All the large concentration camps had “branch camps” associated with the main camp. Prisoners were used as forced labor in all these sub-camps. Auschwitz had at least 200 such camps, perhaps as many as 1000.
The German war machine needed Jewish workers, not Jewish corpses. The concentration camps were processing jobs for thousands of forced labor camps all over Germany and Eastern Europe.
What would happen toward the end of the war as supply routes were lost, crops destroyed, fuel supplies for farm machinery destroyed, and farm workers were in short supply?
The German military got first dibs on food supplies, then German factory workers, German nationals, especially children – last were the forced labor camps. Did the Germans starve prisoners to death or did the allies with their vast carpet bombing of entire cities, regions, and industries?
The Wages of War
Allied bombers were a constant presence over Germany in the last two years of the war. Even before the war, Germany did not have enough land to grow their own crops and to be self- sufficient.
With the loss of their infrastructure, how much harder was it for Germany to produce enough food to survive?
Before the war, many Jews tried to emigrate – whole cruise lines full of Jews circumnavigated the Earth looking for a place to go – only to return to Germany because no nation on Earth would accept them.
It was no different at the end of the war. The Jews still had nowhere to go. If they could not work to earn their food, what choice did the Germans have?
The allies could not accept millions of Jewish refugees because they were living on greatly diminished food supplies, too. Rationing was commonplace in America and the U.K.
Russia just let people starve, and the winters did the rest.
If the allies did accept Jewish refugees, they would have to admit being witness to the concentration camps – and for years to have done absolutely nothing to shut them down.
The allies did not bomb the camps (although they did bomb while cities into piles of rubble all around the camps). They didn’t bomb the colossal rail network serving these camps, send commandos or resistance groups to destroy vital bridges or rail centers that made the camps possible.
The only way the allies could come out clean was to defeat Germany and then to blame it all on the Nazis – and to use their influence as the victors to keep their duplicity out of the history books; i.e., their implicit support of the concentration camps.
The Final Solution
The Germans had no choice but to begin killing Jews – those who could not work for their food, who would soon die of starvation or disease anyway – is it more merciful to let them starve an agonizing death or to kill them painlessly?
The key to all of this is the German railroad infrastructure. Trains moved prisoners to work camps. Trains moved food and material to and from the camps. Trains brought the finished product to the German cities and the German front lines.
Every large concentration camp was at the nexus of a monumental, complicated web of rail lines and transfer points. Sabotage or bomb any part of that rail network, and you shut down the entire camp system – the main camp and hundreds, maybe thousands of sub-camps; out of commission.
Shut down the works camps and you destroy the supply of workers to the German war machine, and you castrate the entire German war effort.
The concentration camp rail depots should have been the #1 target of every allied bombing raid and sabotage mission for the last three years of the war. Yet, they all survived three years of constant carpet bombing virtually untouched.