“The great powers had the pictures of the railway lines that brought the trains to the concentration camps like Auschwitz to kill Jews, Christians, homosexuals, everybody. Why didn’t they bomb (the railway lines)?”
Source: Pope says weapons manufacturers can’t call themselves Christian – Yahoo News
You probably have seen the part about Pope Francis bitching about gun makers from other bloggers and sources, so I won’t go there. But the Auschwitz bit really tells you what kind of stupid is the guy under the mitre.
Even if the Allies’ leadership knew the extent of the crimes against humanity being committed in places like Auschwitz, the idea of bombing the rail lines is based on propaganda resuscitated from the 70s’ Latin Left Wingers.
Let’s go to a map:
Distance between London and Auschwitz as the crow flies is 1,300 miles. Auschwitz begins operations in 1940 and becomes a death camp in 1941. At that time the premier bomber was the B-17 Flying Fortress with a range of about 1,000 miles which shows that even on a suicide mission, it would never reached the camp. The B-24 Liberator has a bit more than double the range of the B-17, so theoretically it could flight all the way over there and back and landing on fumes… Remember, the Allies do not make it to France till June of 1944 and takes a couple of months to have secure and fitted airfields.
Now, two more issues remain: One is that you never had a bombing sortie flight a straight line. You added doglegs to try and hide your objective. That means the actual range of the airplane would be largely decreased. Second issue and the reason for the doglegs: Anti Aircraft suppression in the form of ack-ack (artillery) and the Luftwaffe. In case you missed it in the map, Auschwitz is on the other side of Germany. During regular runs, the Eighth Air Force lost almost 50% of their airplanes and 26,000 dead air crewmen.
And, of course, at bombing heights, finding a standard gauge railroad track (4 ft 8 1⁄2 in) is so easy.
I guess we Catholics are stuck with a Pope that is more intent on being 21st Century hip than actually tending to the spiritual needs of the flock. Instead of the Rock in which Church is built, we go a pontoon to a Party House Boat.
And to bring it full circle. When these death camps were liberated, and Hitler Driven into his bunker to die what were the soldiers carrying?
When the Shitheel in SC was apprehended, what were the responding officers carrying?
When the jerk in Colorado tried to do the EXACT same thing as that guy did in the New Life Church, what brought his assault to a stop?
Going after gun makers for the sins of evil people is….well like going after the Catholic Church for enabling child rapists.
Yep, Catholics (especially here in Boston) did a LOT of evil when it came to twisted priests doing horrible things to young children. Does that mean that Catholicism is synonymous with pedophilia?
NO! NO!!! NO!!!!!
Be careful where you step, Padre!
I noticed this nonsense the pope was saying in the news and just came across your excellent job of debunking it via following a link from a story on the NRA-ILA site.
Great Job.
I’ll be sure to send a link over to Drudge.
As an American of Jewish descent, I find it somewhat despicable that the left thinks it gets to make political points like this based on lies, when what happened at Auschwitz is something people like me take pretty seriously.
But… at this point, you sort of come to expect such low down and outright lies like this from the left.
On a side note, I recently watched a documentary featuring the Lithuanian partisan resistance to the soviets.
the soviets were no better then the Nazis, railroad cars, mass murder, and all.
Why does the left not cry about how we failed to intervene in the Soviet mistreatment of its occupied satellite nations?
Oh…. yeah….. thats right.
Hitler bad, Marx good.
These leftists make me sick.
Their historical myopia and deliberate attempts to revise what history they do know to suit their agendas seems to know now bounds, and like the wise man said, a lie travels all the way around the world before the truth can even strap its boots on to get out the door.
As for the nature of firearms manufacturers being evil, I’d posit that the manufacturers of intentional historical mis-truths and out right LIES to support tyrannical, collectivist, MARXIST agendas are far, far more evil in not only intent, but their very nature as well.
Especially when they masquerade as religious leadership.
As bad as the Nazis were, people seem to forget that Stalin killed more people than Hitler could have imagined.
They were just his own people, so nobody cared.
I’m going to say something highly controversial and potentially offensive, but I hope you’ll follow me as I try to back it up: History needed the lesson the Nazis taught us.
Don’t get me wrong. What they did was terrible, and it would have been better to learn the lesson without it, but it was only after the Nazis committed their atrocities that we realized how awful racism and genocide are. Hitler was good at selecting his victims. He picked a demographic who everyone in the area hated, partly because they were generally very wealthy, and coincidentally that demographic was very wealthy, allowing him to appropriate their wealth to fund his own war machine against them. Hitler was blaming the rich before most of the liberals alive today were even born.
The real shame is that nobody seems to have learned the lesson, and it looks like it may happen again.
70s era memes like this likely had their source in the Soviet Union’s agitprop operations. Which is very likely in this case. Looking again at the map, who WAS close enough that a raid to destroy those rail lines would have been practical? The Soviets. Yet not only did they refuse to, they were operating their own death camps at the time.
Patton was lambasted for slapping a soldier — while the Soviets sent shell-shocked troops to the gulags to die, or just shot them on the field.
Also, there was a western Allied raid deep into German territory to destroy oil fields. Most of the crews didn’t survive. Doing the same to attack the rail lines would have left German war material production untouched for as long as it took to rebuild the bomber forces — which would have prolonged the war. That means more dead, inside and outside the camps, and the possible use of nukes in the European theater.
And, most importantly, he wasn’t there and it wasn’t his responsibility.
As many people know, the Fascists, Nazis, and Soviet Socialists/Communists were anti-Catholic. The government was supposed to be the religion of the people and a well organized Church with an established hierarchy was a threat to the Church of State.
In the South Americas countries that experienced socialist revolutions, that was a little different. The people were far more church going and religious than in Europe. So the Catholic Church was allowed to survive as long as it became a propaganda arm of the nationalist or socialist governments in power. The Catholic Church of Argentina would have been no different. It is Catholic, but operated at the permission of the Argentine nationalist government. Most people forget that Argentine President Juan Peron (husband of Evita) nationalized most of the industries in Argentina in the 60’s and 70’s.
I wouldn’t expect a Catholic priest from South America to be anything but a dyed in the wool socialist. It would be the only way that priest would be allowed to live.
When I was in tenth grade — over four decades ago — three of my classmates and I walked out of a presentation on Nicaraguan agrarian reform arranged by our Jesuit “religion” teacher. (Some of us had good bullshit detectors even at that tender age.) “Liberation theology” was all the rage in the seventies among the Catholic clergy from Latin America, so it’s not surprising that this pontiff has fully embraced its philosophy. The reason is Vatican II that, in the words of Pope Paul VI himself, brought the “smoke of Satan” into the sanctuary and it has never left. I’m done with the Church. I cannot support this secular organization any longer. It ceased to be a spiritual organization a long time ago…
As the Allies found out during the Transportation Plan bombings designed to destroy rail communications between the main German army and the Normandy beaches in preparation for the invasion, railroad tracks are almost impervious to high-altitude bombing. They’re incredibly small, incredibly tough, and easy to repair. They had much better luck concentrating on roundhouses and marshaling yards.
People should know what they’re talking about before they make public statements.
Suddenly less bothered about the current Pope considering retiring and letting a new one in.
He started off so well, too.
Still waiting for Papa Income Redistribution to practice what he preaches and open the Vatican up to a few boatloads of north African “migrants”.
As the evangelical movement in America found, when you allow a fool to be your public voice eventually everyone regards your entire organization as a pack of fools.
All fine points. But none of it goes to the hypocrisy of the office he holds – he has said nothing about the acts and deliberate inactions of Pius XII during the Nazi era. A few letters cutting them off from communion fade quickly when held against the refusal to take action, or against the now-well known Rat Line that funneled Nazis out of the reach of the courts.
Just to end on a pedantic note – there were several bombing raids in and around the area of Auschwitz that targeted the rail lines leading to areas of war manufacture (you know, that slave labor done by camp inmates before they were killed because they were too weak to work any more). The lines to the camp were spurs off those larger lines. There was great debate about whether or not to bomb the camps themselves – which would have been an easier target but of no strategic value. I believe it was Churchill who said something about it being more important to press on militarily in order to be able to save some than to risk killing those that might otherwise survive to be rescued.
stay safe.
Skidmark is right, there WERE bombing raids. B-24’s were used to bomb targets deep in Eastern Germany and Poland but they didn’t return to Italy or N. Africa. They continued on to Soviet territory, then bombed again on the way out, back to Italy or N. Africa. This didn’t go on for very long because the Soviets made the whole operation very difficult.
The allies upper level (FDR, Churchill, Stalin) certainly knew what was going on, especially later in the war. But as Churchill said, they thought the fastest way to help those in the camps was to destroy Germany. I’m not sure if Eisenhower knew…but I don’t think the level of Patton, Bradley, Montgomery knew until they started liberating camps.
I was born and raised Catholic, but struggled with reconciling the doctrines of the Church with my own sense of morality and reading of the scriptures. I was already considering conversion to Judaism when His Holiness, Benedict XVI, announced his resignation. The election of Francis —who claims publicly not to support Marxist liberation theology but certainly acts like a huge fan— was the final straw for my theological camel.
I believe the Church has a great future behind it.
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First, thank you for this clear and logical (or logistical) explanation for why the railroad tracks were never bombed. As an observant Jew, born in NYC in 1980, educated in private religious Jewish schools thru high school, and living among a community of the same people, we too have always asked this question, especially around the time of Holocaust Memorial Day (Yom Hasho’ah), without ever having a good answer. Now, at last, I have received an answer not continigent on the supposed opinions and predjustices of the FDR and Truman administrations, but on simple logistical possibilities.
Once again, thank you.
It has been my pleasure sir. Unfortunately people will gravitate to the scandalous version of an event rather than try to figure out why things happened.