opinion
Ken Burns’ Holocaust Documentary May
Be Hard on America, But not Hard Enough
BY RAFAEL MEDOFF AND
MONTY N. PENKOWER
I n September 1944, David
Ben-Gurion rose before the
Asefat Hanivcharim, Palestine
Jewry’s elected assembly,
and delivered an explosive
“j’accuse” against the Allies
for abandoning Europe’s Jews during the Holocaust.

The words of the man who would soon be
Israel’s first prime minister take on added signif-
icance in view of the upcoming release of Ken
Burns’ three-part, six-hour PBS documentary
“The U.S. and the Holocaust.” Its official website
says the film “dispels” the “myth” that America
“looked on with callous indifference” during the
Holocaust. By contrast, Ben-Gurion told the gathering of
Jewish community leaders in Jerusalem on Sept.

12, 1944: “As millions of Jews were taken to the
slaughter — young and old, infant and newborn,
mother and daughter — the world leaders, those
who shout slogans about democracy and social-
ism, looked away from the bloodshed and did not
undertake rescue action — they did not even try
to rescue them.”
Two months earlier, Ben-Gurion had spoken in
similar terms at a ceremony on the 40th anniver-
sary of the death of Theodor Herzl. Addressing
himself to the Allies, he thundered: “What have
you allowed to be perpetrated against a defense-
less people while you stood aside and let them
bleed to death, never lifting a finger to help?….Why
do you profane our pain and wrath with empty
expressions of sympathy which ring like mockery
in the ears of millions who are being daily burnt
and buried alive in the hell centers of Europe?”
These words were not uttered after the fact.

The Holocaust still raged as Ben-Gurion spoke.

Trainloads of Jewish deportees were being sent
to Auschwitz every day. On the day of the Herzl
speech, July 10, three trainloads of Hungarian
Jewish deportees arrived in Auschwitz. Over the
course of four days that week, more than 30,000
Jews were gassed.

For a few weeks earlier that summer, Ben-Gurion
and his colleagues in the leadership of Palestine’s
Jewish Agency had mistakenly believed that
Auschwitz was a labor camp. But when they
learned in late June that it was in fact a death
camp, they lobbied Allied diplomats in Europe,
the Middle East and the United States to bomb the
railways and bridges leading to Auschwitz, or the
gas chambers, or both.

Future Israeli president Chaim Weizmann and
future prime ministers Moshe Shertok (Sharett)
and Golda Meyerson (Meir) were among those
promoting the proposal in meetings with Allied
officials. In early September, just before the afore-
mentioned meeting of the Asefat Hanivcharim,
Jewish Agency official Eliyahu Epstein (Elath)
reported to Ben-Gurion about his unsuccessful
efforts to persuade a Soviet diplomat in Cairo that
the Allies should bomb the death camps.

Roosevelt administration officials falsely
asserted that the only way to strike the railways
or the death camp would be to “divert” planes
from distant battle zones, thus undermining the
war effort. That claim is repeated in the Burns
film as if it were a fact. In reality, American planes
were already flying over Auschwitz, bombing the
oil factories in the death camp’s industrial zone
(where Elie Wiesel was among the slave laborers)
— less than five miles from the gas chambers. One
of those raids took place on Sept. 13, 1944, the
day after Ben-Gurion’s speech to the Jerusalem
assembly. In Ken Burns’ film, interviewees belittle the pro-
posals to bomb the railways on the grounds that
the Germans could have quickly repaired them.

But that was true for all U.S. bombing attacks
on railroads in Europe, yet it never deterred the
Roosevelt administration and its allies from target-
ing them as part of the war effort.

George McGovern, the future U.S. senator and
1972 Democratic presidential nominee, was one
of the young pilots who undertook those raids
(including bombing the oil factories at Auschwitz).

In a 2004 interview, McGovern argued that even
if the railway lines could have been repaired, the
damage would have delayed the deportations
and saved lives.

“[I]t would have helped if we had bombed the
railroad lines leading to Auschwitz. The purpose
of those rail lines was to carry human beings to
their death, and we might even have been able to
use long-range fighter planes to get down right
on the tracks and knock them out,” McGovern
said. Regarding a junction through which trains
passed on the way to Auschwitz, he said: “We
should have hit that junction and disabled it. We
should have hit the rail lines, even if we had to go
back several times.”
It is also important to remember that there were
bridges along those routes, and bridges could
not be quickly repaired. Some of the requests
put forward by Jewish groups at the same time
actually named bridges that should be targeted.

Those pleas were no secret. On July 10, 1944, the
Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that recent
escapees from Auschwitz were urging the fol-
lowing: “The crematoria in Oswiecim [Auschwitz]
and Birkenau, easily recognisable [sic] by their
chimneys and watch-towers, as well as the main
railway lines connecting Slovakia and Carpatho-
Ruthenia with Poland, especially the bridge at
Cop, should be bombed.”
Debating the options for Allied action, a com-
mentator in the Burns film argues that bombing
Auschwitz might have been a bad idea because
some of the inmates could have been harmed.

That argument is disingenuous for two reasons.

First, the United States could have bombed the
railway lines and bridges to Auschwitz without
endangering inmates. Second, the presence of
those prisoners was not the reason the Allies
rejected the bombing requests; note that they
bombed those oil factories in broad daylight,
even though slave laborers were likely to be
there. Likewise, the United States bombed a
rocket factory in the Buchenwald concentration
camp in daylight in August 1944, even though
the workers would be there; many were indeed
killed, but the Allies considered the attack to be
justified despite that risk.

Nahum Goldmann, who was the Jewish
Agency’s representative in Washington as well
as co-chairman of the World Jewish Congress,
repeatedly asked U.S. officials to bomb Auschwitz
as well as the railways, and heard their excuses
about not wanting to “divert” planes from the war
effort. Three days after Ben-Gurion’s speech in
Jerusalem, Ernest Frischer of the Czech gov-
ernment-in-exile reported to Goldmann and the
WJCongress that the Allies had been bombing
“fuel factories … in Oswiecim and Birkenau,” not far
from the “extermination installations.” Goldmann
pointed out that fact to Allied officials, to no avail.

They were, as Ben-Gurion put it, not willing to
even “lift a finger” to rescue Jews.

In a recent interview, Burns asserted that
President Roosevelt “could not wave a magic
wand” but did his best to help the Jews during the
Holocaust. Ben-Gurion, who actually lived through
those days and was an eyewitness to Roosevelt’s
abandonment of the Jews, understood the reality
far more clearly. JE
Rafael Medoff is founding director of The David S.

Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author
of more than 20 books about Jewish history and
the Holocaust. Monty N. Penkower is professor
emeritus of modern Jewish history at the Machon
Lander Graduate School of Jewish Studies and
author of a five-volume study about the rise of the
state of Israel between the years 1933-1948.

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