History /
Poles and (Polish) Jews... Victims of war... and beyond [380]
Roosevelt surely was no saint. Indeed, you're partially correct in asserting that
the US might well have had both the command will power as well as the air capacity to bomb
Auschwitz-Birkenau, the major section of the Camp.
However, the president was in a quandry; bomb the camps and risk untold US lives
into the bargain. Leave them untouched, and allow the Nazis even greater leeway towards
achieving their unspeakable goals.
The Holocaust remains the single watershed of history. For the first, perhaps the
only, time, a single society used whatever expedients it deemed necessary, with all the systematic,
industrial cruelty their society had at her disposal, to remove a group labled within
their very midst, in a manner of such sadistic and methodical perseverance, it still beggars
the imagination.
As Raul Hilberg writes in his THE DESTRUCTION OF THE EUROPEAN JEWS, "there
were very few malingerers, and practically no deserters.."