an attempt to organize resistance. The most famous member of this group was Hannah Szenes. She was parachuted into Yugoslavia to assist in the rescue of Hungarian Jews about to be deported to the German death camp at Auschwitz. Szenes was arrested at the Hungarian border, then imprisoned and tortured, but refused to reveal details of her mission. She was eventually tried and executed by firing squad. She is regarded as a national heroine in Israel. The British government formed the Jewish Brigade, an all-Jewish unit of the British Army for Jews from Palestine, in July 1944. It consisted of about 5,500 Jewish volunteers from Palestine led by British-Jewish officers, and was organized into three infantry regiments, an artillery regiment, and supporting units. They were attached to the British Eighth Army in Italy from November 1944, taking part to the Spring 1945 offensive in Italy. After the end of the war in Europe the Brigade was moved to Belgium and the Netherlands in July 1945. As well as participating in combat operations against German forces, the brigade assisted and protected Holocaust survivors. The Special Interrogation Group was a British Army commando unit comprising German-speaking Jewish volunteers from Palestine. It carried out commando and sabotage raids behind Axis lines during the Western Desert Campaign, and gathered military intelligence by stopping and questioning German transports while dressed as German military police. They also assisted other British forces. Following the disastrous failure of Operation Agreement, a series of ground and amphibious operations carried out by British, Rhodesian and New Zealand forces on German and Italian-held Tobruk in September 1942, the survivors were transferred to the Royal Pioneer Corps. Notable Jewish resistance fighters Mordechaj Anielewicz, leader of the Jewish Combat Organization during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, killed in action in 1943 Paweł Frenkiel, a Polish Jewish youth leader in Warsaw and a senior commander of the Jewish Military Union, killed in action defending the JMU headquarters Yitzhak Arad, a former Soviet partisan Herbert Baum, a Jewish member of the German resistance against National Socialism, tortured to death by the Gestapo Bielski partisans, an organization of Jewish partisans who rescued Jews from extermination in western Belarus Frank Blaichman, a Holocaust survivor who was a Polish-Jewish leader of Jewish resistance Thomas Blatt, a survivor from the uprising and escape from the Sobibór extermination camp in October 1943 Masha Bruskina, a 17-year-old Jewish member of the Minsk