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Out of Elie Wiesel's Night Came the Discovery
of Long-forgotten CIA Files
Books inspire many things in their readers. They
can be a simple diversion or a life-changing encounter.
They are a means of sharing-a good yarn, a philosophical
treatise, or a personal story. Nobel Peace Prize-winning
author Elie Wiesel's Night is the story of his
Holocaust experiences-increasing restrictions under
the Germans and the fascists, life in the ghetto, and
the hell of concentration camps. This sharing
of memory and experience inspired one reader to search
for answers to a question that had long lain forgotten
in World War II archives and annals.
When CIA archivist Dino Brugioni read Night in
1978, a particular passage caught his eye. It
spoke of air raids over Auschwitz and American planes
dropping bombs on the concentration camp complex.
Knowing nothing about this, he decided to research possible
Allied activity in the area. What he found was
astonishing. Only eight kilometers from the infamous
concentration camp lay Buna, the I.G. Farben industrial
facility that used slave laborers from the camp to make
synthetic oil and rubber. When it dramatically
increased production in 1944, it became a target for
Allied bomber pilots. In preparation for bombing
the factory, Allied photographers flew over the area,
inadvertently catching the concentration camp on film.
Detailed, high-resolution images captured careful landscaping,
an orderly layout of barracks, gas chambers, crematoria,
and SS headquarters, and lines of prisoners waiting
for an unknown fate.
Elie Wiesel was not the only survivor to remember repeated
fly-overs of American planes. Werner Coppel, who
was forced to work for the Germans, vividly remembers
air-raid sirens and hoping that the factory-and other,
more sinister camp facilities would be destroyed.
When he immigrated to the United States, he wrote to
government officials, demanding to know why factory
was bombed but never the terrible gas chambers, which
could consume up to 12,000 people a day. When
Brugioni's findings were declassified he obtained a
copy of the report, which included photographs of the
camp and detailed analysis of what they contained.
Though this did not give any answers, it provided information,
which he shared with Dr. Racelle Weiman, director of
the Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education at Hebrew
Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion when they
first met.
Coppel has never given up his fervent interest in this
matter, which lies so close to home. Wiesel's
words, Brugioni's curiosity, and Coppel's passion encompass
an issue that the foremost scholars on the Holocaust
have dealt with in books and articles and The Center
is currently exploring. Though nothing can be
done to change the past, enactors of that terrible drama
can find some solace in the fact that Holocaust issues
are constantly being described, debated, and remembered
so that they are never again repeated. Books,
lectures, films, and events treat issues from the past
that still reverberate today. Should America have
bombed Auschwitz? Should it have sacrificed a
few hundred people to save the life of thousands?
In the future, can and should it use the military for
humanitarian purposes? It is amazing that so much
thought, so much controversy, and so much conversation
can come from one man reading one line in one book.
Should we have done it? Inspiring questions, Wiesel
also hints at answers:
We
were not afraid. And yet, if a bomb had fallen
on the blocks, it alone would have claimed hundreds
of victims on the spot. But we were no longer
afraid of death; at any rate, not of that death.
Every bomb that exploded filled us with joy and gave
us new confidence in life.
For
further reading, "The Holocaust Revisited: A
Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination
Complex" by Dino Brugioni and Robert Poirier,
1979
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