The Deutsche Reichsbahn, the German national railway, was the operational instrument that physically delivered most of the victims of the Holocaust to the killing sites. Around three million Jews were transported to the death camps and to the killing pits in the East by Reichsbahn trains between 1941 and 1944. The Reichsbahn was, in 1942, the largest single employer in Germany, with around 1.4 million employees. It was a state agency under the Reich Transport Ministry. It scheduled the deportation trains, billed Eichmann’s office at standard third-class group fares for adult deportees and half-price for children under ten, and ran the trains to schedule. Without the railway, the operational scale of the Holocaust would not have been possible.
The Sonderzug schedules
Deportation trains were classified as Sonderzüge, special trains, and were given low priority in the Reichsbahn timetable, fitted around the regular passenger and freight traffic. The trains typically consisted of around forty to fifty freight wagons, sealed and unventilated, packed with around 80 to 100 deportees per wagon. Each train carried 3,000 to 5,000 people. The journey times to Auschwitz from Western Europe ranged from two to four days. From Hungary the journey was around two days. Deportees were given no food or water for the duration of the journey. The percentage of deportees who died in transit varied from a few per cent on the shorter Western European routes to a substantial fraction on the longer Eastern European routes. Reichsbahn personnel were aware of the conditions; the wagons returned with the bodies still inside.
The Eichmann account
The Reichsbahn billed Eichmann’s office (Section IV-B-4 of the RSHA) for the deportation transports. The standard charge was the third-class passenger group rate of around four pfennig per person per kilometre. Children under ten travelled half-price. Children under four travelled free. The arithmetic of the discount, applied to people being transported to be murdered, has frequently been cited as the diagnostic detail of the bureaucratic logic involved. Eichmann’s office paid the Reichsbahn, the Reichsbahn provided the wagons. The accounting was conducted in standard commercial terms. The bills survive.
The bombed-railway debate
From spring 1944 the Allied air forces had aerial superiority over Hungary and the southern routes that the Hungarian deportations were running on. Jewish leaders, including the Slovak Working Group around Gisi Fleischmann, repeatedly requested the bombing of the rail lines to Auschwitz and of the camp’s gas chamber complexes. The American and British governments declined the requests, on grounds of bombing accuracy concerns, military priority, and the argument (advanced by John J. McCloy, the US Assistant Secretary of War) that bombing operations would not effectively halt the deportations. The debate has continued ever since. The Royal Air Force did not have sufficient daylight bombing capability against southern Hungary in summer 1944; the United States Army Air Forces did, and in fact bombed the IG Farben Monowitz plant several times in summer and autumn 1944, passing within a few miles of the gas chambers without targeting them. The decision not to bomb the rail lines or the gas chambers is the subject of an extensive historical literature; the Holocaust historian David Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews (1984) is the standard treatment.
The Reichsbahn officials
The senior Reichsbahn officials who ran the deportation operation were not Nazi Party officials but career civil servants. The principal figure was Albert Ganzenmüller, deputy director of the Reichsbahn from 1942, who oversaw the deportation transport scheduling. Ganzenmüller exchanged a series of letters in 1942 with Karl Wolff, Himmler’s liaison at Hitler’s headquarters, agreeing the schedule of the daily transports of 5,000 Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka. The letters survive. Ganzenmüller wrote, on 28 July 1942, that since 22 July one train daily with 5,000 Jews leaves Warsaw via Malkinia for Treblinka, and twice weekly one train with 5,000 Jews leaves Przemyśl for Bełżec.
He was, in 1942, fully informed of what the trains were doing. He fled to Argentina after the war and was extradited to West Germany in 1955. He was tried in 1973, but the trial was suspended on grounds of his health and never resumed. He died in 1996 without being convicted.
What the personnel knew
The Reichsbahn personnel who staffed the deportation trains, the locomotive drivers, the conductors, the station personnel along the route, knew what the trains were carrying. The wagons were sealed but were not soundproof; the cries of the deportees could be heard from the platform during the loading. The trains arrived at Auschwitz with the smell of burning bodies in the air, particularly during the Hungarian operation of summer 1944. The empty wagons returning from the death camps carried the personal effects of the dead, billed back to the Reich treasury. The Reichsbahn personnel handled it as routine railway work. Most of them returned to railway careers after the war and ran West Germany’s post-war Bundesbahn until they retired.
The post-war reckoning
The Reichsbahn was not directly prosecuted at Nuremberg. Most of its senior officials returned to senior posts in the West German Bundesbahn or the East German Reichsbahn. The German federal railway, the Deutsche Bahn, has progressively acknowledged its predecessor’s role from the 1990s onwards. The 2008 exhibition Sonderzüge in den Tod (Special Trains to Death), permitted by Deutsche Bahn after considerable pressure, was displayed at major German railway stations and is now permanent at the German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin. The exhibition lists the names of around 11,000 Jewish children deported by Reichsbahn trains. The Deutsche Bahn paid into the slave-labour compensation fund of 2000.
What it was
The Reichsbahn is the case of the state-owned bureaucratic agency, staffed by career civil servants and operated as a routine commercial transport business, that delivered most of the victims of the Holocaust to the killing sites. The trains were not Nazi instruments; they were ordinary German railway equipment scheduled and run by ordinary German railway employees who knew what they were doing. The arithmetic of the operation, three million people delivered over three years, was made possible by the routine professionalism of a national railway. The Reichsbahn case is the documentary record of how, when a state instrument as ordinary as a railway is folded into a killing programme, it does the work without the need for ideological commitment from most of its personnel. They were simply doing their jobs.
See also
Sources
- Raul Hilberg, Sonderzüge nach Auschwitz, Mainz, 1981
- Alfred Mierzejewski, The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich: A History of the German National Railway, two volumes, University of North Carolina Press, 1999 and 2000
- David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945, Pantheon, 1984
- Ganzenmüller letter to Wolff, 28 July 1942
- Deutsche Bahn: Sonderzüge in den Tod, exhibition catalogue, 2008
- USHMM: Deutsche Reichsbahn