June 2: The Tracks

The BBC reported on this date in 1942 that some 700,000 Jews had been killed by the Nazi regime. This followed by one day the first published media report, in the underground Warsaw socialist newspaper, Liberty Brigade, about the gassing of thousands of Jews at the Chelmno concentration camp. Two years later, however, on June 2, 1944, as the Allies began Operation Frantic — a four-month bombing campaign in the Balkans to distract the Nazis from the upcoming D-Day invasion — there was still no targeting of the railway lines to Auschwitz, although these lay along the bombing routes and were being used to transport hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews, the final victims of the Final Solution, to their deaths.

“There is no question we should have attempted . . . to go after Auschwitz. There was a pretty good chance we could have blasted those rail lines off the face of the earth, which would have interrupted the flow of people to those death chambers . . . Franklin Roosevelt was a great man, and he was my political hero. But . . . God forgive us for that tragic miscalculation.” —Sen. George McGovern (who was a pilot in the 455th Bomb Group, which bombed I.G. Farben factories within a few miles of Auschwitz)