Bush: 'We should have bombed' Auschwitz

Gog,

It is very easy to shed crocodiles' tears after the fact. "The only good Jew is a dead Jew". On one hand, you "cry" over dead Jews. On the other hand, you make sure there'll be plenty more dead Jews, this time in the ghetto of Judea and Samaria. In fact, you have already killed a few.

Feh!....

DS

On Jan 13, 2008 6:45 AM, E. wrote:

I hate this yad holocaust stuff.
And what's that, olmert with a kippa?
so this is his holy site??
And bush too???
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http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10486553
Bush: 'We should have bombed' Auschwitz
5:00AM Sunday January 13, 2008

George Bush flanked by Israeli President Shamon Peres, left and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at the Holocaust memorial museum. Photo / Reuters

George Bush reopened one of the most sensitive issues of Allied conduct of World War II by saying yesterday "we should have bombed" the Auschwitz concentration camp.
The declaration, reviving one of the most enduring controversies from the war, came as the President toured the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum before leaving Israel for Kuwait.
While some historians have disagreed, many others have argued an Allied bombing of Auschwitz and other German concentration camps might have saved the lives of large numbers of Jews slaughtered.
Avner Shalev, Yad Vashem's director, who accompanied the President on his tour, said Bush examined aerial photos of Auschwitz taken during the war by US forces and called over Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to discuss why the US government had decided against bombing the camp.
Shalev said the President said: "We should have bombed it." He added that during the tour, "Twice, I saw tears well up in his eyes."
The same view was taken by former Democrat Senator George McGovern, who stood unsuccessfully against Richard Nixon for the presidency in 1972 and was a B-24 Liberator pilot during the war.
In an interview three years ago the former senator, whose squadron carried out a bombing raid on an oil facility 8km from Auschwitz, declared: "There is no question we should have attempted... to go after Auschwitz. There was a pretty good chance we could have blasted those rail lines off the face of the Earth, which would have interrupted the flow of people to those death chambers, and we had a good chance of knocking out those gas ovens."
Vashem's own encyclopaedia points out that by the spring of 1944, as some 435,000 Hungarian Jews were being deported to the camp, "the Allied governments knew a lot about the mass annihilation going on at Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi extermination camps".
Two escapees had smuggled out detailed maps of the camp's layout, the Yad Vashem account says that although Jewish leaders in Slovakia and elsewhere begged the Allies to launch bombing raids, the US War Department refused to do so on the grounds that it would "divert military power from essential war operations".
The raid carried out by Senator McGovern's squadron was one of many on oil and industrial installations within a 72 km radius of the camp, which were repeatedly bombed by 2,800 US aircraft between July and November 1944, eliminating any doubt that the extermination camp itself was within range.

Responding to Senator McGovern's arguments, US Holocaust historian Peter Black said that had the rail lines been destroyed, the Nazis might have shot the Jews instead. He also said the government could not pinpoint where the gas chambers were and would have had to carpet-bomb the camp.
- INDEPENDENT