President Bush wondered and why the Allies did not bomb the Nazi extermination camps. Der Spiegel discusses this in an article Why the Allies Did Not Bomb Auschwitz.
The allies of course knew the Nazis were anti-Semitic, but first heard of the plans for the Holocaust in August 1942, In November 1942 a Polish officer, Jan Karski, was smuggled out of Poland to England, and reported the extermination camps to the Americans.
But the dreadful news that he brought surpassed the possibilities of imagination of those who heard him. “Do you think that I am lying,” Karski was supposed to have asked the incredulous Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter,. “I didn’t say that you are lying,” Frankfurters answer was supposed to have been. “I said, I can’t believe you.”
Under Louis XIV the Parischief of police Gabriel Nicholas de la Reynie, who was a modern, rational type, received reports from the priests of Notre Dame that many people were confessing to poisoning their spouses.
La Reyne, at first very skeptical, looked into this, and to his horror discovered an underground in Paris and at Versaillesof diabolist priests, black masses, poisoners, and child murderers. Someone may have been trying to poison the king. The investigation got closer and closer to the royal family, until Louis, fearing that Francewould be completely disgraced, terminated the investigation and burned the reports with his own hands. La Reynie had kept copies for self-protection, so we know about the affair of the poisons.
La Reynie realized that for the criminals the very “the enormity of their crimes proved their safeguard.” No one wanted to believe that a civilized Christian society could have such crimes.Most Holocaust skeptics are anti-Semites, but some, like Judge Brack at the end of Hedda Gabler, think “Good God!–people don’t do such things.”Some people have reacted to my book Sacrilege in that way, although I have left out some of the more bizarre stories of diabolism. People find themselves unable to believe that priests and maybe bishops perpetrated diabolic rites of sexual abuse- but what a brilliant safeguard for the criminals. If they make their crimes unbelievably bizarre, no one will believe the stories of the victims. The Allies decided, by the way, that it would do no good to bomb the camps and that the best way to help the Jews would be to end the war as quickly as possible.