The fate of Hungarian Jewry unfolded before the eyes of the world. Unlike previous phases of the Holocaust, which the Germans partially succeeded in hiding from the international community, what happened in Hungary was no secret.
A common refrain among defenders of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to the Holocaust is the claim that he and his administration learned about the deportations from Hungary too late to do much about it. For example, a recent essay in The Daily Beast, by journalist Jack Schwartz, claimed that “The Allies learned of the Hungarian deportations and their lethal destination in late June”—that is, not until five weeks after the deportations commenced.
But in fact, Washington knew what was coming. At a March 24, 1944, press conference, FDR, after first discussing Philippine independence, farm machinery shipments, and war crimes in Asia, acknowledged that Hungary’s Jews “are now threatened with annihilation” because the Germans were planning “the deportation of Jews to their death in Poland.” The president blurred the issue by coupling it with a remark about the danger that “Norwegians and French” might be deported “to their death in Germany,” but the key point is clear: If we wonder “what did they know, and when did they know it,” the answer with regard to Hungary is that the Roosevelt administration knew plenty, and knew it early.
The Holocaust in Hungary was widely reported, and often in timely fashion, by the American news media (although it was not given the prominence it deserved). For example, on May 10, nine days before the deportations to Auschwitz began, the New York Times quoted a European diplomat warning that the Germans were preparing “huge gas chambers in which the one million Hungarian Jews are to be exterminated in the same fashion as were the Jews of Poland.”
Likewise, on May 18, the Times reported that “a program of mass extermination of Jews in Hungary” was underway, with the first 80,000 “sent to murder camps in Poland.” The notion that the Roosevelt administration only learned about all this in “late June” is preposterous.
Appeals for Bombing
Meanwhile, copies of the Auschwitz escapees’ report reached rescue activists in Slovakia and Switzerland. Those activists then authored an appeal to the Roosevelt administration to bomb “vital sections of these [railway] lines, especially bridges” between Hungary and Auschwitz, “as the only possible means of slowing down or stopping future deportations.” The plea reached Washington in June.
Numerous similar appeals for bombing the gas chambers, or the rail lines and bridges leading to them, were sent to U.S. officials by American Jewish organizations throughout the spring, summer, and fall of 1944.
Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy was designated to reply to the requests. He wrote that the bombing idea was "impracticable" because it would require "diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations." He also claimed the War Department's position was based on "a study" of the issue. But no evidence of such a study has ever been found by researchers.
In reality, McCloy's position was based on the Roosevelt administration’s standing policy that military resources should not be used for "rescuing victims of enemy oppression."