by Kai Bird
While Churchill was an advocate of bombing Auschwitz, there is no evidence that Roosevelt was ever approached about the matter.64 Both the president and McCloy, however, took a strong interest in another scheme to rescue the Hungarian Jews. This scheme—known as the “Brand affair”—may well have influenced McCloy’s attitude toward the bombing question. On May 19, 1944, two Hungarian Jews arrived by small plane in Istanbul. One of the passengers, Joel Brand, a member of a Hungarian Zionist organization called the Relief and Rescue Committee, brought word of a startling offer. The man Hitler had placed in charge of the Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann, was prepared to exchange one million Jews in return for ten thousand trucks and various other supplies such as coffee, soap, and tea. Eichmann assured Brand that he would demonstrate his good faith by releasing several thousand Jews just as soon as Brand could return with word that the Allies could in principle agree to send the trucks.
Brand was quickly picked up and detained by the British in Cairo for interrogation. McCloy was informed of this development almost immediately, as was Roosevelt. The president wrote Ira Hirschmann, the War Refugee Board representative in Turkey, to determine the authenticity of the offer. He told Hirschmann to try to keep the door open in indirect negotiations as long as there was even a “remote possibility of saving lives.”65
Not surprisingly, most military officers in the War Department reacted with skepticism to the idea of trading trucks for Jews. McCloy thought the proposal “bizarre,” and he decided to follow the matter closely; verbatim transcripts of Brand’s interrogation in Cairo were on his desk by late July 1944.66 But he and other War Department officials were more interested in what Brand’s interrogation told them about Nazi morale. In the end, the Soviets demanded that the whole idea be abandoned on the grounds that it probably represented an attempt by the Germans to explore the possibility of a separate peace on the Western front. Brand’s mission thus ended in failure.
In the meantime, Jewish groups in New York had not given up on the military option. In early August, McCloy received another appeal for bombing the death camps, this time from Leon Kubowitzki, the same World Jewish Congress official in New York who had previously warned against bombing. Kubowitzki’s message was actually passing on an appeal from Ernest Frischer, a member of the Czech government-in-exile. As before, McCloy allowed Gerhardt to draft the reply, which used much the same language as before to reject the request. Without investigating the matter or contacting air commanders in the European theater, McCloy again asserted that such bombings would require the “diversion of considerable air support. . . .” The only new element in this letter was the rather curious statement that “there has been considerable opinion to the effect that such an effort, even if practicable, might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans.”67
Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, learned that the Allies were running bombing missions near Auschwitz by reading The New York Times, which briefly reported on the Silesia raids in August and September. Between July 7 and November 20, 1944, at least ten fleets, numbering up to 357 heavy bombers, dropped their loads within thirty-five miles of Auschwitz. Sometime that autumn, Goldmann went to see McCloy in his Pentagon office and personally raised the bombing issue with him. Goldmann maintained an apartment in Washington during the war years and knew McCloy as a friend of both Felix Frankfurter and Henry Morgenthau, Jr.
Years later, Goldmann, who always admired McCloy, wrote of this meeting: “McCloy indicated to me that, although the Americans were reluctant about my proposal, they might agree to it, though any decision as to the targets of bombardments in Europe was in the hands of the British.” (This was not the case.) McCloy told Goldmann to see his good friend Sir John Dill, head of the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington. Goldmann recalled his hour-long confrontation with Dill as “one of the most unforgettable and depressing of my long career.” Dill immediately rejected the idea, first on the grounds that such bombings would kill thousands of prisoners. When Goldmann argued that these prisoners were doomed anyway, Dill declared that British bombs had to be saved for military targets. Goldmann then pointed out that the Royal Air Force was already bombing the I. G. Farben factory only a few miles from Auschwitz and that “the few dozen bombs needed to strike the death camps would not influence the outcome of the war. . . .” Dill was unmoved by these arguments, and by the end of the meeting Goldmann bitterly accused the British field marshal of a “lack of human understanding for the terrible tragedy of the extermination camps.” Dill responded that he thought Goldmann “discourteous,” and on that note the two men parted company.68
If in this instance McCloy succeeded in assigning responsibility to the British, on other occasions the War Department rationalized that it was a matter for Soviet consideration. At the end of September, the Polish government-in-exile once again made a request through the War Refugee Board to have the death camps bombed. The Poles said they had received evidence from their sources in Warsaw that the pace of the exterminations had increased. Pehle decided in early October to transmit this new request to McCloy, but he did so with a note merely advising him to look it over “for such consideration as it may be worth.” McCloy’s assistant, Colonel Gerhardt, passed Pehle’s note to McCloy and recommended that “no action be taken on this, since the matter has been fully presented several times previously.” He reminded McCloy that “it has been our position, which we have expressed to WRB, that bombing the Polish extermination centers should be within the operational responsibility of the Russian forces.”69
That the bombing should be a responsibility of the Russians represented a new rationale. In fact, there is no evidence that the issue was raised with the Soviets, even though there was an easily available excuse to do so. Only a month before, a group of American correspondents toured the Majdanek death camp, near Lublin, which had recently been overrun by Soviet troops. The reporters wired home detailed descriptions of the gas chambers, the crematoria, and the mounds of human ashes.70 If the War Department had really intended to raise the issue of bombing the death camps with the Soviets, no one would have had to spend any time convincing the Russians of the facts.
Finally, in early November, Pehle made one last request for a bombing mission against the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps. He had at last received the full thirty-page text of the Vrba-Wetzler report, and its contents shocked him into action. He wrote McCloy another letter, this time pulling no punches. Enclosing copies of the two escapees’ reports, Pehle told McCloy, “No report of Nazi atrocities received by the Board has quite caught the gruesome brutality of what is taking place in these camps as have these sober, factual accounts of conditions in Auschwitz and Birkenau. I earnestly hope that you will read these reports.” In his cover note, Pehle emphasized that the destruction of large numbers of people “apparently is not a simple process.” The eyewitness reports, Pehle said, show that the Germans were devoting “considerable technological ingenuity and administrative know-how in order to carry out murder on a mass production basis. . . .”
Pehle then “strongly” recommended “destroying the execution chambers and crematories in Birkenau through direct bombing action.” He acknowledged that, “Until now, despite pressures from many sources, I have been hesitant to urge the destruction of these camps by direct, military action. But I am convinced that the point has now been reached where such action is justifiable if it is deemed feasible by competent military authorities.” As if he knew that these military authorities would be reluctant to bomb a nonmilitary target, Pehle then tried to make the military case for bombing the death camps. Krupp, Siemens, and Buna factories—manufacturing hand-grenade casings—could be destroyed in the vicinity of the camps. Many German soldiers guarding the camp would be killed, and the morale of the Polish underground would be “considerably strengthened.” Finally, a number of prisoners might escape in the confusion resulting from the bombings. As evidence of this, Pehle enclosed a recent New York Times article on th
e British bombing of a German prison camp in France where a hundred French resistance fighters condemned to death had escaped in the aftermath of the bombing.71
McCloy or Colonel Gerhardt routinely passed Pehle’s letter over to OPD. Six days later, Lieutenant General John Hull, recently promoted to chief of OPD, wrote McCloy a military evaluation of Pehle’s latest proposal. Hull was the general who had given McCloy a quick negative evaluation of a similar proposal the previous June. This time he flatly stated, “The target is beyond the maximum range of medium bombardment, dive bombers [needed for precision bombing] and fighter bombers located in the United Kingdom, France or Italy.” Hull asserted that the use of heavy bombers based in Britain would require a round-trip flight “unescorted of approximately 2000 miles over enemy territory.” He then went on to tell McCloy that U.S. strategic air forces could not at this “critical stage of the war” be diverted from “the destruction of industrial target systems so vital to our effort. . . .” Hull concluded that the proposed bombing was “unacceptable from a military standpoint. . . and the results obtained would not justify the high losses likely to result from such a mission.”72
Again, Hull had not consulted any of his commanders in the European theater, and no systematic study of the proposed mission was conducted. Contrary to what he told McCloy, bomber missions were flying over Silesia, targeting synthetic-oil plants adjacent to Auschwitz. Nor were these missions sustaining high losses. Even if it was determined that only dive-bombers could do the job, Hull was wrong to say that such bombers could not have traveled the necessary distance. P-38 dive-bombers had made a longer run from their bases in Italy to destroy oil refineries at Ploieşti the previous June. If Hull had taken the time to make a few inquiries, he quickly would have learned these facts. If McCloy had expressed any strong personal interest in a positive reply, Hull’s response might easily have been different. As it was, Colonel Gerhardt received Hull’s evaluation and once again merely incorporated Hull’s language into a draft reply to Pehle for McCloy’s signature. The letter concluded on a personal note: “I know you have been reluctant to press this activity on the War Department. We have been pressed strongly from other quarters, however, and have taken the best military opinion on its feasibility, and we believe the above conclusion is a sound one.” Without commenting on whether he had even read it, McCloy then enclosed the Vrba-Wetzler report for return to Pehle’s files.73
This ended Pehle’s efforts to persuade McCloy to have the death camps bombed. Ironically, the only attempt to destroy one of the death camps was made by the tortured inmates themselves. One month earlier, on October 7, a band of courageous inmates in Birkenau had organized a suicidal uprising and managed to destroy by fire one of the camp’s crematoria.74 The ultimate tragedy lay in the number of lives that could have been saved if the Allies had bombed the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Birkenau at any time during the summer of 1944. If McCloy had pushed through a bombing order in mid-August, some hundred thousand Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz would have been spared death by gassing.75 With the gas chambers destroyed, the Nazis would have been forced to suspend the industrial scale of their murders.
McCloy bears substantial responsibility for this misjudgment. It was his job to handle such civilian political matters brought to the attention of the War Department. Repeated requests of various Jewish leaders and organizations to bomb the death camps were not lost in a bureaucratic maze; the requests, together with the terrifying evidence, found their way to the right man, probably the only official in the War Department who possessed sufficient power and personal competency to persuade the government to make the rescue of European Jewry a military priority.
If John Pehle, Nahum Goldmann, and others had persuaded him of the merits of such an operation, there is little doubt that McCloy’s characteristic diligence would have quickly resulted in a bombing attack on the Polish death camps. McCloy’s mistake was one of omission. He allowed his instinctive chariness of “getting the Army involved” to govern his responses.76 Though given more information than any other high-ranking official in Washington, he chose not to study the issue. When confronted with eyewitness reports, he chose not to believe. Like many others grappling with these unimaginable events, he lived in what the Protestant theologian W. A. Visser’t Hooft called “a twilight between knowing and not knowing.”77
He was not consumed with prejudice, as were many others in the government, such as Breckinridge Long. But he shared with Stimson and many of his peers some of the unconscious petty stereotypes of Jews common to the period. One of these was that Jews could be their own worst advocates, that any aggressive advocacy on their part was somehow grating and impolite. This view, while wholly unexceptional in McCloy’s social milieu, reinforced the skepticism McCloy and others felt about the reports of a Jewish Holocaust, particularly when the sources of the reports were Jewish. Finally, it is important to record that at least one of the Jewish Americans with whom he worked could tag him with anti-Semitism. Henry Morgenthau, Jr., genuinely liked McCloy, but early in the summer of 1944 the Treasury secretary lost his temper at a Cabinet meeting when informed that McCloy was complaining about the army’s having to take care of Jewish refugees. Though McCloy wasn’t in attendance, Stimson was there, and returned that day to dictate a memo asserting that someone in the Cabinet had labeled McCloy an “oppressor of the Jews.”
Morgenthau quickly heard that McCloy was deeply offended, so, early the next morning, he invited him over to his home in order to clear up the matter. McCloy came right to the point by saying, “I understand that I was criticized at Cabinet. . . . Somebody in Cabinet said that I was the oppressor of the Jews. That is a terrible thing.” Without specifically denying that he had called McCloy an “oppressor of the Jews,” Morgenthau reassured him that “there was no criticism of you. . . .” The two men then proceeded to have an amicable conversation about refugee policy. McCloy volunteered that he had found a camp to house eighteen hundred Jewish refugees and asked, “How many people are they really proposing to bring over?” Morgenthau assured him that only a “token” number would be brought into the United States. McCloy then made it clear to Morgenthau that the army was always willing “to be the over-ground railway to bring these people out.” He explained that the army in Italy would feed and care for such refugees only during transit: “We have twenty thousand Italians a night coming through the line in Southern Italy. It is a very difficult military question. We have got our hands full.” Morgenthau said he understood, and both men agreed that ultimately the United Nations Refugee and Relief Agency (UNRRA) would have to take care of refugees once they had made their way south of the army’s front lines. With the issue settled, they parted as friends.
But, clearly, McCloy had been shaken by Morgenthau’s accusation. Immediately after this meeting, Morgenthau told Pehle, “Frankly, the fellow was bothered.” He told Pehle he was glad he had acted promptly to diffuse the issue, and confessed of McCloy, “. . . the fellow is a human fellow.”78
Henry Morgenthau was not wholly immune to McCloy’s persuasive charms, which may explain why he was now about to be outmaneuvered on the critical issue of Germany’s future. For many months, McCloy had been crafting a set of policy directives to guide the U.S. Army as it began to occupy German territory. By August 5, 1944, the progress of Allied troops in France was such that McCloy could tell Harold Ickes over lunch that he “would not be surprised if we would be through with the war in Europe in about a month.”79 If Germany should now suddenly collapse, two policy directives drafted by McCloy on policy for occupying Germany, together with an army handbook spelling out the directives in detail, would immediately become effective. McCloy’s directives reflected the army’s policy of restoring law and order to a war-devastated Germany as rapidly as possible. But the directives and the handbook could easily be characterized as a blueprint for a soft peace. The army handbook instructed occupation authorities to “subsidize essential economic activities where necessary” and “recon
struct German foreign trade. . . .” The army was supposed to be prepared to ensure a food supply averaging two thousand calories a day for each German. “International boundaries will be deemed to be as they were on 31 December 1937.”80
In early August, Morgenthau and his aide, Harry Dexter White, met with Eisenhower in France. The supreme commander indicated in strong terms that he favored letting “Germany stew in its own juice,” at least for the first several months of Allied occupation. He gave Morgenthau a copy of the draft army handbook on occupation policy and, according to Morgenthau, indicated his disapproval of it. Eisenhower’s major concern at the time seemed to be that any talk of a soft peace might disrupt relations with the Soviets; he was anxious to see them resume their offensive on the Eastern front.81
As a result, Morgenthau came back to Washington determined to change the McCloy directives. On August 25, he called up the assistant secretary and said, “Now, look, I just feel somebody’s got to take the lead about let’s be tough to the Germans, see?” Morgenthau said he was going to show the president a synopsis of the army handbook on occupation policy.82 McCloy must have been surprised by what happened next. The very next morning, Roosevelt sent Stimson a stinging memo which began, “This so-called ‘Handbook’ is pretty bad.” The president said he saw no reason to have the U.S. Army of Occupation build a “WPA, PWA, or a CCC for Germany.” He asked Stimson to revise the handbook and warned him, “The German people as a whole must have driven home to them that the whole nation has been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization.”83
