Мартин Гилберт (1936-2017) Auschwitz and the Allies (1981)
How the Allies Responded to the News of Hitler’s Final Solution
Part Three: Auschwitz Revealed
Chapter 25. The truth about Auschwitz reaches the west, June 1944
...On June 21, five days before Jacob Rosenheim’s request had been considered by the Operations Division in Washington, the second Frantic mission took place, with the United States bombers flying from their English base at Lincoln across Germany, bombing the synthetic oil plant at Ruhland, south of Berlin, and flying on to Poltava. But on arrival at Poltava the Frantic project itself came to grief, when German planes attacked Poltava airport. Not only did the Germans succeed in destroying forty-three B.17s and damaging twenty-six; they also destroyed fifteen of the Mustang fighter escort, and ignited 450,000 gallons of aircraft fuel which had been brought into Russia so laboriously throughout the spring.
One American and twenty-five Russians were killed, and the Frantic shuttle was forced to delay the return operation until June 26, and to abandon any flights for the whole of July, until their Poltava fuel store had been replenished by fuel brought by truck along the long road route through Persia and the Caucasus.
note
Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate (editors), The Army Air Forces in World War II, volume 3, Chicago 1951. The sound track of a United States film of Operation Frantic, made during the autumn of 1944, states that among the supplies taken to Poltava were fuel oil, 3,000 miles, via Persia; radio equipment and operators, via Egypt and Palestine; and food and other supplies essential for the mission, 2,000 miles from Liverpool to Murmansk, then a further 2,000 miles by rail from Murmansk to Poltava. (I am grateful to Carl Foreman for the text of this sound track).
Chapter 26
The Gestapo offer: ‘Keep the pot boiling’
...On June 21 the Foreign Office received Shertok’s appeal to Weizmann about Brand’s immediate return to Hungary. The British Government’s reply, Ian Henderson noted, could only be ‘that we will not let him go until we have seen Mr Shertok….’ Shertok, he added, ‘must be interviewed in London, and it is in London and Washington that the chief decisions must be taken.’ Henderson also noted that: ‘The Soviet Govt have rejected any idea of negotiation.’
This was indeed so. A telegram from the British Ambassador in Moscow, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, sent and received on June 20, had repeated a message from Andrei Vyshinsky stating categorically that the Soviet Government ‘does not consider it expedient or permissable to carry on any negotiations whatsoever with the Government of Hitlerite Germany on questions touched on in your letter’. Commenting on this message two days later, Randall noted: ‘This strengthens us for the forthcoming talks with Mr Shertok, who will almost certainly press for contact with the Germans’.
note
‘Eichmann’s cleverest trick in these difficult negotiations’, Hannah Arendt has written, ‘was to see to it that he and his men acted as though they were corrupt’. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Penguin books, London 1977, page 196.