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_Totorotrip_ t1_iw7sbwz wrote

Reply to comment by CNegan in Simple/Short/Silly History Questions Saturday! by AutoModerator

I never heard about it. Supposedly it happened during the Chinese civil war / invasion of Japan? During the WW2? Or after?

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CNegan t1_iw884y3 wrote

I believe it was between 1939-1942. This claim was also paired with they found Chinese and Japanese officers who were working together to bloodlessly take and retake cities to look good for their commanding officers. The book is the William Donovan Biography by Richard Dunlop.

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It also has the claim in it that Szmul Zygielbojm specifically killed himself because FDR refused to bomb Auschwitz after Szmul gave proof to Arthur Goldberg, who gave it to William Donovan, who showed it to FDR, FDR refused to redirect planes, this gets back to Szmul, and he kills himself in protest. No mention of any of this or even a connection between the people involved on Wikipedia.

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elmonoenano t1_iw8vdx0 wrote

The FDR thing is fairly well known. The recent Ken Burns doc on US policy and the Holocaust is worth watching on this. But during the war FDR faced a choice of putting resources to ending the war or hoping that bombing would have some impact on the holocaust. But there wasn't really any evidence that bombing camps would make a difference. There were thousands of camps and they could just moved populations around and repurpose other camps, or they could go back to the strategies of earlier in the war and just machine gun them down. FDR realized the only realistic option was to defeat the Nazis.

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