Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Auschwitz). The town lay in the region of Upper Silesia which had been annexed to Germany
following her 1939 invasion of Poland. This photostatic copy of a sketch map shows the area
as it was in early 1942, when much of the camps' infrastructure was still being developed.
Point C - described in the accompanying papers as 'gas chambers in a wood' - is identifiable
as the site of Auschwitz II (Birkenau), where mass killings of inmates took place from 1942
onwards. The sketch was based on a description supplied by an anonymous prisoner held in
another part of the complex, perhaps one of the blocks on the right-hand side. Apart from a
small inset in the top left corner, which shows the accurate relative positions of the main loc-
ations, the map is not drawn to scale.
By the latter stages of the Second World War, intelligence about the Holocaust had begun
to reach Germany's opponents. In the summer of 1944 the Jewish Agency for Palestine pro-
posed a scheme to bomb the gas chambers at Auschwitz and other camps, and the neighbour-
ing railway lines. The intention was to prevent more Jews from being transported to their
deaths. Although senior British politicians supported this plan in principle, they rejected it for
practical reasons. The region was too far from any Allied airfields for the raids to be carried
out safely. There was also thought to be too little information available about the topography
of the region and the layout of the camps for bombs to be targeted accurately; there was a risk
that an air raid would kill the inmates rather than saving them. Doubts were also raised as to
whether any Allied action could deter the Nazis from their ideologically-motivated slaughter.
To support its case for the bombing scheme, the Jewish Agency had obtained this map
of Auschwitz and a rough plan of the camp at Treblinka from the London-based Polish
government-in-exile and forwarded them to the British Foreign Office. In late September, it
was discovered that the two maps had not been passed to the Air Ministry as intended, and
hence had not been taken into account when evaluating the proposal. Officials at the Foreign
Office decided that the maps were insufficiently detailed or recent enough to have influenced
the outcome. Historians continue to disagree about whether the British government's decision
to reject the bombing plan was correct, and about the accuracy and completeness of the intel-
ligence that informed it.
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