re: #267 Dark_Falcon

I don’t know why what the bombers knew is relevant. We’re talking of state-level failure.

The crematoria are visible without magnification, and the aerial photos are only relevant to the issue of how to locate the bombing targets. Of course no one can see merely from the photos that Birkenau was an extermination camp - that was only known from intelligence and from witnesses. Witnesses’ testimony was indispensable - the escapees from Auschwitz could have pointed to the part of the camp where the gas chambers and the pyre pits were, they could have asked people like Vrba, Wetzler, Mordowicz, Rosin.

The Soviet failure is really analogous to the Allied one. To repeat, the Allies took time and resources to bomb the buna plant at Monowitz, but didn’t even try anything at Birkenau.