Weissmandl intended for the telegrams, formally addressed to his counterpart in Switzerland, to be relayed to the United States, which they duly were. They reached a fellow orthodox leader, Jacob Rosenheim of New York, who in turn passed them on to the War Refugee Board. Their central message was a plea for the Allies to use their air power to ensure the ‘prompt disturbance of all transports, military and deportation’， and, specifically, to begin ‘bombarding’ the railway lines between Ko?ice and Pre?ov, for that was the route along which Jews from eastern Hungary were shipped to their deaths in Auschwitz. The idea was simple to the point of crudity: to stop the Nazi killing machine, smash the conveyor belt.
Rosenheim had read the Vrba–Wetzler Report; he understood the urgency. ‘The bombing has to be made at once,’ he wrote. ‘Every day of delay means a very heavy responsibility for the human lives at stake .’
The head of the WRB, John Pehle, took Rosenheim’s proposal to the War Department, sitting down with Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy. But he did not bang the table demanding immediate action. On the contrary, Pehle confessed that he had ‘several doubts’， including whether air bombardment of the railway lines would have that much impact on the functioning of Auschwitz. Later that same day, he wrote a memo recording that he had ‘made it very clear to Mr McCloy that I was not, at this point at least, requesting the War Department to take any action on this proposal other than to appropriately explore it .’
But that exploration was nugatory. The War Department did not undertake a study of whether bombing the railway lines was militarily feasible; no one looked for alternative means of halting, or even slowing, the transports. Instead, the operations division of the department’s general staff came back to Pehle two days later to say that the bombing proposal was ‘impracticable’， adding the stock response: that the best hope for the victims of Nazism was that Nazism be defeated. The US military would not so much as look at any proposed operation that might require a ‘diversion’ from that effort . On 3 July, McCloy instructed his aide to ‘kill’ the idea .
And yet bombing Auschwitz or the train tracks that fed it would hardly have required a diversion at all. As it happened, American bombers were in the skies over Auschwitz a matter of weeks later. On 20 August, the 15th US Air Force unloaded more than thirteen hundred 500-pound bombs on Monowitz, the place Rudi had known as Buna when he worked there as a slave during his first few weeks in Auschwitz: that’s how close the US bombers would come. To have struck the gas chambers and crematoria would have entailed diverting those aircraft all of five miles.
The bomber pilots would have known exactly where to direct their ordnance too. US reconnaissance planes flew over Auschwitz taking aerial photographs often in the spring and summer of 1944, including on 4 April, the day Walter and Fred made their second attempt at escape. The images were detailed and revealing. They showed everything the Vrba–Wetzler Report described – the gas chambers, the crematoria, the ramps, the barracks – if only someone had taken the time to look. But no one did. No one ever examined those pictures .
The Vrba–Wetzler Report never failed to shake those who actually read it. Once Pehle had seen the full version, he pleaded with McCloy to read it: ‘No report of Nazi atrocities received by the board has quite caught the gruesome brutality of what is taking place in these camps as have these sober, factual accounts,’ he wrote. Pehle’s earlier equivocation vanished: now he urged an all-out aerial bombardment of the death camp. But McCloy did not budge.
In that, he perhaps took his lead from the president himself. It seems Roosevelt had discussed the rights and wrongs of bombing Auschwitz with McCloy, expressing his concern that it would simply see Jews killed by American bombs, leaving the US ‘accused of participating in this horrible business ’。 Neither man seemed to consider that, for one thing, that logic did not apply to destroying the railway tracks to Auschwitz, rather than the camp itself or, for another, plenty of those calling for military intervention believed that any such deaths were a price worth paying, to stop the future killing of much greater numbers of Jews. Such thoughts apparently did not register. The inaction came from the very top.
When he planned his first escape, it was London the seventeen-year-old Walter Rosenberg dreamed of. When Rabbi Weissmandl wrote those coded messages pleading for action, they were bound for the US but it was the outstretched arm of the Royal Air Force he was hoping to summon. If the Americans refused to act to rescue the Jews from the Nazis, perhaps the British might.
The Vrba–Wetzler Report certainly made it to London. It reached Whitehall via multiple routes: Elizabeth Wiskemann had sent her urgent cable on 14 June, Walter Garrett had wired his version ten days later and on 27 June it arrived there again, this time distilled in the form of a memo drafted by a Jewish Agency official for the Zionist leadership in Jerusalem. ‘Now we know exactly what happened , and where it has happened,’ wrote the official, spelling out the report’s significance. The intended addressees were Chaim Weizmann and Moshe Shertok, respectively the future president and prime minister of the state of Israel, but the note found its way to the Foreign Office and from there to the British prime minister. The testimony of the nineteen-year-old boy from Trnava was now in the hands of Winston Churchill.
The prime minister read the document, with its details of the mechanics of mass murder – the gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, the selections, the burning of corpses – and its appeal for bombs to take out the railway lines and the death camp itself, and scribbled a note to his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. For a man then commanding a major imperial power engaged in a world war, Churchill’s tone was oddly plaintive, even despairing: ‘What can be done? What can be said?’
While the Auschwitz Report meandered slowly through the maze of US bureaucracy, in Britain it had reached the top rapidly and, seemingly, to great effect. Prompted in part by their own receipt of the report, Weizmann and Shertok headed for London where on 6 July they met Eden and pressed the demand that, among other Allied actions, ‘the railway line leading from Budapest to Birkenau , and the death camp at Birkenau and other places, should be bombed.’ Eden passed their request to Churchill, who responded on the morning of 7 July with a clarity and directness he had never displayed before . ‘Is there any reason to raise these matters at the Cabinet? You and I are in entire agreement. Get anything out of the Air Force you can and invoke me if necessary .’ Three months to the day since Walter and Fred climbed into their bunker, it seemed they had made the breakthrough. At that moment, the international distress signal they had sent out from that basement room in ?ilina looked as if it was about to be answered.
And yet, master of Britain’s destiny though he was, Churchill was apparently unable to ensure that his will would be done. Right away, Eden contacted Archibald Sinclair, the government minister in charge of the Royal Air Force, stressing that he was backed by ‘the authority of the Prime Minister’， asking about the feasibility of air strikes on Auschwitz. Sinclair rejected the idea. He replied that ‘interrupting the railways’ was ‘out of our power’ and that bombing the gas chambers themselves could only be done by day: the RAF could not do ‘anything of the kind’。 （The Allies stuck to a clear division of responsibility: the Americans bombed by day, the British by night.） Only the US Air Force would be capable of such raids, though even then such a mission would be ‘costly and hazardous’ . Eden did not follow up on the matter.