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Wednesday 28 January 2015

After reading this headline in today's British press: Tucked away in the corner of a tiny Oxfordshire churchyard, the modest final resting place one of Britain's greatest men: How Churchill's grave looks today - as unseen pictures emerge of his private burial. Winston Churchill was buried in the graveyard of St Martin's, Bladon after his state funeral on January 30, 1965. I decided to do it little research on Churchill's relation ship with Jews and this is what I came up with.......



Churchill and The Jews:

What did Churchill know about Auschwitz? When did he know it? And why didn't he do something about it? They are not specifically posed by the author, but about a third of the way into the book they begin to swell in the mind of the reader, blotting out other thoughts.
As Churchill's official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert has had unique access to his subject. But he has written many books over the years, more than 75, and most have been on Churchill - so you might wonder what he has left to say. Actually, there is new material here. Churchill, it seems, was a passionate Zionist - one of the most ardent behind-the-scenes champions of the Balfour declaration - and Gilbert unearths previously unpublished evidence to this effect, secret testimony that Churchill gave to a commission on the future of Palestine in 1937.

The Balfour declaration is covered in great depth, taking up the first third of the book. Then come the three questions, if not the definitive answers. The systematic mass murder of Jews in the Soviet Union was known to Churchill in 1941, thanks to the code-breakers at Bletchley Park. That summer he stated that 'whole districts are being exterminated. We are in the presence of a crime without a name.'
The crime continued and, in the summer of 1942, Churchill did give it a name: 'a bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination'. He knew by then that a train containing 4,000 Jewish children, unaccompanied and without identification papers, left Lyon for 'somewhere in Poland'.
But according to Gilbert it wasn't until 4 July 1944 that Churchill knew for certain that the 'somewhere in Poland' was Auschwitz. He also learned that the Jews of Hungary were arriving daily by train and being gassed at a rate of 12,000 a day.
Churchill immediately put into place plans to bomb the railway from Hungary. But why that strategy did not extend to bombing the rail tracks at Auschwitz remains unclear - they may have been out of range for British bombers, but not American.

One thing is certain Churchill was a committed Zionist,

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