When does a research project transcend the limits of what the academic establishment considers “legitimate” scholarship? At what point do tenure committees decide that a particular undertaking is “unacceptable”? As an assistant professor of history who has just completed work on a documentary film about an event that did not actually happen -- the bombing of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp -- I’ve thought a lot about those issues lately.
In fall 1996, fresh out of graduate school and battling to secure a precious academic posting, I found myself immersed in editing an article for Holocaust and Genocide Studies on a controversy over the nonbombing. Soon I was familiarizing myself with the issue: Could the Allies, from a military standpoint, have destroyed the Auschwitz killing facilities? Would doing so have saved Jewish lives? If so, why didn’t the Allies bomb the camp? In the mid-1980s, the historian David S. Wyman argued that “could have” considerations of military capability were not the issue; the unwillingness of political leaders to undertake any such bombing was. But many scholars still prefer hypothesizing about bomber precision and target defenses to discussing the more pertinent issue of political will.
The article I was editing, by the independent scholar Stuart Erdheim, did not make that mistake. And his enthusiasm for producing a nuanced film about what did not happen proved infectious.
Last spring we completed They Looked Away. Directed by Erdheim and narrated by Mike Wallace, the film is now struggling to find its audience. As executive producer, I’ve found that, despite the archival research and interviews we conducted, many people, including academics, are wary of its merit. When there is such good scholarship about what did occur, they ask, why do we need a film about what did not?
Counterfactual history has always lurked near the margins of what is considered respectable historical scholarship. While “what if” books are published regularly (examples include Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, edited by Niall Ferguson, and What Ifs? of American History: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, edited by Antony Beever and Robert Cowley), they typically represent intellectual exercises by senior professors aimed at a popular audience, rather than serious academic research. That’s because this type of history, though grounded in facts, permits us to create alternative pasts in which we exercise a certain control over those facts. Thus the preference for a happier historical trajectory if Hitler had died in the Munich beer-hall bombing of November 8, 1939, for example, assumes that the Nazi regime and its Führer were codependent, although the nature of Hitler’s rule is the subject of much scholarly debate. Because counterfactual inquiry deals in conjecture, the temptation to apply present values and perspectives is even greater than in writing conventional history. “What if ... " can easily become “If only ... .”
They Looked Away does not focus on how history might have turned out had the Allies bombed Auschwitz. What source can prove a counterfactual? Some innocent people almost certainly would have been killed, but some would have been saved, not because the Nazis would have stopped killing Jews, but because their highly evolved and efficient system for doing so would have been disrupted. All that we filmmakers could say was: Every Holocaust survivor we spoke to wished then, and still wishes today, that the Allies had bombed the camp.
The fact of the matter, and the starting point for the film, is that the Allies did nothing about Auschwitz at all, despite plentiful evidence of exactly what was going on there. Among countless options like dropping leaflets threatening retribution, Allied leaders never seriously weighed a bombing mission. The 30-some aerial images of the death camp in Allied film libraries (one now hangs in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s permanent exhibit) were discovered only in 1978, when a photographic interpreter went looking for them. In 1944, when the pictures were being taken, the Allies were interested in other targets. What World War II leaders would have found if they had planned a bombing mission is, therefore, a relevant counterfactual query, because it relies upon evidence that could have been consulted during the war.
On March 19, 1944, Hungary was occupied by its ally Nazi Germany. Soon thereafter, Adolf Eichmann began planning the deportation of 800,000 Hungarian Jews, the largest Jewish community left in Europe. In a news conference on March 24, nearly two months before the deportations began, President Franklin D. Roosevelt warned that the Jews of Hungary “are now threatened with annihilation.” From May 15 to July 8, 1944, approximately 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. More than 90 percent of them never returned.
As the trains were going back and forth between Hungary and Auschwitz, Allied planes from the 15th Air Force, then based in southern Italy, were waging a fierce campaign against strategic targets in Central Europe. The IG Farben fuel-and-rubber plant five miles from Birkenau now came under intense surveillance. At the same time, two Auschwitz escapees were providing Western leaders with information on the killing complex even more detailed than what they had been receiving from underground sources since 1942. Disparate Jewish and other groups were imploring the Allies to bomb Auschwitz.
So why didn’t the Allies attempt to impede the Holocaust in Hungary (or the killings of tens of thousands of Jews deported to Auschwitz from as far away as France and Greece through the summer and fall of 1944) by bombing the killing facilities? According to those who echo political and military officials of the time, the target itself was the problem: The crematoria were indestructible (despite the fact that inmates blew up one of them in October 1944); or they were impossible to find on a map; or they were too heavily defended to risk the lives of airmen for an unprecedented “diversion from the war effort,” as the War Department put it. Winning the war, Roosevelt said repeatedly, was the only way to stop the killing.
Of course, the U.S. government’s belated establishment of the War Refugee Board, in January 1944, which saved some 200,000 Jews, belies the argument against “diversions.” So do the 1944 Warsaw airdrops of supplies and the activities of the Roberts Commission to prevent airmen from destroying cultural artifacts. Nor is there any evidence whatsoever that Birkenau was more heavily defended than the thousands of targets the Allies did bomb during the war. In the famous photograph of 500-pound bombs dropping toward the Farben plant on September 13, 1944, one can clearly see the crematoria below. No smoke screens obscured Auschwitz-Birkenau.
But the entire debate over bombing Auschwitz has been obscured by smoke -- the smoke of those who would have us believe that this was not a missed opportunity, but an opportunity that never existed. As we look back on World War II -- indeed, looking back on the whole 20th century -- Auschwitz simply looms too large for us to avoid asking why nothing was done about it.
They Looked Away attempts to resolve the issue through comparative history, the meeting point of counterfactual inquiry and good historical methodology. If the Allies could accurately bomb the V-1 weapons plant at Buchenwald and not hurt the inmates in the adjacent concentration camp, why not target bombs at Birkenau? If they could destroy a narrow submarine in heavily defended Toulon harbor, or pinpoint a plant in the Ploesti oil fields, could they not have done the same for four large crematoria with protruding smokestacks?
To answer those questions, we interviewed hitherto silent sources. World War II photographic interpreters insisted that they could easily have picked out the crematoria on the maps available. Former pilots and bombardiers whom we asked to analyze the layout and defenses of Birkenau and compare them with their actual missions all concluded that a raid was possible, and that its chances for success would have been high. The perils of using testimony given half a century after the fact could be the topic of an article by itself. Here, the point is simply that, until now, a debate has raged with little consultation of expert witnesses. Why?
One answer is that we thought of sources for a film differently from the way you might have if you were writing history. We knew that having the squadron leader for the Buchenwald raid explain how he had destroyed the weapons plant and avoided the camp would be far more compelling than scholarly deliberation over whether the term “precision bombing” even applies to World War II.
Yet I think there is also unease with the perilous freedom of counterfactual inquiry. We filmmakers knew that when you ask a question about something that never took place, you have to analyze all possible reasons for its not taking place, including those given by the very people who had the power to make history turn out differently. Choosing among the various contingencies can risk turning historical research into a process of elimination rather than discovery. In the end, the most we said as to why it did not happen was that the political mentality was not there to make it happen.
Of course, conventional history is not without fault, either. Nevertheless, it seems more acceptable to criticize the flaws and prejudices in explanations of historical outcomes than to gauge why one factor is more likely to have obstructed a certain ending than another. No, I do not expect counterfactual history to gain full academic respectability anytime soon. But our understanding of the past would be impoverished without it. The history of genocide in the world since the Allies turned their backs on Auschwitz seems pretty clear confirmation of that.
Paul B. Miller is an assistant professor of history at McDaniel College and executive producer of the film They Looked Away.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 23, Page B10