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General overview
Aerial photographs
of Auschwitz taken by the Allied Air Forces during World War II were
first exposed in 1978 by Dino Brugioni and Robert Poirer, two aerial
photo- analysts who worked for the CIA. Using historical research
material, they re-analyzed aerial photographs housed in the Defense
Intelligence Agency Archives in Washington. Yad Vashem was able to
acquire copies of some of these photographs in 1980 with Elie Wiesel’s
help, and when former US president Carter visited Israel in that same
year, he brought copies of the original film reels. The Allied Air
Forces came to the Auschwitz area because of
the important war industry located in
this region of Upper Silesia (Polish
territory which was annexed to the Third Reich in 1939). In early
1944, there were intelligence reports of a giant fuel and artificial
rubber factory in Monowitz. On April 4th, 1944, a Mosquito plane from
60 Photo Recon Squadron of the South African Air Force flew out of
Foggia base in Southern Italy to photograph the factory. It was the
IG Farben factory at Monowitz, only 4km from Birkenau. In order to
ensure complete coverage of the target, it was common practice to
start the camera rolling ahead of time, and stop it slightly over
time. As a result, the Auschwitz camp was photographed for the first
time. During that same period,
the Allies had commenced planning a
comprehensive attack on the German fuel industry, and the Monowitz
factory was high up on the list of targets. On May 31st, a
second plane from 60 Squadron was sent to the area. This time, it
also took three photographs of Birkenau from an
altitude of
26,000ft, although the photo-analysts did not identify the camp. The
photographs from this sortie show us the camp as it looked 3 days
after the arrival of the deportation documented in the Auschwitz
Album.
For various
operational reasons, the bombing of the Monowitz factory was delayed
but the Allied air forces
continued to gather intelligence information about this factory and
other installations in the area. The South African Mosquito planes
photographed the factory and parts of the camp complex on June 26th,
August 25th and September 8th.
Meanwhile, the US
Army Air force also started carrying out sorties in the area. The
first American sortie to the Auschwitz area was carried out on July 8th
by an F-5 Lightning plane from the 5th Photographic
Reconnaissance Group of the 15th US Air force,
operating from Bari.
The information gathered in this sortie and in the British sorties,
was used to plan the first bombing mission of the Monowitz factory on
August 20th, in which the factory was
damaged, but
was not destroyed. The second bombing mission was carried out on
September 13th, and the photographs taken during the
bombing by B-24 bombers of the 464th Bombardment Group
include a photograph showing bombs being dropped over Birkenau.
Afterwards, further sorties were carried out to estimate the damage,
and the Germans’ progress with its repair. The 5th
Photographic Reconnaissance Group’s Lightning planes also flew over
the Auschwitz area on November 29th, December 21st,
and finally on January 14th, 1945 – only two weeks before
the liberation of the camp by the Soviet Army.
It should be noted that
the photo analysts never realized the significance of Birkenau,
although Camp III, which was next to the IG Farben factory was
identified as a concentration camp.
Further reading:
Brugioni, Dino A.
/Poirier, Robert G., The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective
Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex,
Washington DC, 1979.
Neufeld, Michael J. &
Berenbaum, Michael (ed.), The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the
Allies have Attempted it?, New York, 2000.
James H. Kitchens,
“The Bombing of Auschwitz Re-examined”, in The Journal of Military
History, LVIII, April 1994, pp.233-266.
Gilbert, Martin,
Auschwitz and the Allies, New York, 1981.
Martin Gilbert, “The
Question of Bombing Auschwitz”, in The Nazi Concentration Camps,
Proceedings of the 4th Yad Vashem International Historical
Conference, Jerusalem, 1984, pp.417-473.
Rondall Rice, “Bombing Auschwitz: US
15th Air Force and the Military Aspects of a Possible
Attack”, in War in History, vol.6, no.2, 1999, pp.205-229 |
