The deportation system that took European Jews to the death camps was one of the largest organised population movements of the twentieth century. Between 1941 and 1944 it moved around three million people across the German-occupied continent, by rail in most cases, on a planned schedule operated by the German railways and their local equivalents under SS direction. Almost everyone moved on those trains was murdered at the other end. The deportations were carried out in a particular pattern, country by country, year by year, and they varied dramatically in their thoroughness and pace.
The mechanics
The standard deportation followed a consistent process. The Reich Security Main Office in Berlin, under Adolf Eichmann’s Section IV-B-4, planned the schedules. Local SS commands in each occupied country implemented them in cooperation with the local authorities. Jews were registered, marked (most commonly with a yellow star), and concentrated in ghettos or transit camps. Trains were arranged through the Reichsbahn or the local equivalent at standard third-class passenger rates per head. Deportees were given written notices to assemble at a particular point at a particular time, with a small piece of luggage. The luggage and the deportees were taken to the assembly point by foot or by lorry, then loaded onto sealed freight wagons, around 80 to 100 people per wagon. The wagons travelled for periods ranging from a few hours to several days. Some Jews died on the trains, particularly in the longer transports from Greece and Italy. The survivors arrived at the death camp ramp.
The rate by country
The pace of deportation varied enormously by country. The Hungarian deportations of May to July 1944 are the extreme case: 437,000 Jews deported to Auschwitz in eight weeks, around half of them murdered on arrival. The Dutch deportations of 1942 to 1943 took out around 75 per cent of the Dutch Jewish population over 15 months. The French deportations of 1942 to 1944 took around 25 per cent of the French Jewish population, in a slower and more contested process. The Bulgarian deportation of native Bulgarian Jews never happened, because the Bulgarian government refused to authorise it; the deportation of around 11,000 Jews from Bulgarian-occupied Greek and Yugoslav territory, which the Bulgarian government did permit, did happen.
The differences are accounted for by a combination of factors. The willingness of the local population and police to cooperate. The thoroughness of the local civil registration that gave the Germans accurate lists. The ability of Jews to hide locally, which depended on geography and on the willingness of local non-Jews to shelter them. The presence or absence of escape routes to neutral territory. The timing of the German occupation: countries occupied early in the war had longer to be processed than those occupied late. And the political stance of the local government: a government willing to obstruct the deportations could slow them or stop them, as Bulgaria and Italy and to some extent France did at various moments.
The role of local police
The deportations could not have been carried out at the scale they were without the cooperation of local police forces. The German occupation forces in most countries were not large enough to conduct mass arrests across the entire territory; they relied on the local gendarmerie or police to find Jews, to round them up, to load them onto the trains. The Dutch police participated extensively. The French gendarmerie carried out the major round-ups in Paris in July 1942 (the Vel d’Hiv) and elsewhere. The Hungarian gendarmerie carried out the 1944 deportations under German supervision, often with notable enthusiasm. The Slovak Hlinka Guard carried out the early Slovak deportations of 1942.
This is the most uncomfortable single fact in the deportation record. The Holocaust was a German crime, but the operational machinery that delivered Jews to the trains was, in most countries, made up of local citizens in local uniform, doing what their own government had told them to do.
The role of the Reichsbahn
The German railways, the Reichsbahn, ran the deportation trains as ordinary commercial freight. The SS booked the trains through the standard Reichsbahn freight booking process. The fares were calculated at standard passenger rates: third-class single fare per adult, half-fare per child, with group discounts for parties of over 400. The Reichsbahn billed the SS. The SS paid out of confiscated Jewish assets. The Reichsbahn knew what was being transported and where the trains were going. Many of the freight wagons used had to be cleaned and disinfected after the deportations because of the conditions inside; this was charged to the SS as well.
The Reichsbahn was, in this sense, the largest single corporate participant in the operational machinery of the Holocaust. After the war, the successor body Deutsche Bundesbahn took on the assets and the personnel without acknowledgement of the wartime role. A formal apology from the modern Deutsche Bahn was only issued in the 2000s. The Reichsbahn page on this site covers the institution in detail.
The numbers
The total number of Jews deported across the German-occupied continent between 1941 and 1944 is estimated at around three million, with around two and a half million of those murdered at the destination camps and the remainder dying on the journey or in the labour camps to which a minority were assigned. To these figures must be added the around 1.5 million Jews killed by the Einsatzgruppen and the local auxiliaries in the open-air shootings of the eastern territories, which did not require deportation because the killers came to the victims. Together the deportation system and the eastern shootings account for around four million of the six million Holocaust dead. The other two million died in the ghettos before deportation and in the death marches at the end of the war.
What it tells us
The deportation system was a logistical accomplishment of a particular kind. It moved millions of people across a continent on a schedule, using the standard apparatus of European industrial life, with the cooperation of dozens of national governments and the active participation of hundreds of thousands of officials and police. It would not have been possible without the willingness of the broader European bureaucracy to treat Jewish deportation as a normal administrative task. That willingness is the part of the Holocaust that is hardest to assimilate, because it implicates the everyday institutions of European life, not just the SS men with weapons. The crime was committed at the extremities by the killers. It was made possible at the centre by the people who took the bookings, who issued the timetables, who organised the round-ups, and who certified that the lists were accurate.
See also
- Deutsche Reichsbahn: The German Railways
- Italy
- Adolf Eichmann
- France and Vel d'Hiv
- The Hungarian Deportations 1944
- The Death Marches
Sources
- Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Yale University Press, 2003
- Raul Hilberg, Sources of Holocaust Research, Ivan R. Dee, 2001
- Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust, Franklin Watts, 1982
- Christopher Browning, The Path to Genocide, Cambridge University Press, 1992