// June 2: “Itzhak Gruenbaum, the chairman of the Rescue Committee of the Jewish Agency, requests the bombing of rail lines that lead to Auschwitz.
“The Allies begin a bombing operation (Operation Frantic) in the Balkans, the goal of which is to distract the Germans from upcoming Allied landings in France.
Bombing routes overfly the railway lines leading from Hungary to Auschwitz.
The operation lasts for four months, during the deportation of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz.
The railway lines carrying the Jews are never targeted. //
The railway lines carrying the Jews are never targeted. — Why was this?
I guess related to this: // Although the British were at first opposed to the training of Palestinian Jews to fight, the British deputy minister of state in Cairo, Lord Walter Moyne, finally agreed to their training.
Cynically, he recognized that parachuting the bravest Jews on suicide missions in Eastern Europe would permanently remove them from Palestine. //
To my knowledge there was never a specific allied operation aimed at the Holocaust.
Various reasons were given, chiefly the feeling that the only real help Allies could provide was total victory over Nazism, and nothing should be done to distract from that effort.
Today those reasons sound like weak excuses, but as many other reports demonstrate, sympathy for Jews, and a felt need to help them, was not at the top of Allies’ priorities.