Researchers from the Wyman Institute have uncovered documents revealing for the first time that in 1944, Golda Meir, the future prime minister of Israel, tried to persuade the United States government to bomb the Auschwitz death camp.
The Wyman Institute released the new information on September 3, which is the 70th anniversary of the first gassings by the Nazis in Auschwitz.
The documents are described in "Golda Meir and the Campaign for an Allied Bombing of Auschwitz," a report authored by Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff. Click here to read the report.
A number of Jewish leaders asked the Roosevelt administration to bomb the camp, or the railways leading to it, in 1944. What was not known until now is that Golda Meir was one of them.
In the 1940s, Mrs. Meir, known as Goldie Myerson, was a senior official of the Histadrut, the powerful Jewish labor federation in British Mandatory Palestine. She and her colleagues received many harrowing messages from their Labor Zionist colleagues in Europe about Nazi atrocities. The authors of one such message located by the Wyman Institute described themselves as "separated from you by a sea of blood and continents heaped with corpses."
In an exchange of correspondence uncovered recently by the Wyman Institute in American and Israeli archives, Mrs. Meir forwarded one of the European messages to the Histadrut's U.S. representative, Israel Mereminski, in July 1944 together with an appeal to ask U.S. officials to undertake "the bombing of Oswienzim* [Auschwitz] and railway transporting Jews" to the death camp. Meir's appeal was cosigned by another Histadrut official, Herschel Frumkin.
Mereminski replied that he contacted the U.S. government's War Refugee Board, which in turn submitted "to competent authorities" the Meir-Frumkin request for "destruction gas chambers, crematories, and so forth."
The August 1944 issue of Jewish Frontier, the U.S. Labor Zionist journal, featured an unsigned editorial calling for "Allied bombings of the death camps and the roads leading to them..." The editorial was highly unusual; almost all such appeals were made through private channels. Although Mereminski is not known to have been involved in writing editorials for Jewish Frontier, he was a senior figure in Labor Zionist activity in America and was closely acquainted with its editors; it seems likely that his contacts with Meir, Frumkin, and the War Refugee Board on this issue were part of the discussions leading to the editorial.
Jewish leaders who requested the bombing of Auschwitz invariably received a stock reply from Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, claiming it was "impracticable" because it would require "diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations." Research by Prof. David S. Wyman later revealed that, in fact, U.S. planes in 1944 repeatedly bombed German oil targets adjacent to Auschwitz--some of them less than five miles from the gas chambers--so it would not have been a "diversion" to have them strike the mass murder facilities.
Prof. Henry Feingold, author of The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938-1945, and president emeritus of the Labor Zionists of America, provided the following statement to the Wyman Institute: "These documents shed new light on efforts by Labor Zionists in Europe and Palestine to bring about the bombing of Auschwitz. This information needs to be included in accounts of the Jewish response to the Nazi genocide."
(Note: "Oswienzim," as it appeared in the aforementioned document, contained a typographical error; "Oswiecim" was the Polish name for Auschwitz.)
