Bomb the bridges

In her April 29 letter, Rebecca Erbelding of the US Holocaust Museum expresses doubt as to whether it would have been effective or appropriate for the Allies to bomb Auschwitz or the railway lines leading to the camp. Oddly, she did not comment on the question of bombing the bridges over which those railway lines passed. That’s a curious omission, because a number of the requests for bombing Auschwitz that were submitted to the Allies in 1944 specifically named bridges that should be targeted.

Roswell McClelland, the US War Refugee Board’s representative in Switzerland, wrote to the board’s leaders on June 24, 1944, “It is urged by all sources of this information in Slovakia and Hungary that vital sections of these [rail] lines, especially bridges along one [the Csap, Kosice, Presov route] be bombed as the only possible means of slowing down or stopping future deportations.” By emphasizing the bombing of rail bridges, McClelland understood what the Allied Bomber Command already knew: the best way to effectively interrupt rail traffic was to destroy targets such bridges and viaducts, which were considerably more difficult to rebuild than rail lines.

I had the opportunity to interview Allied pilots who flew near Auschwitz in 1944, for my film They Looked Away. They, too, pointed out that it took the Germans much longer to repair bridges than railway lines, so hitting the bridges would have caused a greater disruption to the deportations of hundreds of thousands of Jews to Auschwitz.

Officials of the US Holocaust Museum ought to familiarize themselves with this important part of the historical record before venturing into the debate over the failure to bomb Auschwitz.

STUART ERDHEIM Director/Producer of They Looked Away