I saw the bombers fly over the camps and we waived to them.

At another camp they flew low over us, bombed the factory (BRABAG at Zeitz) just by our fence and sent no bombs to liberate us inside the fence. Even our guards have fled. I ducked when the shrapnels started flying but oh how welcome the attack was.

Lets face it no one in power REALLY gave a... If we were all British or American troups being exterminated THE CAMPS AND RAILROADS WOULD HAVE BEEN BOMBED TO SMITHERENES./

It is a sad chapter, not even the FDR Museum at Hyde Park has
a good explanation except to refer to this book. It was FDR' decision not to bomb, as evidence now emerges in a recent article in NEWSWEEK magazine by Beshloss.

The point is made which I agree with is that the responsibility for the murders should be with the murders.

I found it this the best and quite a readable account of this issue. Its a series of articles which allow the reader to reach a conclusion. It discusses the US and Britain. It makes it quite clear Stalin did not care and did nothing.

There are basically two issue involved.

The first is could it be done. After reading the discussion in the book but its left to you the reader to decide. I think it could have been. There seems to be no reason, why not? The technical, military and intelligence problems seem quite solvable.

The second is if it could have been done, could it have made any difference. This question is more difficult to answer. If the operation had been done its quite possible that the people would have been killed by other methods eg forced marches or bullets. However this was harder and slower then the gas chambers. It goes on to discuss an air raid on Hungary scared the government there into stopping the transportation of Jews. This was purely an accidental effect of timing. The air raid occurred just when the transportation of Jews started. The Hungarian government thought it was because of the transportation and stopped them. It then discusses the effect of this air raid. Leaving the reader with the impression that maybe political action may have helped to stop some of these murders.

The question that I would like to ask the writers "Is if they had been Americans or English being sent to those gas chambers - would they have been bombed?". I think they would have.

I love a good debate and this book is probably the closest one could come to a well thought out debate and not actually participate in it. The authors / editors do a great job of selecting the historians to write the chapters, I do not think you could ask for a more well spoken, knowledgeable and balanced group. I thought the book would have a lot of emotion shading the arguments almost to the point of making the debate fall into a day time talk show format of pushing and shouting, but that never happened. The chapters provided very convincing and detail laden essays on each particular facet of the issue with a for and against article to balance the debate.

To be honest I did not have an opion one way or the other on this topic before picking up the book. What then happened was that I kept bouncing from one side to the next with each article until I sat back and viewed the book in its totality. My opinion really only maters to me so I will spare you, but this book will definitely help you in forming one. The editors also did a good job of making sure that the book had a nice flow, sometimes I find that with books of different articles by different people you can get a choppy book. It also provides a ton of interesting details about the air war in Europe something I was not expecting but came as a pleasant surprise. Overall this is a very well thought out, well written book that will provide you with a great deal of information.

I am familiar with Michael Neufeld's earlier work with the Paper-Clip interviews on audio tape on file at NARA. What is enigmatically missing from these interviews (and the book) is what these pro-Nazi scientists knew about BERGKRISTALL/ESCHE 2 Guzen II at Mauthausen Concentration Camp. Yes the ME-262 jet engine was engineered and stored there but some very interesting mind boggling technologies were developed there with the help of Jewish slave labor. These slaves were murdered to eliminate any oral historical record of this new strange technology and the Nazi otracirites. Eventually in May of 1945 the invading US 41st Recon Squad 11th Ard Div 3rd US Army liberated the camps. But Russians got to this technology in the tunnels before the US forces could as our boys did not know what they had found until the O.S.S. went over photo recon much later.

By November 1947 the Russians had scooped up and exploited as much as they could and eventually dynamited the tunnels leaving us with nothing but scrapes. To this day they still have unfettered access to this technology but we caught up to them (so to speak) by bringing these Paper-Clip boys to Wright Field (Wright-Paterson AFB today)in Dayton Ohio. This was the real beginning of the Cold War Space Race.

In the Neufeld interviews you will learn of some NEW things you never knew before about the Pennemunde Boys like Project Wasserfall (i.e, submarine fired missle system), the Washington and Brooklynn Rocket Program (V-9 or the V4a bastard rocket - first attempt at ICBM). Maybe some day soon someone will discover the connection between Kplt. Hellmut Neuerburg's U-869 REAL mission from Kriegsmarine and this Wasserfall project! (i.e., a Type IXC/40 submarine that accidently sunk itself with an acoustic T5 torpedo off the coast of New Jersey halfway between Brooklyn and Washington DC in early 1945 near the end of the WWII.)

If you want to know a lot of technical information about the German rocket program in World War II this is the place to start. Neufeld has a grasp of the technical side of the program like no other historian, however his writing style leaves much to be desired. A good plus of the book is that he includes diagrams of the missles as well as a couple sections of pictures that give the reader an idea what the things and places he writes about look like. I found being able to visualize certain things makes understanding it much easier. He also includes an appendix with a chronology of the German rocket program that readers will find helpful for quick short references to each successive rocket in the program. Overall this is an excellent book, I give it 4 stars instead of 5 only due to Neufeld's writing style which makes this book tough going in some sections that include lots of boring, and in my opinion, overkill, technical detail.

The book covers both the political and technical matters of the V-2 (A-4) missile development. As the book is intended for a general audience the coverage of the technology is sufficient for the purpose of the book but not extremely detailed. This is also clear from the title of the book. The description of the political background and military situation is done in a very clear way. The list of references are extremely detailed and it is obviuos the the author has outstanding knowledge of the subject. The important persons are described in what I consider a very balanced way. I recommned this book to anyone wanting to learn about the inner workings of parts of the German WW2 military and political system as well as a the technology of these rockets. An excellent companion is the V-2 by Walter Dornberger which of course must be read with some caution due to the position of its author and time of publication.

This is the story of the Dora Concentration camp where Nazi Germany's V-1 and V-2 rockets and jet engines for Junkers were manufactured by slave labor in huge tunnels cut into the Harz Mountains near Nordhausen in the central German state of Thuringia. The book tells the story of the slave laborers inside the mountain and includes numerous stories from survivor interviews. Many died of starvation, exposure, overwork, exhaustion, disease, beatings, torture, hangings, and minimal health care. Dora had a population of about 15,000, and its own crematorium. Prisoners who died were replaced, but no-one ever left except as a corpse (until the end of the war). Conditions in the tunnels were bad: damp, cold, and dusty with poor ventilation. Prisoners included were not only Jews, but also political prisoners and people captured throughout the German occupied lands: Russians, Poles, Slavs, French, Italians, and Germans. Groups were segregated and given different jobs. Jews and Russians usually got the worst jobs.

Michael J. Neufeld, curator of the National Air and Space Museum at The Smithsonian, provides a detailed introduction. Hitler adopted the V-1/V-2 rocketry program as super-weapons intended to shift the balance after the German war offensive ground to a standstill in Russia. He planned to use them as terror weapons to weaken the will of the British to continue their war effort.

Experimental work was done at Peenemuende on the Baltic Coast, and initially manufacture was set up at that site too. However, the British were able to detect that work via aerial photography (according to the movie, "Operation Crossbow"). In spite of the high risks, the RAF succeeded in destroying the plant by bombing. The timing was fortunate, because Neufeld feels V-2 attacks on massed Allied forces prior to the Normandy Invasion could have had greater impact. As it was, the Allies were able to shoot down the rather slow V-1s. By the time V-2s were available in number, the Allied forces had landed in France and spread out from their beachheads. That made them a less vulnerable target.

The book disagrees strongly with several aspects of the movie "Operation Crossbow." Only production, not research was done in the mountain complex. Conditions for inmates were far worse than portrayed in the movie. Neufeld points out the slave labor/concentration camp aspect of the story was largely ignored in publications prior to 1980, but was recognized in more recent works.

Neufeld provides an excellent bibliography. No index.