Bush: U.S. should have bombed Nazi camps

By JTA Staff · January 11, 2008

The United States erred in not bombing Auschwitz during the Holocaust, President Bush said.

Bush made the comment to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice while viewing an exhibit at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem of U.S. aerial photographs of the Nazi concentration camps, according to the memorial’s chairman, Avner Shalev.

Shalev took Bush on an hour-long tour of the museum on Friday; it was Bush’s second visit to Yad Vashem, a requisite stop for foreign dignitaries visiting Jerusalem. Avner reported that the president’s eyes welled up with tears twice during the tour.

“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,” Bush said.

Wearing a yarmulke and flanked by Israel’s president and prime minister, Bush also laid a red-white-and-blue wreath at the center’s main memorial – a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six Nazi extermination camps.