Today in World War II History—June 2, 1942: 80 Years Ago—June 2, 1942: BBC reports news from the Polish underground of Nazi mass extermination of Jews. Henry J. Kaiser proposes building auxiliary carriers; the Navy awards him a contract for the Casablanca class by the end of the month.
Sarah Sundin's blog notes that news broke in the West, and indeed the world, of one of the biggest crimes ever committed in human history, the German efforts to exterminate the Jews.
This has been controversial, in terms of "when did they know" and "what could have been done", ever since. But in retrospect, the news actually broke relatively quickly after the effort truly became industrial. Up until that time, the Germans had been killing Jews on a large scale, to be sure, but it had been mostly done by deployed SS field units with that specific task, which accomplished it largely via small arms fire. A lot of people were killed in that fashion, and also by Eastern European unofficially allied bands, but it had taken place in conditions which precluded the news from being much more than rumors. SS, and Eastern European, murders of this fashion had taken place either in chaotic conditions as the Germans marched in, or in actual field conditions just behind the lines. As a result, they took place in areas where reporting was limited to what the Germans chose to report. As the only significant opposition force in these regions was the Red Army, which had not recaptured any of these areas by this point in the war, news getting out simply didn't.
Industrial scale murder, however, was impossible to keep a secret. The Poles reported it first, in an underground opposition newspaper. The BBC picked it up the next day.
On the same day the Germans deployed an 800mm (31") railroad gun at Sevastopol. For comparison, battleships typically had 16" guns.
The insanely large gun was a devastating weapon, but the crew required to man it was also insanely large.
