Bush Says U.S. Should Have Bombed WWII Death Camp During Holocaust Memorial Tour

JERUSALEM-President George W. Bush, on an emotional tour of Israel's Holocaust memorial, stopped in front of an aerial photo of Auschwitz on Friday and told his secretary of state that the U.S. should have bombed the death camp to stop the extermination of Jews there, the memorial's chairman said.It was a rare acknowledgment from a U.S. leader on an issue that has stirred deep controversy for decades.The Allies had detailed reports about Auschwitz during the war from Polish partisans and escaped prisoners. But they chose not to bomb the camp, the rail lines leading to it, or any of the other Nazi death camps, preferring instead to focus all resources on the broader military effort.Between 1.1 million and 1.5 million people were murdered at the infamous camp in Poland.Bush twice had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of the museum, said Yad Vashem's chairman, Avner Shalev, who guided Bush through the exhibits.Upon viewing an aerial shot of Auschwitz, taken during the war by U.S. forces, Bush called the ruling not to bomb it "complex." He then called over Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to discuss President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's decision, clearly pondering the options before rendering an opinion of his own, Shalev told the Associated Press."We should have bombed it," Bush said, according to Shalev.Tom Segev, a leading Israeli scholar of the Holocaust, said the Bush comment, which appeared spontaneous, marked the first time an American president had made this acknowledgment."It is clear now that the U.S. knew a lot about it," he said. "It's possible that bombing at least the railway to the camps may have saved the lives of the Jews of Hungary. They were the very last ones who were sent to Auschwitz at a time when everybody knew what was going on."Bush, making the most extensive Mideast trip of his presidency, was accompanied on his tour of the museum by a small party that included Rice, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Israeli President Shimon Peres.At the compound, overlooking a forest on Jerusalem's outskirts, Bush visited a memorial to the 1.5 million Jewish children killed in the Holocaust, featuring six candles reflected 1.5 million times in a hall of mirrors.At the site's Hall of Remembrance, he heard a cantor chant a Jewish prayer for the dead. There, Bush, wearing a yarmulke, placed a red-white-and-blue wreath on a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six extermination camps. He also lit a torch memorializing the victims."I was most impressed that people in the face of horror and evil would not forsake their God. In the face of unspeakable crimes against humanity, brave souls — young and old — stood strong for what they believe," Bush said."I wish as many people as possible would come to this place. It is a sobering reminder that evil exists, and a call that when evil exists we must resist it," he said.The memorial was closed to the public and under heavy guard Friday, with armed soldiers standing on top of some of the site's monuments and a police helicopter and surveillance blimp hovering in the air overhead.It was Bush's second visit to the Holocaust memorial, a regular stop on the visits of foreign dignitaries. His first was in 1998, as governor of Texas. The last sitting U.S. president to visit was Bill Clinton in 1994.In the memorial's visitors' book, the president wrote simply, "God bless Israel, George Bush."Shalev then presented Bush with illustrations of the Bible drawn by the Jewish artist Carol Deutsch, who perished in the Holocaust.Deutsch created the works while in hiding from the Nazis in Belgium. He was informed upon, and died in 1944 in the Buchenwald camp. After the war, his daughter Ingrid discovered that the Nazis had confiscated their furniture and valuables but had left behind a single item: a meticulously crafted wooden box adorned with a Star of David and a seven-branched menorah, containing a collection of 99 of the artist's illustrations of biblical scenes.The originals are on display at Yad Vashem. The memorial recently decided to produce a special series of 500 replicas, the first of which was presented to Bush.Debbie Deutsch-Berman, a Yad Vashem employee whose grandfather was Deutsch's brother, said she was proud that Bush would be given her relative's artwork."These are not just his paintings, they are his legacy, and the fact that they survived shows that as much as our enemies tried to destroy the ideas that these paintings embody, they failed," she said.

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As in the days of Noah......