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.
DOG BARKS
So many people were caught almost immediately, and tortured
and killed.
DOG BARKS AND GROWLS
DOG BARKS
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.
MEN COUGH
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.
FOOTSTEPS APPROACH
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.
WEISSMANDL: 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."
MCCLELLAND: 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.
NARRATOR: 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.
KNOCKS
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.
HE SCOFFS
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...
HE USES A JEWISH TERM
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.