Pehle here.
I have something I think you must
see.
It's a report from Auschwitz.
His reaction was, "It's worse than I
thought.
"I thought it was extraordinarily
evil.
"This is, by a magnitude,
"even more than that."
He goes back to John McCloy.
He sends him a copy of the Protocols
with a cover note that says,
"I am now convinced that we need to
use direct bombing action
"to destroy the gas chambers and
crematorium in Auschwitz-Birkenau."
Pehle was told conclusively by
Assistant Secretary of War
John McCloy that bombing Auschwitz
was not feasible
from a military standpoint.
He says there is considerable
opinion to the effect that such
an action, even if practicable,
might provoke a more vindictive
response on the part of the Germans.
What's more vindictive than
Auschwitz?
The officials who made the decision
that this shouldn't be done,
they weren't concerned about the
people in the camp.
From everything we know, the vast
majority of them
just sloughed it off.
Pehle couldn't force the
War Department to act.
So instead, he leaked the full
version of the Protocol
to newspapers, with a covering
letter.
"So revolting and diabolical
"are the German atrocities that the
minds of civilised people
"find it difficult to believe
they've actually taken place."
Pehle understood his
responsibilities
and that was his greatness.
I regard John Pehle as one of the
great American heroes.
And he said, "We did too little and
we did it too late."
Pehle knew what he was doing,
and he played the media card very,
very well.
It got a great deal of attention.
It was all over the newspapers.
This is front page news nationwide.
The Washington Post publishes an
editorial entitled "Genocide".
It's the first time that word
appears in a national newspaper.
The day that this information is
released to the American people,
the Nazis destroy the gas chambers.
It was an attempt to destroy the
evidence,
but it didn't work.
Two months later, on the 27th of
January 1945,
Auschwitz was liberated by the
Red Army.
The Soviet soldiers who entered
Auschwitz were moved and shaken
by what they saw.
They understood that they had come
across something unique,
that they had seen something
horrific beyond the imagination.
I wish the British or the Americans
had pushed for this target
to have been bombed - as a statement
of principle, as a statement
to the Nazis that this is atrocious
and we, as the human species,
will not stand for it.
It's one of the most emotive things
that's ever happened
in modern history.
You could say this is a great
failure, but one has to understand
that we were fighting a world war,
and the fate of the surviving Jews
of Europe largely depended
on liberating Nazi-occupied Europe
and destroying the Nazi regime.
I would advocate bombing as a
statement
of profound moral outrage.
But do I think it would have solved
the problem?
No.
And I think the critics who say that
it would have,
haven't read the history well.
But moral protest in the wake of
genocide...
is much better than nothing.
Much, much better than nothing.
I think it's important when people
have been subjected to genocide,
for the world to say,
"We do give a damn."
Because you don't know where it's
going to happen next.
We came to the position that we had
to recommend this,
and that it should be done,
and not only should the rail lines
be bombed
but the crematoria should be bombed,
too.
It's tragic that we didn't take this
position in the first place,
but that is the fact.