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Source: https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/389817/no-wars-for-jews/
No Wars for Jews
(Los Angeles Jewish Journal) Jacob Sivak - A Young Republicans chapter in Tennessee recently sent out a mail campaign promoting a platform that included "No wars for Jews." [Local Republican leaders told JTA the mailers were sent out without permission and the Maury County GOP chair strongly denounced the content of the mailers.] 80 years ago, the U.S. refused to bomb a target on behalf of the Jews. In 1944, while the extermination machine at Auschwitz was still operating at full capacity, consuming 12,000 human beings a day, most of them Hungarian Jews, Jewish leaders appealed to the Americans (and the British) to bomb the railway lines into Auschwitz. The appeals led nowhere. Why? Allied bombers had the flying range. In 1944, an industrial slave labor camp near Auschwitz, Buna (also known as Monowitz), that produced aviation fuel and synthetic rubber, was bombed more than once by the Americans. The claim that bombing the rail lines to Auschwitz would be ineffective because the lines were easily repaired is simply an excuse. The Allies found that bombing the German rail lines was very helpful to the war effort. It could be argued that Auschwitz was not a military target. But Auschwitz contained a large ammunition factory that was producing the detonators for one-half million artillery shells per month. The factory, Weischel Union Metallwerke, included 2,000 to 2,500 workers, mostly young Jewish women, and was located in Auschwitz II (Birkenau). Originally, located in Essen, it moved to Auschwitz after it had been bombed in 1943. It was a valid bombing target in the past, so why not now? In Eight Days at Yalta, Diana Preston cites President Roosevelt's advisors in noting that the rail lines at Auschwitz were not bombed because doing so would have confirmed the charge that the war was a war for the Jews. The Allies also rejected requests by the Poles to bomb Auschwitz for "fear of stirring up antisemitism at home." The decision not to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz was due to a toxic combination of antisemitism and isolationism, both of which were pervasive in the U.S. in the 1940s. (Perhaps, to some extent today too.) It was of paramount importance, particularly to the Americans, that their fight in World War II not be seen as a war on behalf of the Jews. The writer, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor from the University of Waterloo.