Most valuable commenter Ara Rubyan writes in and asks:

Given that you’ve written about how all politicians from FDR through Obama have failed to adequately respond to the Holocaust and genocide, could you be persuaded to address President Bush’s latest comments after visiting Yad Vashem?

And if you do, could you please include the comments of Sen. McGovern :

Former U.S. Senator George McGovern piloted a B-24 Liberator in December 1944, and his squadron bombed Nazi oil facilities less than five miles from Auschwitz. In 2005, he said “There is no question we should have attempted…to go after Auschwitz. There was a pretty good chance we could have blasted those rail lines off the face of the Earth, which would have interrupted the flow of people to thos death chambers, and we had a pretty good chance of knocking out those gas ovens.” Reflecting the ongoing controversy, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum historian Peter Black’s response to McGovern’s argument was that had the rail lines been destroyed, the Nazis might have shot the Jews instead. He also said the government couldn’t pinpoint where the gas chambers were and would have had to carpet-bomb the camp.

Yes, I can, Ara. What McGovern says is (as usual) not all that interesting. But I’m surprised at what Black says. I am not a Holocaust expert, but the reason the Germans didn’t shoot the Jews wasn’t because they were shy about using bullets. In the early days of the extermination policy, when German forces sliced through Eastern Europe, they killed Jews the old-fashioned way — drowning them in marshes, burning them up in synagogues, and of course, shooting them. (Incidentally, the trick of making them dig their own graves and then kneel before them for execution was invented by Lenin’s boys.) They switched to gas for efficiency. Obviously they could always have switched back to less efficient methods, but that would have slowed the killing machine — and diverted manpower, and also ammunition.

But regardless of the incremental effect on the genocide — and that is nothing to sneeze at; he who save a single life saves an entire world — knocking out the gas chambers would have been the moral thing to do. Read the rest of this entry »