Bombing Auschwitz

Join historians, survivors and experts as they consider one of the great moral dilemmas of the 20th century. Should the Allies have risked killing Auschwitz prisoners and bombed the camp to stop future atrocities?

In 1944, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Their harrowing testimonies and detailed sketches of the camp's mass extermination practices exposed the "dark heart" of Nazi-occupied Poland.

In May 1944, Rabbi Michael Weissmandl sent the Auschwitz Protocol, along with a plea for help and a demand for Allied air forces to bomb Auschwitz, to Roswell McClelland at the War Refugee Board in Switzerland.

On December 3, 1944, The Washington Post published an editorial on the atrocities in Auschwitz with the headline “Genocide,” marking the first time the word appeared in a national newspaper.