You're sadly mistaken on this point, FRiend; the Jews were smashing down the doors to flee Germany as the persecutions increased. While the most finite details of Endlösung ("Final Solution") would not be known until after the war, everyone knew of the threat they faced. (What would be the point of the efforts to get them out of harm's way (in some cases, by Germans themselves), if there really was, in fact, no awareness of the danger they were in?)
And I don't cite Vonnegut as an authority on this or any other moral matter; I only refer to him as a credible witness. (The moral act of targeting a city doesn't pass or fail judgment in light of his or any other POW's opinion.) Whether or not others knew of his Jewish background is irrelevant; he knew exactly what his background was. And if he, a secular American Jew, could recognize the immorality of targeting a population center, even in a country that had deported his "kind" to death camps en masse, then his opinion on the subject bears far more evidence than that of his fellow American who simply shouts, "'Murica!" but who has never seen anything as graphic as a bad car accident.
Your absolute condemnation of British and American air bombardment strategies on moralistic grounds leads one to ask:
Do you prefer the moral to the real?
I prefer the moral to the immoral; the "real", of course, is simply the one we choose.
“...everyone knew of the threat they faced...
...And I don’t cite Vonnegut as an authority on this or any other moral matter...
...I prefer the moral to the immoral; the “real”, of course, is simply the one we choose.” [Captain Walker, post 205]
My goodness. I apologize for lack of clarity. Always difficult to guess in advance, what another knows or doesn’t.
It’s insupportable to assert that “everyone” knew what the Nazis were doing. Even if you have questioned a statistically significant number of survivors, you could never have been sure who was being truthful and who wasn’t.
If you brought Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s name into this as a mere eyewitness, I must say it’s a first. Everybody else who has written or spoken about it in my hearing or in print I have eyeballed cannot wait to imbue him with special authority. Victimhood grants special moral powers. Or so lots of people think.
By “real” I meant the observable aspects of existence apart from human thought and emotion.
Reality impacts us every moment of every day (and night), independent of our thoughts, feelings, education, or mindset. Perhaps the simplest example: if someone climbs to the top of a building and jumps, they’re going to fall. Doesn’t matter if they hold a PhD or dropped out of high school, if they have a million dollars in savings or none, if they are a divinity student or a drug smuggler.