The West failed to stop the Holocaust – now we’re failing the Uyghurs

In 1944, Slovak rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl sent the US government a 30-page report detailing an extermination facility in Poland where Jews were being murdered en masse. The document included maps pin-pointing the exact locations of gas chambers and crematoria. Rabbi Weissmandl pleaded: ‘We ask that the crematoria of Auschwitz be bombed from the air… Such bombing will delay the work of the German murderers.’ Franklin Roosevelt rejected the proposal.

FDR had no love for Jews but his decision was at least as much about practicalities and in these concerns he was not alone. Further calls came to bomb either the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz or the gas chambers themselves, but such initiatives divided Jewish organisations. The Jewish Agency opposed airstrikes when it believed Auschwitz to be a labour camp but reversed its position upon learning the truth. Rabbi Weissmandl was later sent to Auschwitz himself, though he escaped the train en route, and he remained bitter about the failure to disrupt the Nazi death machine.