Allies could have saved 4 million Jews, says Bibi

[Von Schadewald]

From this week's Manchester Jewish Telegraph, Netanyahu repeats an oft made claim:


Allies could have saved 4 million Jews, says Bibi

http://www.jewishtelegraph.com/world_3.html

THE wartime Allies could have saved the lives of four million Jews, Benjamin Netanyahu declared as Israel opened its Holocaust Remembrance Day.


The prime minister said that newly-released documents from the United Nations showed that the Allies were aware of the Nazis' systematic extermination of the Jews at least two years earlier than previously known.

"If they had acted on that information at the time, it could have saved four million of the Jewish Holocaust victims," he added at a ceremony at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

"All that was needed was repeated bombing of the death camps.

"When terrible crimes were being committed against the Jews, when our brothers and sisters were being sent to the furnaces, the powers knew and did not act."

The annual memorial day is one of the most solemn on Israel's calendar. Places of entertainment and restaurants shut their doors and TV stations either ceased broadcasting or dedicated programming almost exclusively to Holocaust documentaries, interviews with survivors and melancholy music.

On Monday morning, Israel came to a standstill as sirens wailed for two minutes. Pedestrians stopped in their tracks, and cars and buses halted on the streets while drivers and passengers stepped out to stand with their heads bowed.

Other ceremonies on the solemn day included the public reading of names of Holocaust victims at Israel's Knesset and elsewhere around the country.

Netanyahu went on to say that Israel's arch-enemy Iran, as well as the Islamic State group, are "publicly striving to destroy us".

"The lesson of the Holocaust is that we must be able to defend ourselves by ourselves against all threats and any enemy."

He added that this lesson guides him "every morning and every evening".

Netanyahu said Israel has transformed itself into a strong nation with one of the "strongest defensive forces in the world" and warned "those that seek to destroy us will put themselves in danger of destruction".

President Reuven Rivlin took a different approach in his remarks. He said although the Holocaust is "permanently branded in our flesh", it "is not the lens through which we should examine our past and our future".

He went on: "The Shoah has always been - and will always be - a programme of annihilation that was planned and implemented against the Jewish people.

"The gas chambers were not built 'as a crime against humanity' - they were built for the purpose of annihilating the Jewish people.

"It was a terrorising process that gathered Jews from around the world, from different continents, Jews who did not know each other's language, both the believers and non-believers, assimilated and Orthodox Jews, with one goal - to exterminate them and their seed from the face of the earth."

The Israeli flag was lowered to half-mast at the beginning of the ceremony as a military honour guard stood nearby.

Psalms and the Jewish prayer for the dead were recited at the podium. Six survivors lit six symbolic torches to commemorate the six million dead.

Approximately 189,000 Holocaust survivors live in Israel, of whom 45,000 live under the poverty line, according to data released by the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Survivors.

[antfreire]

If the Allies had cooperated in bringing the Jews out of Europe before the war began, none would have perished. It would have been the biggest rescue operation in history and perhaps even prevented "" The unnecessary war "" as It was called by Churchill.

[Michael Kenny]

If the Allies had cooperated in bringing the Jews out of Europe before the war began, none would have perished. It would have been the biggest rescue operation in history and perhaps even prevented "" The unnecessary war "" as It was called by Churchill.

And then they could rescue the millions of Poles who were at risk.......
Then they could have rescued all the Slave who were at risk......

Or they could simply get rid of the lunatics who wanted to get rid of the Poles. Jews and Slavs...........

[wm]

Fake news, and another slander against the British, and against the American people.
British and American diplomats should formally protest every time such statements are made publicly.

[Gorque]

The Evian Conference highlighted the undesirability of accepting a nearly penniless minority into the participants nations knowing that these destitute refugees would not only be a drag upon the various nations' social service structures, but would also be competing for scarce jobs while these nations were still suffering from the effects of the Great Depression. And Germany wasn't about to let the Jews emigrate with all their wealth and Germany having a shortage of precious metals, foreign currency as well as the balance of payments problem.

Besides, who in their wildest dreams could foresee what the future held in store for them. In 1938-39, I'm quite certain no one thought it industrialized mass-murder possible.

[wm]

It should be added at that time the US, by today's standards, was quite a poor country.
Per capita, it was as rich as today's Uzbekistan or Peru. The world really has changed a lot since the WW2.

[OpanaPointer]

It should be added at that time the US, by today's standards, was quite a poor country.
Per capita, it was as rich as today's Uzbekistan or Peru. The world really has changed a lot since the WW2.

The US had the world's most robust economy in 1941. Our military was pathetic, the Army ranked behind Bulgaria's.

We didn't bomb the camps because that would have delayed the final victory, diverting attacks from more directly military targets. Or, as FDR say, "...it's called winning the war."

[wm]

Well, to be fair nobody demanded camps were bombed - only the gas chambers of Auschwitz. And this only required a dozen or so planes. It wouldn't save anyone, but Bibi wouldn't be able to spread his lies today so easily.

And actually the Allies did (pointlessly) divert substantial resources, most likely delaying the final victory during the operation Crossbow.

[Rob Stuart]

If the Allies had cooperated in bringing the Jews out of Europe before the war began, none would have perished. It would have been the biggest rescue operation in history and perhaps even prevented "" The unnecessary war "" as It was called by Churchill.

From hindsight we know which countries Hitler overran, but before the war there was no reason to expect that Hitler would invade Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Greece or even the USSR (with which it did not have a common border). Invasions of Poland, Belgium and France might have been thought possible, but certainly no one could have foreseen that France would be defeated and occupied. A lot of German Jews were in fact welcomed before the war in many of the countries I've named here, but to the great surprise of most people their countries of refuge were overrun, and they and the native Jews became accessible to the Nazis.

Incidentally, should Jews from Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, the UK and Ireland have been rescued too, so that all Jews from any country which might have come under the Germans' sway would be safe? The answer is obviously "No". Certainly no one, including the Jews in question themselves, would have thought it necessary to evacuate Jews from the UK, since its defeat by the Germans was not foreseen, but the occupation of most of the countries Hitler occupied would have been seen as almost as unlikely as the occupation of the UK.

If we are going to propose, on the basis of hindsight, things which might have prevented the Holocaust, then would it not be a better idea to say that at Munich the British, French and Americans should have told Hitler that he could NOT have the Sudetenland?

[James A Pratt III]

There was an article in the magazine Journal of Military History many years ago on bombing the gas chambers of Auschwitz. It could not be done. High level bombing would have destroyed the buildings around the chambers and killed lots of inmates but the chances of getting a hit or hits are remote. Low level was just not possible the target was just too far away also chances of hitting it were also not great. Lets not forget what happened on the low level raid on Polesti.

[Sheldrake]

Nonsense. There was very little the Allies could have done in 1942 to save the Jews, had they known about the final solution from the outset.

#1 Far more people suffered in Ww2 than the Jews. The only nation with land power - the USSR was fighting for its existence and lost more of its own citizens than were lost in the holocaust.

#2 What concessions could the western allies have offered in exchange for accepting 4 million Jewish refugees? NAZI Germany had enslaved a continent n and its leadership had an appetite for extermination. There is no evidence that the Germans would have let the Jews go.

This looks like an attempt to blame the West for a Nazi crime

[wm]

There was an article in the magazine Journal of Military History many years ago on bombing the gas chambers of Auschwitz. It could not be done. High level bombing would have destroyed the buildings around the chambers and killed lots of inmates but the chances of getting a hit or hits are remote. Low level was just not possible the target was just too far away also chances of hitting it were also not great. Lets not forget what happened on the low level raid on Polesti.

Sorry but that is not quite correct.

Auschwitz wasn't Ploiești (the most heavily defended place in Nazi controlled territory), Auschwitz (the camp) was basically undefended.

The distance from Foggia Airfield Complex (or Poltava Air Base) was about 1000 km. DH.98 Mosquito had a range of 2,400 km with full weapons load. And they were used in such low level missions.

Polish heavy bombers routinely over-flew the Auschwitz region in their missions to Warsaw, where they executed low level re-supply drops facing strong anti-aircraft defenses.

Even more Auschwitz was in range of the Soviet Air Force, the distance to the front-line was about 200 km.

[OpanaPointer]

The Soviet weren't interested in saving any European Jews.

[wm]

Certainly, they weren't.
But properly compensated for their efforts, they could have done it.

[OpanaPointer]

Certainly, they weren't.
But properly compensated for their efforts, they could have done it.

Properly compensated? Austria perhaps?

I know that the US requested facilities in Soviet territory to allow them to shuttle bomb targets and that they were refused.