We are currently studying this in my History class.
But I was thinking, what are your opinions?
During the WW2 era, Do you think it would be possible? What effects would it have had differently?
EDIT:
This is: Could the Allies Have Bombed Auschwitz vs. Hiroshima?
This is: Could the Allies Have Bombed Auschwitz vs. Hiroshima?
Wait... what's the intent? Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed to force a Japanese surrender, all of which happened after Germany had already surrendered. Also, Auschwitz was a set of concentration camps which were, together, the largest concentration camp run by the Axis - a site where we needed to go and save people. Why are we bombing it?
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My anecdotal evidence disagrees with yours! EXPLAIN THAT!
Heh. That is a dumb question. The Allies would have only helped the Germans in getting rid of Jews. I think that would have annuled the entire idea of going to war against the Germans. Okay, truth is that they didn't know what was going on until Allied soldiers tripped over the emaciated bodies, but that is not the thing going on here. A scout plane could not have mistaken a prison for a military target.
Could the Allies Have Bombed Auschwitz vs. Hiroshima?
That is pointless question. I'm hoping the intent is more along the lines of "Would the U.S. have nuked a German city to force a Nazi surrender?". To that question I would have to answer no.
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Yes, that is an extremely weird question, the reasons of which Zith has already stated. Why would the Allies have bombed Auschwitz at all?
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Wait... what's the intent? Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed to force a Japanese surrender, all of which happened after Germany had already surrendered. Also, Auschwitz was a set of concentration camps which were, together, the largest concentration camp run by the Axis - a site where we needed to go and save people. Why are we bombing it?
That is my point in the essay that I wrote for this question.
This is a question from my class saying that "In your opinion", and I was thinking, Isn't it the whole point of this war to save the people in there? Not to kill them. But I could see someones point of bombing Hiroshima being as bad, due to the innocents. But still.
That is pointless question. I'm hoping the intent is more along the lines of "Would the U.S. have nuked a German city to force a Nazi surrender?". To that question I would have to answer no.
I beleive that is what he meant, but I copied the question Directly, so I mean that would be up for debate as well.
EDIT:
I realized that that wasn't the exact question, but it seems close enough (And was taken from one of the articles)
We are currently studying this in my History class.
But I was thinking, what are your opinions?
During the WW2 era, Do you think it would be possible? What effects would it have had differently?
EDIT:
This is: Could the Allies Have Bombed Auschwitz vs. Hiroshima?
Why would the Allies ever bomb Auschwitz?
Firstly, I thought the Nazi concentration camps were well-guarded secrets, and the Allies only started to gain knowledge of them later on in the war. Second, these concentration camps were at the heart of the Nazi controlled territory, so if for some reason the Allies mistook them for something else, bombing them would be horribly impractical, and nigh impossible.
Bombing Auschwitz = killing thousands of innocent people
Bombing Hiroshima/Nagasaki = saving thousands of (mainly American) lives
If you replaced Auschwitz with the fire-bombing of Dresden, your thread would make some sense.
I think you might need to research the topic yourself a little bit.
Bombing Auschwitz = killing thousands of innocent people
Bombing Hiroshima/Nagasaki = saving thousands of (mainly American) lives. AND killing hundreds of thousands of innocent(ish) people.
Could the Allies Have Bombed Auschwitz vs. Hiroshima?
Well... no. Aside from any concerns about morality, the allies had not yet developed the atomic bomb to a point where it could be deployed. This is not, however, what I think you were really asking.
Would the allies have used an atomic bomb, had they had access to one, to end a wartime stalemate with a historical Nazi Germany? Yes. Auschwitz? Probably not. There were better targets. Never forget, the second part of the impetus to use the bomb, aside from potential body counts, was because the War was bankrupting the government. We couldn't really finance a forceful ground invasion of Japan by that point, and had the situation in Europe been similar, similar results would very likely have come about.
The average lion is approximately 190 cm long and 60 cm wide = 11400 cm2 = 0.00000114 km2
Now, if we take that times a trillion we get 11,400,000 km2 of lion.
I think you might need to research the topic yourself a little bit.
Fixd.
Well what about all the innocent people who perished in the Battle of Berlin, when the Red Army beat the everliving **** out of the German capital?
What about all the innocent people who died in the fire-bombing of Dresden, which was by almost all accounts worse than Nagasaki/Hiroshima?
In a war, it's true that innocent people will die, but Auschwitz and all other concentration camps are an exception. The people there were forced into conscription by the Nazis, and deserved liberation, despite the fact that their labor helped the Nazi cause.
Well... no. Aside from any concerns about morality, the allies had not yet developed the atomic bomb to a point where it could be deployed. This is not, however, what I think you were really asking.
Would the allies have used an atomic bomb, had they had access to one, to end a wartime stalemate with a historical Nazi Germany? Yes. Auschwitz? Probably not. There were better targets. Never forget, the second part of the impetus to use the bomb, aside from potential body counts, was because the War was bankrupting the government. We couldn't really finance a forceful ground invasion of Japan by that point, and had the situation in Europe been similar, similar results would very likely have come about.
Exactly, imagine how ridiculously effective an atomic bomb dropped on Berlin around January 1945 would have been? WWII in Europe would most likely have ended that instant.
The allies had already been firebombing the crap out of German cities for quite some time towards the end of the war.
Really there were two reasons, according to then Secretary of Defense McNamara in a very interesting documentary I watched last year, that the Americans dropped the nukes on those two Japanese cities. For one, we knew how much our little romp through the south-pacific cost, both in lives and resources and realized that if the Japanese fought that hard for those islands, they were going to fight twice as hard to defend their homeland. We would never have won a ground assault on Japan. And if we did attack on the ground, it might have given them incentive to not surrender to us, which they were planning to even before their cities were bombed.
The second reason, which I have forgotten quite a bit about, but there might be some info if you look for it, is that it was an experiment. The government chose 6 cities in Japan that would be targets for an attack. They wanted to see what the effects would be on such a large amount of people in a confined area as a result of a nuclear weapon detonating in the area. I forget the rest, but that's the basics as i recall them.
Sure they could have bombed Auschwitz, but it would have accomplished nothing. Unlike the Japanese, the German forces were not going to back down until they were completely decimated from tits to toes, which they were. Destroying their largest death camp, and all of the Jews, gypsies, gays, etc. would not have had any affect on the war, and would have only resulted in the death of even more people.
Wait... what's the intent? Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed to force a Japanese surrender, all of which happened after Germany had already surrendered. Also, Auschwitz was a set of concentration camps which were, together, the largest concentration camp run by the Axis - a site where we needed to go and save people. Why are we bombing it?
I react the same way.
Are you asking if we could have bombed the railway lines leading TO Auschwitz?
Also, how is this and bombing Hiroshima mutually exclusive?
I mean, I don't celebrate the deaths of civilians, but when you're caught between a rock and a hard place in the middle of a total war with a facist empire, I think your commitments to the lives of your own far exceed your commitments to the well-being of the enemy. Which would kind of, you know, be why you're fighting them in the first place.
Sure they could have bombed Auschwitz, but it would have accomplished nothing. Unlike the Japanese, the German forces were not going to back down until they were completely decimated from tits to toes, which they were.
Erm... That would make them EXACTLY like the Japanese. The Japanese fought to the wire to defend islands in the Pacific. There's no chance they'd give up their homeland without the nuclear bomb being dropped, not without a ground campaign would have been horrific beyond words for both sides.
Are you asking if we could have bombed the railway lines leading TO Auschwitz?
Erm... That would make them EXACTLY like the Japanese. The Japanese fought to the wire to defend islands in the Pacific. There's no chance they'd give up their homeland without the nuclear bomb being dropped, not without a ground campaign would have been horrific beyond words for both sides.
Bombing those railways lines would have been a bad choice for morality. The Nazi's would have just marched the Jews/etc in, or executed them on the spot in their ghetto/holding camp.
Dying of a gunshot wound might be better than forced march/labor/starvation, but at least these people would have a chance to live if Auschwitz was liberated in time.
Your right about that ground campaign. Fighting on the main Japanese island would have been a bloodbath for both sides, in the end the Allies would win, but the amount of casualties would be staggering. The Japanese pioneered kamikaze attacks, imagine what they would do if faced with being defeated on their own soil?
Bombing those railways lines would have been a bad choice for morality. The Nazi's would have just marched the Jews/etc in, or executed them on the spot in their ghetto/holding camp.
Dying of a gunshot wound might be better than forced march/labor/starvation, but at least these people would have a chance to live if Auschwitz was liberated in time.
Your right about that ground campaign. Fighting on the main Japanese island would have been a bloodbath for both sides, in the end the Allies would win, but the amount of casualties would be staggering. The Japanese pioneered kamikaze attacks, imagine what they would do if faced with being defeated on their own soil?
I am unsure if I agree with your " Allies would win in the end" thing. It would be mostly the Americans, since everybody else went home to nurse their wounds after their own war. Also, the willingness of the Japanese to throw away their own lives in order to further their cause will have caused a very important dent in morale to americans. Remember, if they had gone for a ground offensive, they would've sent in war weary soldiers from the western front. And nobody likes living a year in peace only to get back into the fight in a place you've never even heard of (again), let alone never trained for.
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I see no reason why the US would have ever considered any German targets for a possible nuke bombing. By the time the Manhattan Project was in full gear and about to churn out the first few prototypes, it was obvious that the Germans would not last in the war for much longer. That and the fact that by that time the allies knew there was a lot of dissent within the German army to kill Hitler, as shown in the movie Valkyrie. If you don't now the actual background to the movie, it wasn't the first attempt on Hitler's life, though it was the last as Hitler totally isolated himself after that.
As was said earlier in the thread, the Japanese were the only viable targets. Any ground invasion would had basically made everyone in Japan the enemy given the culture and mentality of the populous. Every man, woman, and older child would be fighting against the US in order to try and stop them. I think the estimated toll to the US side was something along the lines of 100K Soldiers dead if they did do a ground invasion.
Oh, I think I see now. We're debating the notion that Hiroshima was an effective target, saying that Auschwitz would be a comparable target for the desired effect. Some problems with the comparison: Auschwitz had a much less desirable ratio of enemies to victims as compared to either of the bombed cities, Germany being land-locked makes a ground invasion far less costly compared to a ground invasion of Japan's main islands, and neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were primary targets.
The main one being that bombing wouldn't have worked on any of the Axis powers at their height, and getting the European nations down to where it does work means that you've already done the hard part, namely, gotten a foothold on the same chunk of Earth they're on. I rather doubt that projected losses from that point on either side would be lower for a civilian bombing than for invading their nation, which they were for the bombings in Japan due to the fact that you have to invade that country using ships (highly vulnerable vessels filled with soldiers are easy targets).
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My anecdotal evidence disagrees with yours! EXPLAIN THAT!
I still don't understand the possible motive behind bombing a concentration camp. The Allies were sympathetic to the plight of European Jewry, whereas Hiroshima was military target peopled almost exclusively by enemy civilians. Why would they have wanted to bomb Auschwitz?
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I am unsure if I agree with your " Allies would win in the end" thing. It would be mostly the Americans, since everybody else went home to nurse their wounds after their own war. Also, the willingness of the Japanese to throw away their own lives in order to further their cause will have caused a very important dent in morale to americans. Remember, if they had gone for a ground offensive, they would've sent in war weary soldiers from the western front. And nobody likes living a year in peace only to get back into the fight in a place you've never even heard of (again), let alone never trained for.
The Allies would eventually win, the mainland is heavily dependent on outside supplies is it not? Plus, with carriers completely surrounding the island, 24/7 bombing would have to lead to something...
I'm very sure after American helped bail out Europe, they would be pretty eager to help us out in Japan, Britain would most likely send ships/planes/etc to help.
That's what I meant when I said "the Japanese pioneered kamikaze attacks, imagine what they would do if faced with being defeated on their own soil?"
They would use every last available soldier, to his dying breath.
Soldiers from the European theatre would most likely be given a rest, then sent in, while replacements/troops who hadn't seen much action in the European theatre would be the invading force of the Pacific.
The Allies would eventually win, the mainland is heavily dependent on outside supplies is it not? Plus, with carriers completely surrounding the island, 24/7 bombing would have to lead to something...
I'm very sure after American helped bail out Europe, they would be pretty eager to help us out in Japan, Britain would most likely send ships/planes/etc to help.
That's what I meant when I said "the Japanese pioneered kamikaze attacks, imagine what they would do if faced with being defeated on their own soil?"
They would use every last available soldier, to his dying breath.
Soldiers from the European theatre would most likely be given a rest, then sent in, while replacements/troops who hadn't seen much action in the European theatre would be the invading force of the Pacific.
I have to point out the massive impracticality of Europe getting involved in the Pacific theatre. Completely ignoring the fact that naval ships would have to circle two continents (cutting through the Mediterranean, since there's no way in hell they'd go through Soviet waters) to get to Japan, their navy was ill-suited for that kind of warfare (and by they, I obviously mean Britain).
Island-hopping, aircraft carriers and long-ranged bombardment is vastly different than anything used in Europe. Do you really think that Britain was in any sort of shape to start pumping out new weapons en masse?
Firstly, the bombing of auschwitz would have been intended to cripple the capacity of the germans to march people into gas chambers. 75-odd percent of the capacity they had was in and around auschwitz. Yes, there would have been Jewish casualties if they bombed those chambers(1) - however the question is if it would have been worth it?
In 1944, around 80,000 Jews *PER MONTH* were sent to auschwitz. While it is true that some proportion of them would have been murdered where they were, there is a good (well, ok, evil) reason the germans set up the death camps: The efficience level was vastly more, and you you could many thousands more per month with less men doing it.
And the allies knew. Certainly by early 44 - when they had the capability - they knew where the camps were, and pretty much exactly what was going on. (possibly as early as late 42.) See
So the allies knew for sure by early 44, and had the ability to bomb the camp.
So the question is: do you save more lives by bombing than by not? And even if you do is it a morally correct decision?
And it is the same for Japan. Do you save more lives (and possibly more 'important' lives) by nuking than not?
The estimates were that of the order of 100,000 American and associated allied troops (there were australian and british/commonwealth troops involved in some of the island fighting, despite the fact that American stories of the era pretty much universally ignore them). Of course, these estimates were made by the people who *wanted* to drop the bomb, for other reasons (to show that they had it and to see what it did in a live test, and to scare the russians). The other, of course, was to make sure the Russians didn't get involved against Japan.
Japan was, it must be remembered, teetering on the edge of collapse already. They had virtually no navy (no petrol), and no appreciable airforce left. Indeed, the Japanese *would have surrendered* several months earlier except that Truman had - accidentally - implied they would not be able to keep the emperor as part of the post-surrender government.
The bombing of hiroshima is arguably justified, although I'd say the argument is pretty weak. The bombing of nagasaki, on the other hand, was *completely* unjustified; the Japanese were in shock and assessing the situation, and no demand was made that they surrender or another such strike would occur; they were in fact in a meeting to agree to surrender on the day nagasaki was bombed. It was just something some of the american brass wanted to do to see how different the plutonium vs uranium bomb was.
(1) although it should be noted that they were generally much more accurate than some posters here seem to believe; yes, there was a lot more splash damage than these days, but they could hit a factory in the middle of a city and often not do *much* damage too far away - except they usually didn't want to limit damage
I want to comment on your footnote, there:
We are assuming that it was a nuke thrown on Auschwitz. Any kind of accuracy would hardly matter, since that thing is such a horrible monster that it doesn't matter if you dropped it on Jerry's left or right toe. Both toes would evaporate anyway.
Also compounding the matter of nuking Auschwitz: Allies. There were people that helped the americans, remember? If you nuke the middle of Europe, there's a lot of countries caught in the fallout. Not that I think america'd care....to this date they are the only country in the world that used nuclear weapons in anger...
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I want to comment on your footnote, there:
We are assuming that it was a nuke thrown on Auschwitz. Any kind of accuracy would hardly matter, since that thing is such a horrible monster that it doesn't matter if you dropped it on Jerry's left or right toe. Both toes would evaporate anyway.
Also compounding the matter of nuking Auschwitz: Allies. There were people that helped the americans, remember? If you nuke the middle of Europe, there's a lot of countries caught in the fallout. Not that I think america'd care....to this date they are the only country in the world that used nuclear weapons in anger...
How the heck did people in this thread get the silly idea that the OP asked about droping a nuke on Auschwitz? That's the most idiotic thing I have seen suggested in while on these forums.
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But I was thinking, what are your opinions?
During the WW2 era, Do you think it would be possible? What effects would it have had differently?
EDIT:
This is:
Could the Allies Have Bombed Auschwitz vs. Hiroshima?
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That is pointless question. I'm hoping the intent is more along the lines of "Would the U.S. have nuked a German city to force a Nazi surrender?". To that question I would have to answer no.
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That is my point in the essay that I wrote for this question.
This is a question from my class saying that "In your opinion", and I was thinking, Isn't it the whole point of this war to save the people in there? Not to kill them. But I could see someones point of bombing Hiroshima being as bad, due to the innocents. But still.
Here are some of the sites he gave us as a refernece.
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Holocaust/bombau.html (Link is broken :-/)
http://hnn.us/articles/4268.html
http://www.chron.com/content/interactive/special/vj/vets.html
I'd still say that bombing Hiroshima was the right direction.
I beleive that is what he meant, but I copied the question Directly, so I mean that would be up for debate as well.
EDIT:
I realized that that wasn't the exact question, but it seems close enough (And was taken from one of the articles)
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Why would the Allies ever bomb Auschwitz?
Firstly, I thought the Nazi concentration camps were well-guarded secrets, and the Allies only started to gain knowledge of them later on in the war. Second, these concentration camps were at the heart of the Nazi controlled territory, so if for some reason the Allies mistook them for something else, bombing them would be horribly impractical, and nigh impossible.
Bombing Auschwitz = killing thousands of innocent people
Bombing Hiroshima/Nagasaki = saving thousands of (mainly American) lives
If you replaced Auschwitz with the fire-bombing of Dresden, your thread would make some sense.
I think you might need to research the topic yourself a little bit.
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Well... no. Aside from any concerns about morality, the allies had not yet developed the atomic bomb to a point where it could be deployed. This is not, however, what I think you were really asking.
Would the allies have used an atomic bomb, had they had access to one, to end a wartime stalemate with a historical Nazi Germany? Yes. Auschwitz? Probably not. There were better targets. Never forget, the second part of the impetus to use the bomb, aside from potential body counts, was because the War was bankrupting the government. We couldn't really finance a forceful ground invasion of Japan by that point, and had the situation in Europe been similar, similar results would very likely have come about.
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Well what about all the innocent people who perished in the Battle of Berlin, when the Red Army beat the everliving **** out of the German capital?
What about all the innocent people who died in the fire-bombing of Dresden, which was by almost all accounts worse than Nagasaki/Hiroshima?
In a war, it's true that innocent people will die, but Auschwitz and all other concentration camps are an exception. The people there were forced into conscription by the Nazis, and deserved liberation, despite the fact that their labor helped the Nazi cause.
EDIT:
Exactly, imagine how ridiculously effective an atomic bomb dropped on Berlin around January 1945 would have been? WWII in Europe would most likely have ended that instant.
Really there were two reasons, according to then Secretary of Defense McNamara in a very interesting documentary I watched last year, that the Americans dropped the nukes on those two Japanese cities. For one, we knew how much our little romp through the south-pacific cost, both in lives and resources and realized that if the Japanese fought that hard for those islands, they were going to fight twice as hard to defend their homeland. We would never have won a ground assault on Japan. And if we did attack on the ground, it might have given them incentive to not surrender to us, which they were planning to even before their cities were bombed.
The second reason, which I have forgotten quite a bit about, but there might be some info if you look for it, is that it was an experiment. The government chose 6 cities in Japan that would be targets for an attack. They wanted to see what the effects would be on such a large amount of people in a confined area as a result of a nuclear weapon detonating in the area. I forget the rest, but that's the basics as i recall them.
I react the same way.
Are you asking if we could have bombed the railway lines leading TO Auschwitz?
Also, how is this and bombing Hiroshima mutually exclusive?
Innocent-ish? Care to define that term?
I mean, I don't celebrate the deaths of civilians, but when you're caught between a rock and a hard place in the middle of a total war with a facist empire, I think your commitments to the lives of your own far exceed your commitments to the well-being of the enemy. Which would kind of, you know, be why you're fighting them in the first place.
Erm... That would make them EXACTLY like the Japanese. The Japanese fought to the wire to defend islands in the Pacific. There's no chance they'd give up their homeland without the nuclear bomb being dropped, not without a ground campaign would have been horrific beyond words for both sides.
Bombing those railways lines would have been a bad choice for morality. The Nazi's would have just marched the Jews/etc in, or executed them on the spot in their ghetto/holding camp.
Dying of a gunshot wound might be better than forced march/labor/starvation, but at least these people would have a chance to live if Auschwitz was liberated in time.
Your right about that ground campaign. Fighting on the main Japanese island would have been a bloodbath for both sides, in the end the Allies would win, but the amount of casualties would be staggering. The Japanese pioneered kamikaze attacks, imagine what they would do if faced with being defeated on their own soil?
I am unsure if I agree with your " Allies would win in the end" thing. It would be mostly the Americans, since everybody else went home to nurse their wounds after their own war. Also, the willingness of the Japanese to throw away their own lives in order to further their cause will have caused a very important dent in morale to americans. Remember, if they had gone for a ground offensive, they would've sent in war weary soldiers from the western front. And nobody likes living a year in peace only to get back into the fight in a place you've never even heard of (again), let alone never trained for.
As was said earlier in the thread, the Japanese were the only viable targets. Any ground invasion would had basically made everyone in Japan the enemy given the culture and mentality of the populous. Every man, woman, and older child would be fighting against the US in order to try and stop them. I think the estimated toll to the US side was something along the lines of 100K Soldiers dead if they did do a ground invasion.
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The main one being that bombing wouldn't have worked on any of the Axis powers at their height, and getting the European nations down to where it does work means that you've already done the hard part, namely, gotten a foothold on the same chunk of Earth they're on. I rather doubt that projected losses from that point on either side would be lower for a civilian bombing than for invading their nation, which they were for the bombings in Japan due to the fact that you have to invade that country using ships (highly vulnerable vessels filled with soldiers are easy targets).
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The Allies would eventually win, the mainland is heavily dependent on outside supplies is it not? Plus, with carriers completely surrounding the island, 24/7 bombing would have to lead to something...
I'm very sure after American helped bail out Europe, they would be pretty eager to help us out in Japan, Britain would most likely send ships/planes/etc to help.
That's what I meant when I said "the Japanese pioneered kamikaze attacks, imagine what they would do if faced with being defeated on their own soil?"
They would use every last available soldier, to his dying breath.
Soldiers from the European theatre would most likely be given a rest, then sent in, while replacements/troops who hadn't seen much action in the European theatre would be the invading force of the Pacific.
I have to point out the massive impracticality of Europe getting involved in the Pacific theatre. Completely ignoring the fact that naval ships would have to circle two continents (cutting through the Mediterranean, since there's no way in hell they'd go through Soviet waters) to get to Japan, their navy was ill-suited for that kind of warfare (and by they, I obviously mean Britain).
Island-hopping, aircraft carriers and long-ranged bombardment is vastly different than anything used in Europe. Do you really think that Britain was in any sort of shape to start pumping out new weapons en masse?
Firstly, the bombing of auschwitz would have been intended to cripple the capacity of the germans to march people into gas chambers. 75-odd percent of the capacity they had was in and around auschwitz. Yes, there would have been Jewish casualties if they bombed those chambers(1) - however the question is if it would have been worth it?
In 1944, around 80,000 Jews *PER MONTH* were sent to auschwitz. While it is true that some proportion of them would have been murdered where they were, there is a good (well, ok, evil) reason the germans set up the death camps: The efficience level was vastly more, and you you could many thousands more per month with less men doing it.
And the allies knew. Certainly by early 44 - when they had the capability - they knew where the camps were, and pretty much exactly what was going on. (possibly as early as late 42.) See
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/bombau.html.
So the allies knew for sure by early 44, and had the ability to bomb the camp.
So the question is: do you save more lives by bombing than by not? And even if you do is it a morally correct decision?
And it is the same for Japan. Do you save more lives (and possibly more 'important' lives) by nuking than not?
The estimates were that of the order of 100,000 American and associated allied troops (there were australian and british/commonwealth troops involved in some of the island fighting, despite the fact that American stories of the era pretty much universally ignore them). Of course, these estimates were made by the people who *wanted* to drop the bomb, for other reasons (to show that they had it and to see what it did in a live test, and to scare the russians). The other, of course, was to make sure the Russians didn't get involved against Japan.
Japan was, it must be remembered, teetering on the edge of collapse already. They had virtually no navy (no petrol), and no appreciable airforce left. Indeed, the Japanese *would have surrendered* several months earlier except that Truman had - accidentally - implied they would not be able to keep the emperor as part of the post-surrender government.
The bombing of hiroshima is arguably justified, although I'd say the argument is pretty weak. The bombing of nagasaki, on the other hand, was *completely* unjustified; the Japanese were in shock and assessing the situation, and no demand was made that they surrender or another such strike would occur; they were in fact in a meeting to agree to surrender on the day nagasaki was bombed. It was just something some of the american brass wanted to do to see how different the plutonium vs uranium bomb was.
(1) although it should be noted that they were generally much more accurate than some posters here seem to believe; yes, there was a lot more splash damage than these days, but they could hit a factory in the middle of a city and often not do *much* damage too far away - except they usually didn't want to limit damage
We are assuming that it was a nuke thrown on Auschwitz. Any kind of accuracy would hardly matter, since that thing is such a horrible monster that it doesn't matter if you dropped it on Jerry's left or right toe. Both toes would evaporate anyway.
Also compounding the matter of nuking Auschwitz: Allies. There were people that helped the americans, remember? If you nuke the middle of Europe, there's a lot of countries caught in the fallout. Not that I think america'd care....to this date they are the only country in the world that used nuclear weapons in anger...
How the heck did people in this thread get the silly idea that the OP asked about droping a nuke on Auschwitz? That's the most idiotic thing I have seen suggested in while on these forums.