September 6, 2011
Golda Meir wanted Allies to bomb Auschwitz
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Golda Meir. Photo by Marion S. Trikosko
Golda Meir, the future Israeli prime minister, wanted the United States and its allies to bomb Auschwitz, researchers have learned.
Researchers from the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies found documents in Israeli and American archives that shed light on Meir’s support for the unsuccessful campaign by Jewish leaders to persuade the Allied powers to bomb the Nazi death camp.
Meir, then known as Goldie Myerson, was serving at the time as a senior official of the Histadrut, the Jewish labor federation in British Mandate Palestine.
Amid reports of the deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, Meir and a Histadrut colleague cabled the labor federation’s U.S. representative, Israel Mereminski, on July 29, 1944 saying that the Allied powers must be urged to bomb Auschwitz and the railways used to transport Jews to the camp.
Mereminski replied that he had contacted the U.S. government’s War Refugee Board, which conveyed to “competent authorities” their request for the “destruction of gas chambers, crematories, and so forth.”
