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Letters They Wouldn't Publish
September 3, 2006
Letters to the Editor Washington Post letters@washpost.com To the editor: Attorney Robert Rosen was quoted in your September 3 edition as claiming that "American Jewish leaders were divided" about the idea of asking the Allies to bomb Nazi death camps. He appears to believe that this supposed "division" absolves the Roosevelt administration of moral responsibility for refusing to bomb the camps. But his claim that American Jews were "divided" is not substantiated by the historical record. In fact, only one official of one American Jewish organization is known to have voiced objections to the bombing idea. That was A. Leon Kubowitzki of the World Jewish Congress, who urged the Allies to use paratroopers rather than airplanes to attack Auschwitz. However, Kubowitzki himself repeatedly forwarded to the U.S. government’s War Refugee Board the appeals which he received from European sources urging the bombing of Auschwitz. In any event, at the very same time Kubowitzki was voicing his view, his boss, World Jewish Congress chairman Nahum Goldmann, was lobbying the U.S., the Soviets, and the British to bomb Auschwitz. Another World Jewish Congress official, Maurice Perlzweig, also gave U.S. officials appeals from Europe to bomb the camps. The American Jewish Conference, a coalition of all major U.S. Jewish organizations, publicly called on the Allies to use "all measures" (they did not exclude aerial bombings) to "destroy the implements, facilities, and places were the Nazis have carried out their mass executions." Two smaller New York-based groups, the Labor Zionists of America and the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe (the Bergson Group), publicly called for bombing the death camps. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported sympathetically on the bombing idea, as did the editors of the National Jewish Ledger. The editors of the Independent Jewish Press Service urged the bombing of the camps. Columnists for the Yiddish daily Morgen Zhurnal and the popular Jewish magazine Opinion likewise endorsed bombing the camps. Cordially, Rafael Medoff |
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