Reprinted with permission of World War II Magazine
It is a hot August afternoon in 1944. The scene is Birkenau, that portion of the vast Auschwitz concentration camp dedicated to the industrialized killing of Europeans the Nazis regard as unworthy of life. They have already slain over five million through shooting, carbon monoxide poisoning, and, since September of 1941, the use of the lethal insecticide Zyklon B. Of the five original death camps, all in occupied Poland, Birkenau is the only one still in use. But it is efficient: its gas chambers can kill 2,000 prisoners in a single day.
Another group of Jews has just emerged from the fetid cattle cars of the train that has carried them from their homes to this forbidding place. Weak from disease, hunger, and dehydration, most are too bewildered or too frightened by the brutal SS officers and guards to pay much attention to the drone of aircraft approaching from the south. The SS men are scarcely more concerned. Even as the drone resolves into 75 American B-17 bombers, the SS men assume that their target must be the I. G. Farben synthetic oil and rubber plants at Buna, an Auschwitz subcamp some seven miles away, which had been struck a few days earlier. But the deafening crash of the first bombs, less than 600 yards away, announces that the objective is Birkenau….
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