British aerial photographs during the peak of the Holocaust reveal the truth of the long-time Jewish claim that the Allies could have bombed the railroad tracks leading to the Nazi death camps - and even the gas chambers themselves.

Photographs taken by British pilots in 1944, at the height of the Holocaust, reveal the truth of the long-time Jewish claim that the Allies could have bombed the railroad tracks leading to the Nazi death camps - and even the gas chambers themselves.

The archives of some five million photos are being made available today on a new internet site (www.evidenceincamera.co.uk). Some pictures show a clearly-identifiable plume of smoke rising from a crematorium in Auschwitz, while others show smoke rising from burial pits where bodies that were unable to be taken to the crematoria were burned.

“One thing is certain,” says Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum director Avner Shalev. “These photos show once again, in a most chilling manner, that which was known before: The Allies were able to reach the death camps, fly over them, photograph them - and bomb them.”

British sources say that the tremendous amount of photographs that were taken made it difficult to analyze all of the relevant ones. The Allied intelligence services apparently chose the ones that were of immediate military importance.

Shalev adds that it was in mid-1944 when the destruction of 600,000 Hungarian Jews was at its peak. Yad Vashem archives already have pictures taken by American and South African pilots of the death camps, including some which show the smoke of dead Jews rising skyward. In many cases, an analysis of the time and date of the picture, together with information on the various transports of Jews that arrived at the camps, can produce an accurate picture of the precise origin of the transport eternalized in the photo.

Because of the tremendous interest generated by the site, it has been largely inaccessible since its launching this morning.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2004 and is filed under news.