Will opening up Holocaust archives reveal why Britain failed to bomb Auschwitz?
VTHE question of why Britain didn’t bomb Auschwitz may at last be answered after the UK’s decision to open up its Holocaust archives, a leading academic has told the JC.
Dr Andy Pearce of the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education said there was more to discover about the government’s knowledge of the Shoah and, in particular, the question over why Britain did not use its air power to shut down the death camps.
Dr Pearce said: “Towards the end of the war, we know that there was debate and deliberation around the prospect of potentially bombing the train lines to Auschwitz-Birkenau.”
Adding that there is known to have been a “difference of opinion that existed either between bureaucrats and or between ministers”, Dr Pearce said he hoped the opening of the archive would provide answers.
Lord Ahmad, the Foreign Office’s minister for human rights, said on Thursday that the department was “working to release any Holocaust-related material it may hold and to make that public”.
Separately, Guernsey and Jersey have also confirmed their commitments to making all Shoah records publicly available. But Dr Gilly Carr, a Cambridge lecturer in archaeology who has extensively researched the German occupation of the Channel Islands, said “there is plenty to keep us going that is already open”.
She added: “The writing of history is only as good as our ability to ask the right research questions.”
Meanwhile, a trove of 787 books discovered in Austria in September 1945 after being looted by the Nazis, will be released to the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, the Foreign Office has said.
The collection, which dates back to the late 16th century, had been hidden in St Lambrecht Abbey, a monastery that was seized by the SS in 1938 and converted into sub-camps.