Mark Shea made a comment about the irony of blaming the Pope for the Holocaust when he had few material tools to end it — or even interfere. Point well taken. I love Mark and his blessed blog, but he’s incorrect in one respect. Here’s the full passage:
“It is one of the weird twists of history that so many in both the Catholic and Jewish communities should survey the wreckage of WWII, a wreckage in Allied Leaders like Roosevelt and Churchill refused to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz and in which Stalin did nothing as the Warsaw Ghetto was annihilated, and look past this to a man who had not a single gun to defend himself, and yet who was responsible for the rescue of more Jews than any other man in Europe–and condemn him as practically being the architect of the Holocaust.”
America bombed lots of German rail lines (and railheads and railway yards), but the Germans were very clever about fixing them. It doesn’t take any skill to fill a bomb crater, and it doesn’t take hardly any skill to mend a rail. Bombing the lines only caused a few hours’ delay, or a day at most. Given the horribly inaccurate bombs of the day (it took a squadron of planes dropping hundreds of bombs to destroy a single target), it would have been impossible to destroy the rails altogether.
The Germans, as everyone knows, are organizational geniuses. Their wartime production kept humming along until the Allies started conquering Germany proper; a big part of their industrial prowess was dedicated to killing human beings. Since we couldn’t stopped industrial processes such as tank production or oil refinement, saying we could have destroyed the killing process is inaccurate.
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actually i believe mark is right. there was a railway going right to auschwitz that carried up to 10,000 people a day into it. the usa knew about it but for unexplained reasons never bombed it even to stop it for a day.
this is from a biography of John J. McCloy who was assistant director of the war department at the time.
As I said, the Germans managed to keep making tanks, refining oil, harvesting crops, planning, shipping, and everything else, despite the millions of pounds of ordnance the Allies dropped on Germany almost every day from 1943-45. Any delay would have been temporary and would not have permanently disrupted the killings, which were a very high priority for the Nazi regime.
To say that Americans were in any way directly responsible for the Holocaust is a real stretch. Direct responsibility for the Holocaust rests with Hitler, his minions, and the men who carried out the orders.