For a separate discussion about the argument that the allies should have bombed the lines to the death camps:
I've been bewildered for a decade how anyone proposes that they could have done any damage to a 1.4 meter wide target made of two steel beams lying on the earth. At least, any damage that could not have been repaired in half a week.
Barnes Wallis' Tallboy[1] was a 5 ton bomb designed to be dropped from a high altitude and penetrate deep underground. Upon detonation at the correct depth it could create a large crater, up to 100ft deep and 80ft across, which was identified as being useful for attacking railway targets and airstrips, as repair of these craters was time consuming. Combined with the specialised bomb sights used by the squadron who dropped the Tallboys, successfully bombing a small target such as a viaduct or railway line was doable.
However this bomb wasn't used before June '44, when most of the death camps were closed or closing, and the short supply of Tallboys meant that they were exclusively used for targets of high military importance.
You don't blow up just any track: you blow up bridges because they take so much more time to build or repair.
As for the targeting: you have to go really low. British bombers attacked the gestapo hq in Copenhagen by going so low that their bombs were dropped into the sides of the building (consequently, although that wasn't the plan, a number of prisoners who had been housed in cells in the top floor managed to escape).
Of course you can only do something like that if you are willing to paint a huge target on yourself because you will be very easy to shoot down.
Part of the Copenhagen story is that the first planes hit the Gestapo HQ with the bombs, but one of the planes hit a tower, dropped the bombs over a random street and then crashed into a girls school. The following planes then bombed the crash-site (the school) since they saw the smoke and thought it was the target. Precision bombing was incredible risky.
But cruise missiles fly low for the express purpose of being harder to shoot down! I know, radar and anti-aircraft measures are different now. But flying low means antiaircraft measures have only hundreds milliseconds to spot you, aim and fire, before you pass over.
Flying low and fast means that the heavy AA can't hit you, but it leaves you vulnerable to light AA. If you're low and fast enough, then they won't have much warning and your angular velocity will be pretty high, making you harder to hit. At the same time, light AA rounds get to the target faster. That means they are shooting at you, rather than where they think you are going to be. That light AA also has a better rate of fire.
Low and fast was safer in many scenarios, but it wasn't without drawbacks.
You have your bombing run at an angle to the rails, not parallel or perpendicular. Like the RAF did with Operation Black Buck in the Falklands.
Anyway, what I've usually heard is that they should have bombed the camps themselves, not the rail lines leading to them. That's not what I personally think, but that's what I've heard others talk about.
Bombing the camps would have killed the prisoners. Extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau was built in connection with the concentration camp Auschwitz, so it would have been impossible to bomb without killing camp prisoners.
Now something like Treblinka was purely a "killing factory" with no prisoners held for more than a few hours before they were killed. In that case bombing everything would probably have saved lives in retrospect, since any prisoners at the site would have been killed anyway, and destroying the facilities would have slowed down the extermination project. But while the allied knew mass killings was taking place, they didn't know enough about the locations and logistics to make that call.
The argument is (and again, it is not mine) that it would have been better to kill everyone currently in the camp, if it meant that the camp was taken out of commission for the future. The holocaust survivor I first heard this from was talking specifically of Auschwitz.
I understand the sentiment, but deliberate bombing a prisoners camp (which btw. also have a number of your own captured soldiers) in order to destroy the facility? In any case a camp could quickly be rebuilt somewhere else, much more complex installations like airplane factories were moved around and continued to operate despite heavy bombing.
