The Chairman

by Kai Bird

  Information on the Hungarian deportations had been available for some weeks. As early as April, even before the deportations actually began, Gerhardt Riegner of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva informed Rabbi Stephen Wise that the Germans were now planning to exterminate the last large Jewish community still intact on the European continent. A few weeks later, United Press reported that three hundred thousand Hungarian Jews had been forced into assembly camps. On May 10, The New York Times reported that the Budapest government “is now preparing for the annihilation of Hungarian Jews.” A week later, the Times published a report that the first batch of Jews had left the Hungarian countryside for “murder camps in Poland.” This was, in fact, remarkably accurate reporting: the first trains bound for Auschwitz had left only three days previously.38

  Some of the information that persuaded Rosenheim to request the bombardment of the rail lines out of Hungary was based on the testimony of two Jews who had escaped from Auschwitz on April 10. Making their way by foot at night, and sleeping by day, they crossed into Slovakia on April 21. There the two escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, made contact with the Jewish underground and wrote a thirty-page report detailing what they had seen at Auschwitz. Both men had survived more than two years in the death camp, largely working as registrars. In this capacity, they had plenty of opportunity to observe the millions of Jews processed through the camp. Vrba and Wetzler were determined to escape, to bear witness and warn the Hungarian Jews of what awaited them upon deportation. The previous January, Vrba had seen the Nazis construct a new railroad ramp leading right up to one of the gas chambers in the Birkenau section of Auschwitz. “The purpose of this ramp,” Vrba wrote years later, “was no secret in Birkenau, the SS were talking about ‘Hungarian Salami’ and a ‘million units’. . . .”39

  The Vrba-Wetzler report for the first time placed a name on the main extermination camp, Auschwitz, and described in incredible detail its operations, and specifically the gas chambers:

  It holds 2,000 people. . . . When everybody is inside, the heavy doors are closed. Then there is a short pause, presumably to allow the room temperature to rise to a certain level, after which SS men with gas masks climb on the roof, open the traps, and shake down . . . a “cyanide” mixture of some sort which turns into gas at a certain temperature. After three minutes everyone in the chamber is dead. . . . The chamber is then opened, aired, and the “special squad” [of slave laborers] carts the bodies on flat trucks to the furnace rooms where the burning takes place.40

  This report reached Budapest and the leadership of Hungarian Jews by early May, and by mid-June it was passed by Allen Dulles in Switzerland to Roswell McClelland, the War Refugee Board’s representative in Geneva. McClelland did not doubt the veracity of the Vrba-Wetzler testimony; it merely confirmed everything else he had heard about the Polish death camps, and was corroborated by the testimony of a non-Jewish Polish military officer who had also escaped from Auschwitz. On June 24, he sent a three-page cable to Pehle in Washington reporting, “There is little doubt that many of these Hungarian Jews are being sent to the extermination camps of Ausehitz (Oswiecim) and Birke Nau (Rajska) in western upper Silesia where according to recent reports, since early summer 1942 at least 1,500,000 Jews have been killed. There is evidence that already in January 1944 preparations were being made to receive and exterminate Hungarian Jews in these camps. Soon a detailed report on these camps will be cabled.”41

  This was the only reference to the Vrba-Wetzler report in McClelland’s cable. He had, not unreasonably, decided to devote a separate, longer cable to summarizing their gruesome testimony. But even this shorter cable of June 24 described in considerable detail, citing numerous sources, the horrific circumstances of the Hungarian deportations, and how hundreds must have died for lack of air and food during the three-day train journey to Poland. He also conveyed the request of “all sources of this information in Slovakia and Hungary that vital sections of these [railway] lines, especially bridges . . . be bombed as the only possible means of slowing down or stopping future deportations.” However, he then added a disclaimer: “This [request] is submitted by me as a proposal of these agencies and I can venture no opinion on its utility.”42

  On the very day McClelland sent his cable, Pehle saw McCloy in his office and discussed Rosenheim’s bombing proposal. Pehle made it clear that he “had several doubts about the matter”— specifically, whether it would be appropriate to use military personnel for such a purpose, and whether the rail lines could be put out of action long enough to make any difference to the Hungarian Jews. In a memo afterward, Pehle recorded that he had made it “very clear to Mr. McCloy” that he was not, “at this point at least, requesting the War Department to take any action on this proposal, other than to appropriately explore it.” McCloy assured him that he would “check into the matter.”43

  A day or two later, Pehle told McCloy about his receipt of the McClelland cable and promised to send him a copy. On June 29, it reached McCloy’s desk with a cover note directing his attention to the request to bomb the “vital sections” of the rail lines.44 By this time, the Operations and Planning Division (OPD) in the War Department had generated a response to Jacob Rosenheim’s June 18 request that the Hungarian rail lines be bombed.

  OPD had received a query on the bombing proposal on June 23. Three days later, Lieutenant General John E. Hull, an assistant chief of staff and the immediate deputy to Lieutenant General Thomas T. Handy, approved a reply. (Lieutenant General Handy was at the time visiting England and the Normandy invasion beaches.)45 General Hull, or whichever of his aides drafted the reply, conducted no study of the military viability of bombing the rail lines. Instead, Hull merely relied on the War Department’s February 1944 internal memorandum stating as a matter of policy that “the most effective relief which can be given victims of enemy persecution is to insure the speedy defeat of the Axis.”46

  McCloy discussed this recommendation with his personal aide, Colonel Al Gerhardt, and concluded there was no reason to overrule General Hull’s estimation. McCloy instructed Gerhardt to “kill” the matter. But then, on July 3, 1944, Gerhardt finally passed him the June 29 note from Pehle with the attached cable from McClelland. Gerhardt wrote, “I know you told me to ‘kill’ this but since those instructions, we have received the attached letter from Pehle. I suggest that the attached reply be sent.”47 McCloy inquired no further about the issue and merely signed Gerhardt’s suggested response. It was to be the first of many letters he would sign refusing to take military action against the death camps: “The War Department is of the opinion that the suggested air operation is impracticable. It could be executed only by the diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations and would in any case be of such very doubtful efficacy that it would not amount to a practical project.”48

  The single assertion of fact in this letter, that the Auschwitz rail lines could be bombed only by “the diversion of considerable air support,” was not true. Long-range American bombers stationed in Italy had been flying over the camp since that spring. Aerial-reconnaissance photos had been taken of the Auschwitz camp and a neighboring I. G. Farben petrochemical plant on April 4 and June 26,1944, the latter date just one week before McCloy wrote Pehle that such an air operation was impracticable.49 Indeed, a few weeks later, U.S. bombers extended the air war against Germany’s synthetic-fuels plants to regions very close to the death camps. And late in the summer, a few bombs actually fell on the Monowitz camp, a part of the Auschwitz complex, and injured some three hundred slave laborers.50

  There is no question that the tens of thousands of inmates in the death camps themselves wished and prayed for Allied bombing raids, even at the risk of their own death. Primo Levi, an Italian partisan captured and imprisoned in Auschwitz in 1944, later wrote, “As for us, we were too destroyed to be really afraid. The few who could still judge and feel rightly, drew strength and hope from the bombardments. . . . B
ut the greater number bore the new danger and the new discomforts with unchanged indifference: it was not a conscious resignation, but the opaque torpor of beasts broken in by blows, whom the blows no longer hurt.”51

  Nevertheless, in a letter to the War Refugee Board on July 1, Leon Kubowitzki, head of the Congress’s Rescue Department, warned that the gas chambers could not be destroyed by aerial bombardment, for “the first victims would be the Jews who are gathered in these camps.” Instead, Kubowitzki proposed that the Soviets be asked to send in paratroopers “to seize the buildings, to annihilate the squads of murderers, and to free the unfortunate inmates.” Since it was highly unlikely that the Soviets would act on such a request, Pehle viewed it as a prelude to a request for the use of American troops. He didn’t even bother to pass this proposal on to McCloy, because, as he told Morgenthau two months later, “we did not feel justified in asking the War Department to undertake a measure which involved the sacrifice of American troops.”52

  Members of Pehle’s own staff disagreed with him; one of his staff aides, Benjamin Akzin, was so shaken by McClelland’s June 24 cable that five days later he wrote a memo making a strong argument for bombing not the rail lines but the gas chambers themselves. To do so, he argued, would force the Germans to spend considerable time and resources to reconstruct the gas chambers “or to evolve elsewhere equally efficient procedures of mass slaughter and of disposing of the bodies.” In the meantime, many lives would be saved. Akzin told Pehle it was a “matter of principle” and that in any case the Auschwitz complex itself was an important military target, containing “mining and manufacturing centres.” Finally, he said, the Allies should not be deterred by the fact that a large number of Jews would probably be killed in any such military operations: “. . . refraining from bombing the extermination centres would be sheer misplaced sentimentality, far more cruel a decision than to destroy these centres.”53

  Here, at last, was a cogent and compelling argument for the use of military force. Akzin clearly accepted the basic fact, that fifteen thousand Hungarian Jews were being deported each day to Auschwitz, where one had to assume that most were executed. At that very moment, twelve thousand Jews were being gassed each day in the Auschwitz camps, and by August as many as twenty-four thousand were killed in a single day—a record throughout the Final Solution.54 McCloy, however, was never shown Akzin’s memo, and Pehle’s own doubts and the halfhearted manner in which he conveyed the bombing proposal reinforced McCloy’s judgment that this was something the War Department should stay away from.

  Still, as the evidence accumulated in the latter half of June and the first week of July, Pehle began to have second thoughts. On July 8, McClelland, in Switzerland, cabled him an eight-page summary of the Vrba-Wetzler report. Although Pehle would not see the complete text of this graphic description of the mass killings until the autumn of that year, McClelland’s summary persuaded him to raise the issue of military action once again. But he did so in a fashion clearly designed to protect the War Refugee Board’s record and lay the onus for a refusal to use military force against the death camps on others in the War Department. In a July 15 memorandum for the members of the War Refugee Board, copies of which were sent to Stimson and McCloy, Pehle first summarized the Board’s general response to the Hungarian crisis. He cited the Board’s efforts to get Hungarian refugees out of the country or protect them with Swedish passports. The latter scheme had been instituted in cooperation with the government of Sweden, which at the WRB’s request had accredited a young and prominent businessman named Raoul Wallenberg as their attaché in Budapest. About to leave on his rescue mission, Wallenberg, thirty-one, was promised whatever assistance the WRB could extend. After outlining these and various other schemes to rescue Hungarian Jews, Pehle tried to set the record straight on the question of military operations:

  As the situation in Hungary has become increasingly desperate, the Board has received several proposals that certain military operations might take place with the possible purpose of forestalling or hindering German extermination operations. One of these was a suggestion that the railways leading from the points of deportation to the camps be bombed. This particular suggestion was discussed with Assistant Secretary of War McCloy. After careful consideration of the matter, the War Department ruled that the suggested air operation was impracticable. . . .

  It has been suggested that the concentration and extermination centers be bombed in order that in the resultant confusion some of the unfortunate people might be able to escape and hide. It has also been suggested that weapons be dropped by parachute simultaneously with such bombings. Finally, it has been proposed that some parachute troops be dropped to bring about disorganization and escape of the unfortunate people. Arrangements are under way for the examination of these proposals by the competent military authorities.55

  Attached to this memo were copies of the cables Pehle had received from McClelland in Switzerland and the Board’s representative in Sweden, Iver C. Olsen. These cables were so definitive and detailed in their description of the plight of Hungary’s Jews that there could be little doubt of the consequences of inaction.

  Olsen’s July 1 cable from Stockholm described in sickening detail the industrial character of the killing factories. He said the latest news from Budapest concerning the treatment of Jews “is so terrible that it is hard to believe and that there are no words to qualify its description.” He reported that, in a conservative estimate, over six hundred thousand Jews had been either killed or deported:

  According to the evidence, these people are now being taken to a place across the Hungarian frontier in Poland where there is an establishment at which gas is used for killing people. It is said by Boheman [a Swedish Foreign Ministry official] that these people of all ages, children, women and men are transported to this isolated spot in box cars packed in like sardines and that upon arrival many are already dead. Those who have survived the trip are stripped naked, given a small square object which resembles a piece of soap and told that at the bath house they must bathe themselves. The “bath house” does in fact look like a big bathing establishment. . . . Into a large room with a total capacity of two thousand packed together closely the victims are pushed. No regard is given to sex or age and all are completely naked. When the atmosphere of the hall has been heated by this mass of bodies a fine powder is let down over the whole area by opening a contraption in the ceiling. When the heated atmosphere comes in contact with this powder a poisonous gas is formed which kills all occupants of the room. Trucks then take out the bodies, and burning follows.56

  McCloy received a copy of this cable, but there is no record of his reaction to it. And though he and Pehle again discussed the military option, there is no formal record that Pehle followed up on his July 15 assertion that “competent military authorities” would examine the proposals to bomb the gas chambers or effect some kind of rescue operation with paratroopers. A genuine determination of the viability of any such operations would have to have been made in the office of General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, the man in charge of the U.S. air arm. But there is no record in Arnold’s papers that the issue was ever brought to his desk.57 Evidently, McCloy still did not really comprehend or believe that mass extermination was being carried out on an industrial basis, for, after his talk with the assistant secretary, Pehle dropped the issue.58

  Meanwhile, in London, a summary of the Vrba-Wetzler report had reached the Foreign Office on July 4, and the next day, in Parliament, Anthony Eden acknowledged that “many persons have been killed” in the course of these “barbarous deportations.”59 On the following day, Eden raised with Churchill the matter of bombing the death camps. He told the prime minister that the idea had “already been considered” but said that he was now in favor of it. On July 7, Churchill wrote Eden, “You and I are in entire agreement. Get anything out of the Air Force you can, and invoke me if necessary.”60

  Unlike McCloy, Pehle, and others in Washington, not only did Churchil
l instantly believe the Auschwitz reports, but he was willing to authorize military operations against the death camps.61 A few days later, he told his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, “There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilized men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races in Europe.”62

  Eden immediately acted upon Churchill’s authorization and wrote a letter to British Secretary of State for Air Sir Archibald Sinclair. Referring to the “appalling persecution” of Hungary’s Jews, Eden then asked for the Air Ministry’s opinion as to the “feasibility” of bombing either the rail lines or the camps themselves. He told Sinclair, “I very much hope that it will be possible to do something. I have the authority of the Prime Minister to say that he agrees.”

  Sinclair’s reply a week later echoed McCloy’s own negative assessment. He told Eden that interrupting the railways to the death camps “is out of our power.” Sinclair pleaded that “the distance of Silesia [in the region of Auschwitz] from our bases entirely rules out our doing anything of the kind.” He explained that, whereas the distances were too great for British night bombers, “It might be carried out by the Americans by daylight but it would be a costly and hazardous operation. It might be ineffective, and even if the plant was destroyed, I am not clear that it would really help the victims.” Nevertheless, Sinclair said he would try to present all the facts of the situation to the Americans, not knowing that McCloy had already rejected the idea. In the event, no formal British request was made on the subject, partly because over the next month the Air Ministry failed to obtain copies of the layout and exact location of Auschwitz, information that rested in the files of the Foreign Ministry. In short, Churchill’s request that Eden “get anything out of the Air Force you can” on bombing the death camps floundered in the face of the same military mind-set prevalent in the War Department. Scarce British pilots could not be risked for a nonmilitary target.63