WI: Allies Targeted Concentration Camps

We avoided attacking the infrastructure of the holocaust because it was believed that we would be diverting resources to attack what would be repaired by Germany anyway, and that it was best to keep those resources dedicated to the war to end it quicker and liberate the camps quicker. There was one incident where Allied bombers bombed a concentration camp, and that was only by accident.

What if the Allies targeted the concentration camps, bombed rails, etc as part of the war effort, and made them a military objective?
 
My understanding is that very few prisoners were actually held at the camps, relative to the number who were brought in.


Thus, even if the ones who were at the camp were hit, which they would be, that overall the numbers of those killed would drop dramatically.

And I can't imagine that it would slow down the war effort very much.
 
It killed some prisoners that otherwise most probably would have survived the war due to working in factories, if it was the incident I came across a few weeks ago. :(

Calbears Alt Story?

Yes an additional 40,000 dies in death marches as a result but the story goes on to say that this was relatively few compared to the million or so that the camp would have potentially killed had it not been bombed

So if we callously reduce those people to statistics then over a million people are not murdered in that Death Camp
 
Calbears Alt Story?
No, I have not read that (yet). This was in one of the WW2 books I try to work my way through. Currently it is "The long road home", before that "The last Battle", but it may be in the one before that, whichever that was, perhaps "The moral war".

In one I read years ago there was some statement regarding the post-war suggestion of "bombing Auschwitz", that even if it had been done when it became a realistic action, it was by then too late to have achieved anything significant.

On the other hand, at the Neuengamme camp, I read that the prisoners themselves felt happier when they were bombed, since this showed that their tormentors were on the defensive. So even if a bombing of death camps might have accomplished no change in the death toll, it would have raised the hopes for the inmates.
 
No, I have not read that (yet). This was in one of the WW2 books I try to work my way through. Currently it is "The long road home", before that "The last Battle", but it may be in the one before that, whichever that was, perhaps "The moral war".

In one I read years ago there was some statement regarding the post-war suggestion of "bombing Auschwitz", that even if it had been done when it became a realistic action, it was by then too late to have achieved anything significant.

On the other hand, at the Neuengamme camp, I read that the prisoners themselves felt happier when they were bombed, since this showed that their tormentors were on the defensive. So even if a bombing of death camps might have accomplished no change in the death toll, it would have raised the hopes for the inmates.

Well if nothing else it would show that the Allies pro actively tried to stop the Death camps - even if it was proven that the attempt or attempts did not result in fewer deaths over all.
 
Well if nothing else it would show that the Allies pro actively tried to stop the Death camps - even if it was proven that the attempt or attempts did not result in fewer deaths over all.

Until the Allies saw the camps it wasn't an emotionally real thing to them even for the Allied leaders and generals who believed it was going on.

That is the reality of the period that the lack of action I believe correctly sends the point of. When the film reels reached the camps that was when the Final Solution started to become an emotionally real thing for the Western world.

History googles nonwithsanding I find it helps to get into the minds of the people of the era and intellectually knowing large numbers of people were dying and being killed in camps was nothing like actually seeing it as they had no mental vantage point to emotionally comprehend the statistics they were seeing.

The modern mental and emotional conception of the Holocaust was not there nor was the terminology which at the time tended to be the same as used in the 18th and 19th century.

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