On the occasion of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day
Why it could have been done, why it was not done.
Could the Allies have bombarded Auschwitz from the sky, to stop the death factory’s mass murders? Was it a possibility, in the final phase of WWII? Since 1942, more and more was known about what was happening in the concentration camps, and yet the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination machine kept running; those railway tracks kept bringing trains full of lives and stories that, once there, embarked on a journey with no return. Umberto Gentiloni in his book explores all the possible reasons that brought the Allies to prioritise the victorious end of the war against the military action that could have stopped the massacres in the most infamous of the Nazi concentration camps.
Umberto Gentiloni Silveri is Professor of Contemporary History at the University La Sapienza in Rome. Among his most recent publications, L’Italia sospesa. La crisi degli anni Settanta vista da Washington (Einaudi 2009) and Contro scettici e disfattisti. Gli anni di Ciampi 1992-2006 (Laterza 2013). Since 2011 he contributes to the Italian daily newspaper La Stampa.
