Holocaust trains

The Holocaust trains were railway transports ran by German Nazis and their collaborators to forcibly deport interned Jews and other victims of the Holocaust to the Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps.

Modern historians suggested that without the mass transportation of the railways, the scale of the Final Solution would not have been possible.

Pre-war
Following the unsuccessful Évian Conference, in late 1938 at the invitation of a friend in the British Embassy in Prague, Czechoslovakia, 30 year old clerk to the London Stock Exchange Nicholas Winton visited one of the rapidly expanding refugee camps for those fleeing the Nazis. At the Embassy's request, he set up an office at a dining room table in his hotel in Wenceslas Square, where he arranged train transport for children to Britain. On return to London, the British Government agreed to the shipment of the children on the conditions were that Winton had to pay the cost of the transport (arranged via Czech travel agency Cedok), pay a £50 bond, and arrange a foster family - at the time when few of the affected families could afford the cost.

In nine months, Winterton managed to arrange for 669 children to get out on eight trains, Prague to London (a small group of 15 were flown out via Sweden). The ninth and biggest 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 was seen again. During the war, 15,000 Czech children were killed.

The role of the railway in the Final Solution
Within various phases of the Holocaust, the trains were used differently:


 * After economic discrimination and separation, trains were used to concentrate the populations, either in ghettos, or - more often - to transport them to forced labour or concentration camps
 * After concentration within ghettos, to transport the inmates to death camps

The scale of the extermination of the Jews was therefore only dependent on two factors:
 * The volume of the death camps to murder Jews and process bodies
 * The capacity of the railways to transport Jews from the ghettos to the death camps

The most modern accurate numbers on the scale of the Final Solution still rely today partly on shipping records of the German railways.

The advantage of using trains
To implement the Final Solution, the Nazis needed an efficient system for mass extermination. Although trains took valuable track space away, they sped up the scale and duration over which the extermination needed to take place. The enclosed nature of the railway wagons used also reduced the number and skill of troops required to transport the Jews, and allowed the Nazis to build and operate more efficient death camps to a larger scale, rather than wasting valuable production resources on bullets. Many of the Jews killed were from Eastern Europe where there were many trains that had already transported military goods to the Russian front, and would have been empty on their return back to Germany were it not for the human cargo bound for the Holocaust.

Scale of the need for mass transportation
On 20 January, 1942, after the Wannsee conference, the Nazis began to murder the Jews in large numbers. The mobile extermination squads were already conducting mass shootings of Jews in the areas of the occupied Soviet territories since 1941, and now Jews were either deported to then-empty ghettos like Riga, or to the death camps of Operation Reinhard: Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibór.

At Wannsee, the SS estimated that the "Final Solution" would ultimately annihilate 11 million European Jews; Nazi planners envisioned the inclusion of Jews living in neutral or non-occupied countries such as Ireland, Sweden, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Deportations on this scale required the co-ordination of numerous German government ministries and state organisations, including the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), the Transport Ministry, and the Foreign Office. The RSHA coordinated and directed the deportations; the Transport Ministry organised train schedules; and the Foreign Office negotiated with German-allied states about handing over their Jews.

Jews from Germany and German-occupied Europe were deported by rail to the extermination camps in occupied Poland, where they were systematically murdered. The Nazis disguised the Final Solution by referring to these deportations as "resettlement to the east." The victims were told they were being taken to labour camps, but in reality, from 1942, deportation for most Jews meant transit to extermination camps. During a telephone conversation in late 1942, Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann admonished Heinrich Himmler, who was informing him that 50,000 Jews were already exterminated in a concentration camp in Poland. Bormann screamed: "They were not exterminated, only evacuated, evacuated, evacuated!", and slammed down the phone.

The journey
The first trains operated on 16 October, 1941, transporting Jews from central Germany to ghettos in the east.

The trains consisted of formations of either third class passenger carriages, but mainly freight cars of cattle cars - the later were packed, according to SS regulations, with 50, but sometimes up to 150 occupants. No food or water was provided, while the freight cars were only provided with a bucket latrine. A small barred window provided irregular ventilation, which sometimes resulted in deaths from either suffocation or the exposure to the elements.

Sometimes the Germans did not have enough cars to make it worth their while to do a major shipment of Jews to the camps, so the victims were stuck in a switching yard – "standing room only" – sometimes for days. At other times, the trains had to wait for more important military trains to pass. An average transport took about four and a half days. The longest transport of the war, from Corfu, took 18 days. When the train got to the camps and the doors were opened, everyone was already dead. The armed guards shot anyone trying to escape. Due to cramped conditions, many deportees died in transit. To avoid contamination between loads, at times the floor of the freight cars had a layer of quick lime which burned the feet of the human cargo.

Once alighted, the remaining passengers were split into two groups. The old, the young, the sick, and the infirm were sent immediately to be killed, initially in gassing vans and later in the gas chambers. The rest were to put to work, frequently in the harshest conditions which included the burial of victims in mass graves.

The calculations
Powered mainly by efficient freight steam locomotives, the trains were kept to a maximum of 55 freight cars.

The standard accommodation was a 10 metre long cattle freight wagon, although third class passenger carriages were also used where the SS wanted to keep up the "resettlement to work in the East" myth, particularly in Holland and Belgium.

The standard SS manual covered such trains, suggesting a resultant loading ration per train of:


 * 50 people in a freight car X 50 cars = 2,500 people in each train.

Since normally the trains were loaded to 150 to 200% capacity, this results in the following:


 * 100 people in a freight car X 50 cars = 5,000 people in each train

Of the estimated 6 million Jews exterminated during the Second World War, 2 million were murdered immediately by the second-rank military and political police, and mobile death squadrons of the Einsatzgruppen.

In total, over 1,600 trains were organised by the German Transport Ministry, and logged mainly by the Polish state railway company due to the majority of death camps being located in Poland. Between 1941 until December of 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 X 50 prisoners per freight car X 1.5 trains/day X 1,066 days = 4,000,000 prisoners

On 20 January, 1943, Himmler sent a letter to Reich Minister of Transport: "need your help and support. If I am to wind things up quickly, I MUST HAVE MORE TRAINS."

Payment
Most of the Jews were forced to pay for their own transportation, particularly where passenger carriages were used. This payment came in the from of direct money paid to the SS, in light of the "resettlement to work in the East" myth. Charged in the ghettos for accommodation, the Jews paid for a full one-way ticket, while children under 10-12 years of age paid half price. Those who were running out of money in the ghetto were shipped to the East first, while those with some supplies of gold and cash were shipped last.

The SS also paid the German Transport Authority to pay the German Railways to transport Jews. The ReichBanh were paid the equivalent of a Third Class train ticket for every prisoner transported to the their final destination:
 * 0.5 pfennig X 8,000,000 prisoners X 600 km (pro media of voyage length) = 240 millions Riechmarks

The ReichBanh pocketed both this money and their share, after the SS fees, of the money paid by the transported.

Variations per country
The characteristics of organized concentration and transportation of victims of the Holocaust varied by country.

Belgium
When Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss in March 1938, and following the unsuccessful Évian Conference of June 1938, Belgium had in excess of 30,000 refugees within its borders. The government ordered the Belgian Embassy in Vienna to stop issuing entry visas and draw up lists of "suspect Belgians and foreigners."

When German troops invaded Belgium on 10 May, 1940, the Belgian authorities rounded up the “unpatriotic” subjects, including Flemish-Nationalists, Communists, and non-Belgian citizens, most of them Jewish refugees from Germany and Poland. Theses people were transported to France on so-called "phantom trains" the records for which were destroyed, but it is known that at least 3,000 were arrested under the plot in Antwerp alone. A phantom train on which Joris van Severen, leader of the pro-Belgian Fascist party was among 79 people deported is well recorded, as 21 people were killed by French soldiers at Abbeville.

Of the people deported on "phantom trains," most including the Belgian Jews were released by the Wehrmacht, the only Jews released by the Nazi German Army. 3,537 Jews holding German and Austrian passports were kept imprisoned at location, and were transported to Auschwitz for processing. In July 1940 General Eggert Reeder the head of the Wehrmacht in Brussels, had Robert de Foy the head of the Belgian secret police, arrested for the deportations. The SS ordered that De Foy released, in that he had fully co-operated with Heinrich Himmler before the War.

After implementation of the Final Solution in Belgium, between August 1942 and July 1944, 28 trains transported more than 25,000 Jewish deportees to Auschwitz via the concentration camp at Mechelen, chosen because it was the hub of the Belgian railway system.

After the War, De Foy resumed his position as head of the Belgian secret police. While the records about the persecution of the Antwerp Jews are intact, the documents about French-speaking cities with large Jewish communities including Charleroi and Liège, were claimed to have been purposely destroyed, even into the early 2000s.

Bulgaria
On 22 February, 1943 the Bulgarian government agreed to allow the Germans to deport 11,000 Jews. Overcrowding conditions existed in the 20 trains that transported them over four days, requiring each train to stop daily to dump the bodies of those who died during the past day.

Czech Republic
Jews were interned and shipped from Theresienstadt, mainly to Birkenau.

The last train left Theresienstadt for Birkenau on 28 October, 1944 with 2,038 Jews, of which 1,589 were immediately gassed. Birkenau closed its gas chambers on 7 November, 1944.

France
SNCF under the Vichy Government played its part in the Final Solution, however reluctantly. In total, the Vichy government helped in the deportation of 76,000 Jews, although this number varies depending on the account, to German extermination camps; only 2,500 survived the war.

During the 16 July 1942 rafle du Vel'd'Hiv ("Vel'd'Hiv round-up"), French police officers and SNCF officials rounded up 12,884 Jews (including 4,051 children which the Gestapo hadn't asked for), and imprisoned them in the Winter Velodrome in unhygienic conditions, from which they were led to Drancy internment camp, run by Alois Brunner, and French constabulary police, and then to Birkenau.

During the January 1943 Battle of Marseille, the French police controlled the identity of 40,000 people, and sent 2,000 inhabitants of Marseille to Birkenau.

Drancy served as the transport hub for the Paris area, where by February 3, 1944 the 67th train had left for Birkenau. ; Vittel served the northeast. By 23 June, 1943 50,000 Jews had been be deported from France, an apparently slow pace not to the satisfaction of the Germans. The last train from France left Drancy on 31 July, 1944 with over 300 children.

Greece
After the German occupation, an internment camp was set up in Athens to transport Jews to another internment camp at Salonika, which served as the collection point for Jews from the Greek Islands.

In total, between March and August 1943, over 40,000 Jews were deported from Greece to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Hungary
Hungary resisted the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Germany, but did deport 100,000 Jews in former Romanian territory of Transylvania, and Jews from occupied Yugoslavia.

After Hitler launched Operation Margarethe in March 1944, the discussions between him and Admiral Horthy came to a quick conclusion. On 29 April, 1944 the first deportation to Birkenau took place, and the second on 30 April of 2,000 Jews. To allay fears of the remaining population estimated at 762,000, the SS has the deported write postcards to their family back home.

On 25 May, German representative General Edmund Veesenmayer reported that 138,870 Jews have been deported in the past 10 days; on 31 May he reported that 60,000 more had been deported in the last six days, while the total for the past 16 days stood at 204,312.

On 8 July, 1944 due to international pressure by the Pope, King of Sweden and the Red Cross (all who have only recently learned the extent of the Hungarian tragedy), the deportation of the Hungarian Jews stopped. In 70 days, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported - around 6,250 per day.

In October 1944, following the coup detat that again put a fascist Government in control, 50,000 of the remaining Jews were forced on a death march to Germany, digging anti-tank ditches on the roads westwards. A further 25,000 were saved in an "international ghetto" under Swiss protection engineered by Charles Lutz and Raoul Wallenberg. When the Soviet Army liberated Budapest on 17 January, 1945, only 120,000 of Hungarian Jews survived.

Italy
Benito Mussolini resisted the deportation of Italian Jews to Germany. After the Allies landings on mainland Italy, and the 8 September, 1943 Armistice with Italy, the Germans occupied northern Italy and shipped 8,000 Jews to Birkenau via mainly Austria, and also possibly via neutral Switzerland.

Between September 1943 and April 1944, at least 23,000 Italian soldiers were deported to work as slaves in German industry, while over 10,000 partisans were captured and deported during the same period to Birkenau. By 1944 there were over half a million Italians working for the Nazi war machine.

Netherlands
In the Netherlands, Jews were concentrated in Amsterdam ghettos, before being moved for “re-settlement in the East” to Westerbork, a transit camp in the north-east of near the German border. Deportees from Amsterdam Muiderpoort station were unaware of their final destination or fate, as postcards were often thrown from moving trains.

Between July 1942 and September 1944, almost every Tuesday a train left for the concentration camps Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibór, Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt. In the period from 1942 to 1945, a total of 107,000 people passed through the camp on a total of 93 outgoing trains: about 60,000 to Auschwitz and over 34,000 to Sobibor.

Only 5,200 of the deportees survived, most of them in Theresienstadt or Bergen-Belsen, or liberated in Westerbork. On 29 September, 2005, Nederlandse Spoorwegen apologised for its role in the deportation of Jews.

Poland
Most of the Jews were transported by road to concentration camps, until the opening of the full five gas chambers at Auschwitz. The numerous train movements, both originating inside and outside Poland and terminating at the various death camps, were tracked by the Polish railway company PKP Hollerith department, at 22 Pawia Street in Kraków. Using IBM supplied card reading machines and railway software, they made up 95% of IBM's Polish business.

The Warsaw Ghetto was created by the Nazis on 16 November, 1940; eventually over 450,000 people cramped in an area meant for about 60,000. Shipments to the camps under Operation Reinhard were from the station at Umschlagplatz started on 22 July, 1942 through to 12 September.

The Nazi record of Operation Reinhard lists the total number of killed, most of whom were transported by train, as follows:

The Höfle Telegram lists the number of arrivals to the camps through 1942 as 1,274,166, while the total killed is estimated at 2milion.

On 18 August, 1943, the last train ever to be sent to Treblinka camp left Białystok ghetto - all survivors were sent to the gas chambers, after which the camp closed down.

From 7 August, 1944 the Nazis liquidated 68,000 Jews of the Łódź Ghetto, by then the largest remaining gathering of Jews in all of Europe. They were told by the SS that they were to be resettled, instead over the next 23 days they were sent to Birkenau by train at the rate of 2,500 per day, with some of the crippled selected by Dr. Josef Mengele for his medical experiments.

Romania
Romania had the third largest Jewish population in Europe after Russia and Poland, and antisemitic feelings ran high in pre-War Romania, based partly on Christian beliefs as well as modern politics stemming from King Carol II. When he was forced to resign, the Government headed by Ion Antonescu introduced draconian anti-Jewish legislature, which was openly inspired by the Nazi Nuremberg Laws. During 1941 and 1942, thirty-two antisemitic laws, thirty-one decree-laws, and seventeen government resolutions were passed and decreed. This resulted in many Jews leaving for Palestine by ship in Autumn 1940.

As a result of Romania having to give up territories to the Soviet Union, Hungary and Bulgaria in summer 1940, Jews in the new border regions were rounded up in concentration camps for transportation to the interior regions. Jewish population was mainly concentated to the east of the River Prut. 800,000 of them died in Transnistria; 206,958 in Bessarabia; and 69,144 in Bukovina. These Jewish populations were shipped to both Auschwitz as well as Belzec, where in September, 1942 two trains from Kolomea in Galicia arrived: the first with 4,769 Jews in 50 freight wagons; the second with 8,205 Jews packed at a ratio of 167 people per car, with 2,000 on board all already dead.

As a result of the Iaşi pogrom on 25 June 1941 in which 900 Jews were killed, train shipments were increased to Călăraşi in the south where estimated 420,000 Jews died, as well as to Auschwitz. In addition, 26,000 Roma people were deported to Nazi death camps.

Scandinavia
In October 1942, 770 Norwegian Jews were deported by boat to Hamburg and onwards by train to Auschwitz. The Danish resistance, on hearing a similar measure was to be attempted by the SS in Denmark, assisted in a mass rescue of the Danish Jews to neutral Sweden.

Slovakia
On 9 September, 1941, the parliament of "independent" Slovakia - a Nazi puppet state - ratified the Jewish Codex, a series of laws and regulations that stripped Slovakia's 80,000 Jews of their civil rights and all means of economic survival. The fascist Slovak leadership was so impatient to get rid of Jews that it paid the Nazis DM 500 in exchange for each expelled Jew and a promise that the deportees would never return to Slovakia. The decision by Slovakia to initiate and pay for the expulsion was unprecedented among the satellite states of Nazi Germany. They paid 40 millions RM to the SS.

Switzerland
Although the Germans shipped most supplies to Italy through the Austrian Brenner Pass, based on the German-Italian-Swiss treaty of 1909 (to be denounced within ten years, by Article 374 of the 1919 Versailles Treaty), Switzerland was forced to allow Nazi Germany to ship certain non-strategic goods (specifically the treaty excluded soldiers and armaments) through the St. Gotthard Tunnel.

There exists substantial evidence that these shipments included Italian forced labour workers and possibly shipments of Jews in 1944, during the Nazi occupation of northern Italy, when a German train passed through Switzerland every 10 minutes. The need for the tunnel was complicated by the British Royal Air Force having bombed and disrupted services through the Brenner Pass, as well as a heavy snowfall in the winter of 1944/45.

Of 43 trains that could be tracked down by the 1996 Bergier Commission, 39 went via Austria (Brenner, Tarvisio), one via France (Ventimiglia - Nice). The commission could not find any evidence that the other three passed through Switzerland. It is possible that the train could have been carrying dissidents back from concentration camps. Started in 1944, some repatriation trains went through Switzerland officially, organised by the Red Cross.

1944 onwards
After the Soviet Army began making severe inroads into the Nazi land war gains in the East, and the Allies landed in Normandy in June, the number of trains and transported persons began to vary greatly.

By November 1944, with the closure of Birkenau and the advance of the Soviet Army, the death trains had ceased. Death Marches also had the advantage of being able to used the forced labour to build defences.

Kastner train
In April 1944, for reasons that are still disputed, Nazi officials under the direction of SS officer Adolf Eichmann offered to sell the Zionist Aid and Rescue Committee (Vaada), of which Hungarian journalist and lawyer Rudolph Kastner was the de facto leader, exit visas for 600 Jews who held Palestinian immigration certificates, in exchange for 6.5 million pengö (RM 4,000,000 or $1,600,000).

The negotiations between the SS and the Vaada were expanded to include more Jews, and the Vaada compiled a list of ten categories of Jews they wanted to rescue, a list that included Orthodox Jews, Zionists, prominent Jews, orphans, refugees, Revisionists, and "paying persons." The list also controversially included 388 people from Kastner's home town of Cluj.

Eventually the Kastner train transported 1,684 Jews from Nazi-controlled Hungary to Switzerland. in exchange for 6.5 million pengö (RM 4,000,000 or $1,600,000). Although Kastner was later criticised for putting his own family on the train, Hansi Brand, a member of the Vaada, testified at Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem in 1961 that Kastner had included his family to reassure the other passengers that the train was safe, and was not destined, as they feared, for Auschwitz.

1945
As the Soviet and Allied Armies made their final pushes, the Nazi's transported some of the concentration camp survivors, either to other camps located further inside the collapsing Third Reich, or to border areas where they believed they could negotiate the release of captured Nazi Prisoners of War in return for "Exchange Jews" or those that were born outside the Nazi occupied territories.

Many of the inmates were transported via the infamous Death Marches, but among other transports three trains left Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 bound for Theresienstadt - all were liberated.

The last recorded train is the one used to transport the women of the Flossenbürg March, where for three days in March 1945 the remaining survivors were crammed into cattle cars to await further transport. Only 200 of the original 1000 women survived the entire trip to Bergen-Belsen.

The Gold train
With the Soviet Army about 100 miles away from Hungary, on March 7, 1944 Hitler launched Operation Margarethe&mdash;the invasion of Hungary. The fascist government of Hungary issued a decree against the Jewish population, ordering them to "deposit" their gems, their golden jewels ornamented with gems, and all valuables made of gold, with the authorities. The jewels and other valuables of 800,000 Hungarian Jews were seized by the fascist government.

With the approach of Soviet and Allied forces, the government of Ferenc Szálasi had these valuables laden on a train consisting of 44 cars. This train was seized in May 1945 by U.S. troops of occupation in Austria. The Hungarian escort pushed the train into the tunnel near Boeckstein, while the Americans took possession at the railway station of Werfen, where they found that the train also contained other valuables, e.g. oriental carpets, silver, furs, etc. While unloading the train to store the valuables, two lorries were seized in the French sector.

The goods were stored in two locations in Salzburg, with the valuables in one location and paintings in another. After goods were given to furnish American families locating to Europe, the remainder were repatriated for sale in America, where, in June 1948 they were sold at Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York. To date, of the scheduled 1,176 paintings on the gold train originally stored by the US Army, only one has been repatriated. On 30 September, 2005 the US Government reached agreement with the representatives of the Hungarian Jewish community to pay $25.5 million in compensation, with an additional $500k for the preservation of documents associated with the Gold Train, and to declassify any remaining documents related to the Gold Train.

Modern-day legacy
There are still signs of the mass transportation system employed by the Nazis in the "Final Solution," as well well as controversies surrounding the history.

In Poland, the arrival point at Auschwitz is well preserved, although ceremonially cut-off from the main railway system. In 1988 at the Umschlagplatz national monument, a stone sculpture resembling an open freight car was created by architect Hanna Szmalenberg and sculptor Wladyslaw Klamerus.

In the Netherlands, Nederlandse Spoorwegen used its 29 September, 2005, apology for its role in the "Final Solution" to launch an equal opportunities and anti-Discrimination policy, in part to be monitored by the Dutch council of Jews.

In Germany, Federal Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee wants to see an exhibition by artist Jan Philipp Reemtsma on the railways role in the 11,000 German children of the Holocaust launched on 27 January, 2008 to mark the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945. Tiefensee had wanted the exhibition to be housed as it toured the country in the cities railway stations, but the head of Deutsche Bahn, Hartmut Mehdorn, is presently vehemently opposed to the idea citing financial, organisational and technical reasons.

Railway companies involved

 * Deutsche Bahn
 * NMBS/SNCB
 * Nederlandse Spoorwegen
 * SNCF