The Journey of No Return

The above photograph is a rail track I pass over nearly every day. Yesterday, when I passed it, I had to think of all those who went on train journeys and never returned.

The trains that travel over this rail track are comfortable, They have soft seats you can sit on, and some even have restaurant facilities on board.

On 20 January 1942, a conference was held in Berlin and became known as The Wannsee Conference. It was there that they decided what to do with the remaining Jews in Europe, not only occupied Europe but also The United Kingdom and Ireland. The Nazis wanted to murder all 11 million Jews in Europe. They called it, “The Final Solution.“

It was on that day when they decided that all Jews, Roma, undesirables, and non-Aryans, were to be transported by train to the concentration and extermination camps.

Trains were used before that, but more to concentrate the Jewish populations in the ghettos or to transport them to forced labour and concentration camps for economic exploitation.

Not like the luxury trains that pass the rail track above. The trains the Nazis used didn’t have the same facilities. The Nazis used both freight and passenger cars for the deportations. There was neither food nor water available on those trains. The toilet was one bucket for the hundreds of people per wagon. The people were deported in sealed freight cars with extreme heat in summer, freezing temperatures in winter, and the stench of urine and excrement. Some were transported in passenger cars, but the majority were deported on cars which were originally built to transport cattle. The difference was the cattle would have been a lot more comfortable because there were fewer of them, and they would be fed and given water. Without food or water, many of the deportees died before the trains reached the camps. Armed guards shot anyone trying to escape. They even had to pay for the train tickets. Everyone was pushed into the trains regardless the age, sex, or health condition. Young babies, pregnant women, people of old age, and sick people all in one car.

There is no denying how the railway transports of the Deutsche Reichsbahn operated. However, all other Railway companies across occupied Europe complied and were therefore complacent.

In France, it was the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français railway or short SNCF. It became an instrument of death during the Holocaust. Under German occupation, it provided the trains that transported 73 convoys of Jews eastwards. French railway workers operated the trains until they reached the border with Germany, where they were replaced by German staff

In the Netherlands, Westerbork became the main transit camp in 1941 and the first deportees left on 15 July 1942. The final train left on 13 September 1944, with 279 Jews on board. Among those deported from the camp were 245 Sinti and Roma. Approximately 100 trains left Westerbork.

The prisoners at Westerbork lived from transport to transport and between hope and fear. The evening before a departure was unbearable because the names of those who would be transported were announced then. The next day there was no escape. Sometimes as many as 70 people with all their bags were crammed into each filthy boxcar of the lengthy train.

A representative of the National Westerbork Memorial, Dirk Mulder, said in a TV interview that the NS(Dutch Railways) had “complied with the German order to make trains available. The Germans paid for it and the NS had to come up with a timetable. And the company went and did it without a word of objection.”

There are some miraculous stories of survival though.

Mirjam Lapid-Andriesse was 10 years old when she was taken from her home in the Dutch city of Utrecht and placed in an Amsterdam “ghetto” with her family in April 1943. In an interview with the BBC, she recalled her memories.

“I was a little girl during the war, so my memories are childhood memories, not political, I was the youngest of four children, two boys and two girls. I remember we were taken from the ghetto by train to the Westerbork transit camp in June 1943.”

Shortly before the war ended, the Nazis began destroying evidence of concentration camps, including sites and documentation, and transporting prisoners to other locations within Germany. It was at this time, as Mirjam was travelling through Germany in 1945 on one of three trains that had departed from the camp at Bergen-Belsen, that she recalls the moment she was freed.

“Our train was known as The Lost Train,” she said after the vehicle intended to travel to Theresienstadt, in what is now the Czech Republic, was forced to reroute due to bombing, before stopping in the small German village of Tröbitz. Many of the people on board died in transit due to malnutrition and illness. I celebrated my 12th birthday on the train, on 17 April 1945. Since then I celebrate my second birthday on 23 April—the day we were liberated by the Russian army in Tröbitz, where we were held for two months. We were then returned to the Netherlands.”

Mirjam was one of the few lucky ones. Most went on a journey of no return.

#NEVER FORGET#

sources

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49233817

Westerbork-Auschwitz Train Signboard

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30351196

Click to access Filling-the-Silence-JM1-State-of-Research.pdf

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/german-railways-and-the-holocaust

https://kampwesterbork.nl/en/history/second-world-war/durchgangslager/66-history/durchgangslager/266-transports

Paying to be transported to death.

 

Killing the Jews wasn’t enough for the Nazi regime. They also needed to be humiliated. and their deaths had to be profitable. Laws were introduced to remove them from any social interaction and then they were forcibly removed from their homes, with only one suitcase of possessions, all other valuables were sold or just taken by Nazi officials.

Then when they were put on transport to the concentration camps or death camps(in my opinion they were all death camps, some camps just killed more on an industrial scale) They even had to pay for the train tickets.

The majority of Jews were made to pay for their own deportations, especially wherever passenger carriages were used. The payments were done in a way  of direct money deposit to the SS in relation to  the “resettlement to work in the East” myth. Charged in the ghettos for accommodation, adult Jews paid full price one-way tickets, the Nazis knew there would not be any return tickets.  Children under 12 years of age paid half price, and those under four did not have to pay. The Jews who no money left were typically  the first to be deported.

The SS would forward the monies to the German transport authority , to be paid to the Reichsbahn to finance and accommodate further transports.

In 2009 an expert report established on behalf of the German “Train of Commemoration” project, estimates that the Reichsbahn pocketed a €445,000,000 or $462,000,000. between 1938 and 1945.

The Reichsbahn weren’t the only ones to profit. The Dutch and French railways and other European rail companies also made money from the transports.

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Sources

Click to access Gutachten.pdf

https://books.google.ie/books?id=IfoBx6skMCkC&redir_esc=y

 

A single rail track.

I took the picture above this morning at about 11:00 am . It is a rail track just around the corner of my home. When I looked at that rail track this morning several thoughts came to mind.

Firstly I thought how the railways made such a big change in the lives of ordinary citizens. It connected cities and also countries. People were no longer bound by the location they were born in. To this day it still fuels the imagination of children. Shows like Thomas the Tank engine are immensely popular as are the books. Even my own children when they were growing up loved to read those books and watch the show. My oldest son first learned to read from a book entitled “My first book of trains”

My second thought when I looked at the tracks  and at the picture after I took it,was that it looked like a picture of a rail track to any of the concentration camps, be it Auschwitz,Treblinka, Bergen Belsen. It occurred to me that the Holocaust really could have happened any period in history. The picture could have easily been taken in 1942.

I also realized that for the survivors and their children and grandchildren the Holocaust is still a daily reality. For those who survived they still relive that train journey every day.

The one thing that was built to connect people was used to facilitate the mass murder of millions. 1.5 million of which were  children. Children who would have been in awe of the technology,

Train journeys were supposed to be pleasant but there was nothing pleasant about their journeys.Often a hundred or more people would be cramped in a cattle car with no windows , no sanitary facilities, nowhere to sit and many would not even survive the journey.

Below is a picture of some children who survived. Who they are I don’t know. All I know is that they were liberated from the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in April 1945.

They were some of the lucky ones, but I say lucky reluctantly because even though they survived their nightmare still went on in their minds for years to come,sometimes coupled with the insult by those who claimed the Holocaust never happened. The Holocaust would forever be a part of their lives.

1.5 Million were killed,although I do believe that number is higher.

Here are just some of their names

Harry Knöpfelmacher  Murdered age 9

Hedwig Zander Murdered age 12

Frederika Borstrock Murdered age 4

Ester Kwint Murdered age 12 or 13

Peter Czeisler Murdered age 2

The scary thing is that it appears we haven’t learned from our mistakes and the one thing I fear most is that a Holocaust is very likely to happen again  and it could happen to any group of people.

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Reichsbahn-‘Weapon’ of mass destruction.

If it hadn’t been for the Reichsbahn-the Nazi contolled railways ,the Holocaust would not have been possible to the extend it was.The irony, for lack of a better word, the hate for the Jews by  Hitler ,Himmler and the other Nazi leaders quite possibly caused them to lose the war. So many trains had been allocated to transport Jews and others to the death camps and concentration camps, that there was a lack of trains for transport of troops,supplies and equipment especially to the Eastern front.

Julius Heinrich Dorpmueller was  general manager of Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft and the Reich Minister for Transport from 1937 to 1945.After the Nazi seizure of power Dorpmüller replaced nearly all “non-Aryan” workers with National Socialists. Dorpmüller became Reich Transport Minister on 2 February 1937

Dorpmüller had doubts about the capacity of the Reichsbahn and had confessed to Albert Speer  at one stage that the  Reichsbahn had not enough  cars and locomotives available for the German area that it was no longer possible  to meet the most urgent transportation needs.

Speer then convinced Hitler to appoint Albert Ganzenmüller state secretary under Dorpmüller. Ganzenmüller immediately goy  involved in the organisation of trains for deportation. He collaborated in the transportation scheme for elderly German Jews to Theresienstadt and made sure  the  transport to the extermination camps as set up under Operation Reinhardt  ran as smoothly as possible. However there were some complaints about the management of the transports by Ganzemüller. On July 16 Himmler’s personal adjutant Karl Wolff, , complained to the newly appointed under-secretary about irregularities on  transport and track repairs on the line to the extermination camp at Sobibor. Ganzenmüller replied in writing on 28 July 1942 as follows:

“A train carrying 5,000 Jews has run daily since 22 July from Warsaw to Treblinka via Malkinia; furthermore, another train has run twice a week with 5,000 Jews from Przemysl to Belzec. The senior management of the eastern division of the railways, ‘Gedob’ (Generaldirektion der Ostbahnen), is in constant touch with the security service  in Krakau. The latter is in agreement that transport from Warsaw to Sobibor via Lublin should continue while the reconstruction work on this stretch renders such movements impossible ([until] approximately October 1942).”

Karl Wolff thanked him on 13 August 1942 in a personal letter:

“I note with particular pleasure from your communication that a train with 5,000 members of the chosen race has been running daily for 14 days and that we are accordingly in a position to continue with this population movement at an accelerated pace.”

Not only was the Reichsbahn used as a sort of weapon of mass destruction , it was also used as a money making tool.Most of the Jews were forced to pay for their own deportations, particularly wherever passenger carriages were used.According to an expert report established on behalf of the German “Train of Commemoration” project, the receipts taken in by the state-owned Deutsche Reichsbahn for mass deportations in the period between 1938 and 1945 reached a sum of  an equivalent of close to 450 Million Euro or 505 Million USD.

It must be said that it wasn’t only the German railways who were involved, most of the other European railways also transported Jews and other so called’undesirables’ to the camps. Although they were controlled by the Reichsbahn, they still had some level of autonomy.

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Archive.org

Bundesarchiv

 

Like lambs to the slaughter they were led.

Like lambs to the slaughter they were led.But with one significant difference, lambs were treated more humanely. They were not tortured before death.

I recently saw the movie “The Resistance Banker” it has one subtle but yet powerful scene, no words were spoken. A regular passenger train is stopped to facilitate a transport train to pass by. The passenger in the regular train see people crammed in cattle cars on the transport train and they hear babies crying. The scene only lasts for a minute, but that image will last for a lifetime.

I knew the circumstances in the cattle cars were dire but that bit of movie made it so clear to me, the crying babies it made my heart stop for a second.

The horrors even dawned more clearly on me then. I have traveled with young children on a luxurious  21st century train and it was extremely difficult to keep my kids entertained and quiet, this was in a train where they were able to move around and get refreshments if they wanted to.

It is impossible for me to fathom the anxiety,fear,stress and psychological terror parents on those transport trains must have felt, leave alone the physical discomfort and pain, caused by so many crammed into a small wagon.

Even before they reached their final destination they were stripped from their dignity. Yet they had to try to stay positive for the youngsters to ensure hope would not fade away.

So many showed in these inhumane circumstances a humanity which none of us nowadays are able to display. They had everything to lose and indeed lost everything often even their lives. They knew what their end would bring, like the lambs brought to the slaughter.

We have everything to gain by never forgetting the horrors they endured.

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I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you. To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.

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Sources

NIOD

Netflix

 

The last single Journey: Westerbork-Auschwitz

One of the cruel jokes the Nazis played on their victims was giving them hope. Like a railway sign indicating a return journey that was never to be. Only empty trains returned ready to pick up more victims like lambs led to the slaughter.

On September 3,1944 the last transport by train from Westerbork Transit Camp to Auschwitz took place.

Between July 15 ,1942 and September 13,1944 a total of 99 trains had left Westerbork for either Auschwitz,Sobibor,Theresienstadt and Bergen Belsen.

On the September 3rd transport 1019 victims were transported to Auschwitz. A journey which would take 3 days. Even before they reached Auschwitz they endured hell, because they were cramped in cattle cars, quite literally like cattle. There were no toilets, barely any food or water, nowhere to sleep. Some would die even before they reached their final destination.

What makes this transport special is because of one family, A Father,mother and 2 daugthers, only the father would eventually survive. This family was the Frank Family.

Anne and Margot Frank had one more journey to make on 28 October they were selected to be transported to Bergen-Belsen, where both girls died. Otto and Edith Frank remained in Auschwitz but Edith eventually died of starvation in January 1945.

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Deutsche Reichsbahn-Transport to Death.

The Holocaust would not have been possible without the help of the railways, at least not to the extend as it happened.

The Deutsche Reichsbahn was headed by Julius Dorpmüller, who was also Reich Minister for Transport, but it was  his deputy , Albert Ganzenmüller, who had the  responsibility for the organisation of trains for deportation.

Ganzenmüller had replaced Wilhelm Kleinmann, who’resigned’ on May 26,1942. Kleinmann had stated that he had exceeded the age limit for the position, the reality was that he was pushed out because the Nazi regime weren’t impressed by the performance of the Reichsbahn in relation to the deportation and Operation Barbarossa, Hitler even threatened to send Kleinmann to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, as he did with other railway executives.

However Ganzenmüller was a more enthusiastic Nazi than Kleinmann. He collaborated in the transportation scheme for elderly German Jews to Theresienstadt and made sure  the running of transport to the extermination camps set up under Operation Reinhardt would go smoothly.

On 16 July 1942, Karl Wolff, the Personal assistant to Heinrich Himmler, complained to the newly appointed deputy chief of the Deutsche Reichsbahn about irregular transport and track repairs on the line to the extermination camp at Sobibor.

On July 28,1942, Ganzenmüller sent the following reply in writing to Karl Wolff:

“A train carrying 5,000 Jews has run daily since 22 July from Warsaw to Treblinka via Malkinia; furthermore, another train has run twice a week with 5,000 Jews from Przemysl to Belzec. The senior management of the eastern division of the railways, ‘Gedob’ (Generaldirektion der Ostbahnen), is in constant touch with the security service  in Krakow.

The latter is in agreement that transport from Warsaw to Sobibor via Lublin should continue while the reconstruction work on this stretch renders such movements impossible until approximately October 1942.”

Karl Wolff, personally thanked him in writing on 13 August 1942 :

“I note with particular pleasure from your communication that a train with 5,000 members of the chosen race has been running daily for 14 days and that we are accordingly in a position to continue with this population movement at an accelerated pace.”

Ganzenmüller was  directly approached by  Himmler in early 1943 in order to ensure the pending removal of Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Albert Ganzenmüller escaped to Argentina in 1945 but was given amnesty in 1952, he returned to Germany in 1955. He did serve a few weeks in remand in 1957, after his correspondence with Wolff and Himmler had been discovered but he wasn’t charged. In 1974 new charges were presented at a regional court but the case was halted and eventually terminated.

Aside from the obvious ,another sickening aspect of the transports was the fact that the victims had to pay for the tickets.Adults paid 4 pfennigs per kilometre, children 2 pfennigs, while those under the age of 4 traveled free. Trainloads of 400 or more, which amounted to massive overcrowding, received a 50% discount.

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I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you. To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.

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The tin of Survival-Surviving the Death Train.

There are circumstances when your life could very well depend on something as simple as a biscuit tin. This one went with Abel Herzberg and his wife Thea on a dreadful journey. In the Westerbork Transit Camp as well as the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, it was matter of life or death to be able to safely store the little bit of food that was available from time to time.

In April 1945, with the approach of the Allies, the Nazis started to empty Bergen-Belsen of thousands of Jews. Abel and Thea Herzberg were aboard the last train to leave the camp. Weakened by exhaustion and illness they left the few possessions they had behind. The ‘death train’ criss-crossed the eastern part of Germany for weeks on end. Many Jews on board died of starvation and typhus. Now and again the train stopped. Abel, Thea and others stole food from the surrounding farmland and stored it in this tin.

The train was eventually liberated by the Russians near the German village of Tröbitz. A few months later Abel Herzberg and his wife returned to Amsterdam. The diary that Herzberg had kept the whole time – later published as Tweestromenland (Between Two Streams) – and this empty tin were the only things that returned with them. They had nothing else.

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I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you. To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.

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The Hammond circus train wreck.

In a quiet cemetery outside Chicago lies a mass grave of clowns, strongmen, and acrobats who died in one of the worst circus tragedies in history.

In the early morning hours of June 22, 1918, the members of the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus were fast asleep in the wooden cars at the back of their train.

The Hammond Circus Train Wreck occurred on June 22, 1918 during World War 1 and was one of the worst train wrecks in US history. Eighty-six people were reported to have died and another 127 were injured when a locomotive engineer fell asleep and ran his train into the rear of another near Hammond, Indiana.

In the early morning hours of June 22, 1918, Alonzo Sargent was operating a Michigan Central Railroad troop train pulling 20 empty Pullman cars. He was aware that his train was closely following a slower circus train. Sargent, an experienced man at the throttle, had slept little if at all in the preceding twenty-four hours. The effects of a lack of sleep, several heavy meals, some kidney pills, and the gentle rolling of his locomotive are thought to have caused him to fall asleep at the controls.

At approximately 4:00 am, he missed at least two automatic signals and warnings posted by a brakeman of the 26-car circus train, which had made an emergency stop to check a hot box on one of the flatcars. The second train plowed into the caboose and four rear wooden sleeping cars of the circus train at a rail crossing known as Ivanhoe Interlocking (5½ miles east of Hammond, Indiana) at an estimated speed of 35 miles per hour.

The circus train held 400 performers and roustabouts of the Hagenbeck-Wallace circus. Most of the 86 who were killed in the train wreck perished in the first 35 seconds after the collision. Then, the wreckage caught on fire. Among the dead were Arthur Dierckx and Max Nietzborn of the Great Dierckx Brothers, a strongman act, and Jennie Ward Todd of The Flying Wards. There were also 127 injuries.

Five days later, most of those killed, burned beyond recognition, were buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, at the intersection of Cermak Road and Des Plaines Avenue in Forest Park, Illinois, in a section set aside as Showmen’s Rest, which had been purchased by the Showmen’s League of America only a few months earlier. Few of those buried were formally identified, and so the graves of most of the casualties are marked “Unknown Male” or “Unknown Female.” One grave is marked “Smiley”, one “Baldy”, and another “4 Horse Driver”. The section is surrounded by statues of elephants in a symbolic mourning posture.

Nazi Railways

We have all seen the pictures of the cattle wagons used to transport the Jews and other ‘Undesirables’ to the concentration camps and ghettos. Without a shadow of a doubt the Nazi Railways network played a pivotal role in the ‘Final Solution’ .Ironically(for the lack of a better word) though the same network also potentially contributed to the downfall of the ‘Third Reich’ that and the arrogance of Hitler who had not envisaged or anticipated the number of trains he needed for operation Barbarossa to succeed.Combined with the fact that starting the operation on the 22nd of June was too late to ensure reaching Moscow before winter.

Shortly after the invasion of the Soviet Union the Germans took control of the Minsk Railway Station. All the timetable printers at the station were Jewish, Hitler had them all shot without anyone able to replace them.

The first mass deportation of Jews from Nazi Germany occurred in less than a year before the outbreak of war. It was the forcible eviction of German Jews with Polish citizenship fuelled by the Kristallnacht. Approximately 30,000 Jews were rounded up and sent via rail to refugee camps. In July 1938 both the United States and Britain at the Évian Conference in France refused to accept any more Jewish immigrants. The British Government agreed to take in the shipment of children arranged by Nicholas Winton in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on the conditions that he pay the cost (via Czech travel agency Cedok) and arrange for the foster care. Winton managed to arrange for 669 children to get out on eight trains to London (a small group of 15 were flown out via Sweden).

Forgotten History-Nicholas Winton an unsung Hero

The ninth train was to leave Prague on 3 September 1939, the day Britain entered World War II. The train never left the station, and none of the 250 children on board were seen again. All European Jews trapped under the Nazi regime became the target of Hitler’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.

The European rail network played a crucial role in the implementation of the “Final Solution.” Jews from Germany and German-occupied Europe were deported by rail to the killing centers in occupied Poland.

The Germans attempted to disguise their deadly intentions, referring to these deportations as “resettlement to the east.” The victims were told they were being taken to labor camps, but in reality, from 1942, deportation for most Jews meant transit to extermination camps.

Deportations on this scale required the coordination of numerous German government ministries and state organizations, including the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), the Transport Ministry, and the Foreign Office. The RSHA coordinated and directed the deportations; the Transport Ministry organized train schedules; and the Foreign Office negotiated with German-allied states about handing over their Jews.

The Germans used both freight and passenger cars for the deportations. They did not provide the deportees with food or water, even when the transports had to wait days on railroad spurs for other trains to pass. The people deported in sealed freight cars suffered from intense heat in summer, freezing temperatures in winter, and the stench of urine and excrement. Aside from a bucket, there were no provisions for sanitary requirements. Without food or water, many deportees died before the trains reached their destinations. Armed guards shot anyone trying to escape. Between the fall of 1941 and the fall of 1944, millions of people were transported by rail to the extermination camps and other killing sites in occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet Union.

Most of the Jews were forced to pay for their own deportations, particularly wherever passenger carriages were used. This payment came in the form of direct money deposit to the SS in light of the “resettlement to work in the East” myth. Charged in the ghettos for accommodation the adult Jews paid full price one-way tickets, while children under 10–12 years of age paid half price. Those who were running out of money in the ghetto were loaded onto trains to the East as first, while those with some remaining supplies of gold and cash were shipped as last.

The SS forwarded part of this money to the German Transport Authority to pay the German Railways for transport of the Jews. The Reichsbahn was paid the equivalent of a third class railway ticket for every prisoner transported to their destination: 8,000,000 passengers 4 Pfennig per track kilometer, times 600 km (average voyage length), equaled 240 million Reichsmarks. Children under four went free.

The Reichsbahn pocketed both this money and their own share of the cash paid by the transported Jews after the SS fees. According to an expert report established on behalf of the German “Train of Commemoration” project, the receipts taken in by the state-owned Deutsche Reichsbahn for mass deportations in the period between 1938 and 1945 reached a sum of US $664,525,820.34

Following the Wannsee Conference of 1942, the Nazis began to murder the Jews in large numbers at newly built death camps of Operation Reinhard. Since 1941, the Einsatzgruppen, mobile extermination squads, were already conducting mass shootings of Jews in the Eastern territories which were occupied earlier by the Soviet Union, as well as east of the 1939 Soviet borders . The Jews of Western Europe were either deported to ghettos emptied through mass killings, such as the Rumbula massacre of the inhabitants of the Riga Ghetto, or sent directly to Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibór extermination camps built in spring and summer of 1942 only for gassing. Auschwitz II Birkenau chambers began operating in March. The last death camp, Majdanek, launched them in late 1942.

At Wannsee, the SS estimated that the “Final Solution” could ultimately eradicate up to 11 million European Jews; Nazi planners envisioned the inclusion of Jews living in neutral and non-occupied countries such as Ireland, Sweden, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Deportations on this scale required the coordination of numerous German government ministries and state organisations, including the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), the Transport Ministry, and the Foreign Office. The RSHA coordinated and directed the deportations; the Transport Ministry organized train schedules; and the Foreign Office negotiated with German-allied states and their railways about “processing” their own Jews.

In recent years, the German spokesman for the Train of Commemoration remembrance project, Hans-Rüdiger Minow told The Jerusalem Post that from among the World War II railway staff and officials, there is “no word about those who committed the crimes” even though 200,000 train employees were involved in the rail deportations and “10,000 to 20,000 were responsible for mass murders”. The railwaymen were never prosecuted.

The first trains with German Jews expelled to ghettos in occupied Poland began departing from central Germany on 16 October 1941.Subsequently called Sonderzüge (special trains), the trains had low priority for the movement and would proceed to the mainline only after all other transports went through, inevitably extending shipping time beyond expectations.

The trains consisted of sets of either third class passenger carriages,but mainly freight cars or cattle cars or both; the latter packed with up to 150 deportees, although 50 was the number proposed by the SS regulations. No food or water was supplied. The Güterwagen boxcars were only fitted with a bucket latrine. A small barred window provided irregular ventilation, which oftentimes resulted in multiple deaths from either suffocation or the exposure to the elements.Some freight cars had a layer of quick lime on the floor.

At times the Germans did not have enough filled up cars ready to start a major shipment of Jews to the camps,so the victims were kept locked inside overnight at layover yards. The Holocaust trains waited for more important military trains to pass. An average transport took about four days. The longest transport of the war, from Corfu, took 18 days. When the train arrived at the camp and the doors were opened, everyone was already dead.

Due to delays and cramped conditions, many deportees died in transit. On 18 August 1942, Waffen SS officer Kurt Gerstein had witnessed at Belzec the arrival of “45 wagons with 6,700 people of whom 1,450 were already dead on arrival.” That train came with the Jews of the Lwów Ghetto,less than a hundred kilometers away.

The standard means of delivery was a 10 metre long cattle freight wagon, although third class passenger carriages were also used when the SS wanted to keep up the “resettlement to work in the East” myth, particularly in the Netherlands and in Belgium. The SS manual covered such trains, suggesting a carrying capacity per each trainset of 2,500 people in 50 cars, each boxcar loaded with 50 prisoners. In reality however, boxcars were crammed with up to 100 persons and routinely loaded from the minimum of 150% to 200% capacity.

This resulted in an average of 5,000 people per trainset; 100 persons in each freight car multiplied by 50 cars. Notably, during the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka in 1942 trains carried up to 7,000 victims each.

In total, over 1,600 trains were organised by the German Transport Ministry, and logged mainly by the Polish state railway company taken over by Germany, due to the majority of death camps being located in occupied Poland.Between 1941 and December 1944, the official date of closing of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, the transport/arrival timetable was of 1.5 trains per day: 50 freight cars × 50 prisoners per freight car × 1,066 days = 4,000,000 prisoners in total.

On 20 January 1943, Himmler sent a letter to Albert Ganzenmüller, the Under-secretary of State at the Reich Transport Ministry, pledging: “need your help and support.If I am to wind things up quickly, I must have more trains.”

Of the estimated 6 million Jews exterminated during World War II, 2 million were murdered on the spot by the military, political police, and mobile death squads of the Einsatzgruppen aided by the Orpo battalions and their auxiliaries. The remainder were shipped to their deaths elsewhere.

It is said that  one time Hitler’s train had to stop next to a ‘Transport train’, the victims on that train who spotted Hitler on the train standing next to them, gave him an icy and defiant stare. Hitler did not like that and had it arranged that no Troops train would ever be scheduled at the same time as a ‘Transport’ train

The excuse which was often used by the Germans after the war was”We didn’t know” but if you see thousands of people being cramped in a train, and I am sure the ordinary Germans would have witnessed this occasionally, you must have been aware nothing good could come from that.