Trains Before and During the Holocaust

By: Dr. Frances G. Sternberg, MCHE 

Railroads were a key feature of modern industrial society and culture. Starting in the mid-19th century, they expanded across Europe and the United States, as well as Africa, Asia, and Central and South America, forming vast networks that facilitated the rapid long distance transport of raw materials, goods and labor so necessary to the growth of the industrial process. 

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries and into the period between World War I and World War II, as railroad travel became more accessible and affordable, the trains brought the populations of the rural hinterlands and rapidly growing cities in closer contact with each other. This generated not only economic development, but also new residential patterns (suburbanization) and new travel patterns (tourism) and the rapid and widespread dissemination of new ideas and new cultural patterns. 

Railroads were of strategic importance as well. Troop trains carried the thousands and then millions of men serving in the ever-growing armies and freight trains carried the tons of materials, weapons, and supplies necessary to field them. This was as true during the Civil War and the Boer War as it was during World War I and World War II. 

Railroads also served the darker purposes of a variety of political authorities. In Russia, the Tsarist and Soviet governments used trains to move dissidents to penal camps in Siberia and what would become the Gulag, where they would effectively “disappear.” In Turkey, functionaries of the Ottoman Empire crammed Armenian men, women and children into freight cars and deported them, without food, water, or other amenities to their deaths in rough territory near the Syrian border. In the United States, during World War II, authorities transported more than 110,000 Japanese Americans from the west coast to detention camps in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. 

And during the Holocaust, the railroads became the single most significant factor in the expansion and radicalization of Adolf Hitler’s “solution to the Jewish problem.” 

In the summer of 1941, two years after World War II began, Germany controlled a sizable territory that extended from Norway through Greece and from France into the western Soviet Union. During that summer, after the June invasion of the Soviet Union, Adolf Hitler decided to murder all of Europe’s Jews – some 9 million men, women, and children. He charged Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, with the task of overseeing the genocide. Himmler delegated this task to SS General Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Main Office for Reich Security, who – in turn – brought on SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann as the “policy expert” on the Jews. 

Over the next six months, the SS took certain crucial steps to facilitate the destruction process. It was decided that the victims would be asphyxiated by some form of poison gas; six death camps were established in Poland, where the murder would take place; and that the victims would be transported to their death by railroad. 

To this end, the SS, worked closely with Albert Ganzenmuller, Secretary of State for the Reich Transportation Ministry, and with the Deutsche Reichsbahn Gesellshaft – the German State Railway Association, a state-owned, civilian-run for-profit agency, to develop a special fare structure for the transports. In 1941, when German Jews began to be transported to the ghettos in Poland and the occupied Soviet territories, the Reichsbahn offered the SS a half-price group rate based on occupancy levels of at least 400 individuals per transport. Thus, in order to save money, the SS filled the trains to extreme overcrowding with as many people as possible, often 1,000 to 2,000 victims per transport, and increasingly used freight cars rather than standard passenger trains. In 1942, the SS had to pay 0.04 Reichsmark (RM) for 1 adult per kilometer, 0.02 RM for children over 4, children under 4 were free. By then, trains with up to 60 freight cars, each transporting around 5,000 victims, were the norm; and, as the territory under German occupation expanded, they often incorporated the rolling stock of other national railways as well, such as France, Slovakia, and Hungary. 

In addition to the SS, who planned and coordinated the deportations, a variety of other individuals were also involved in the organization and implementation of the transports. These people included the professional railroad staff, without which no transport could get underway, the local workers who maintained the rolling stock and the tracks, and the armed guards – German policeman, Ukrainian auxiliaries, and others – who accompanied the transports with orders to shoot anyone trying to escape. Another large group consisted of the many people who watched the trains pass – bystanders who were witnesses to the plight of the Jews. 

For the perpetrators, the railroads were as essential to the genocide as the camp system itself. Indeed, between 1941 and 1944, historians estimate that the trains may have carried as many as three million Jews to the concentration and death camps. And because the perpetrators considered the “war against the Jews” as much of a priority as the “war against the Allies,” the SS – especially Adolf Eichmann – also worked closely with a variety of other government agencies such as the Foreign Office, to iron out any difficulties and to make sure that, even in the midst of war, the trains would reach their destinations in a timely manner. For the victims, the trains were “mobile chambers” of persecution – an integral step in the larger deportation process that was preceded by brutal round-ups that tore people from their dwellings (in their hometowns or in the ghettos) and that was followed by the traumatic arrival at the camps where families were torn apart and most Jews were murdered almost immediately. 

Conditions in the trains were brutal. The cars were so overcrowded that – in many cases – fewer than two square feet of space were allotted per individual. They were also filthy and without adequate ventilation. People endured intense heat during the summer and freezing cold during the winter. No food or water was provided, even when the journey took many days. Aside from a bucket, no sanitary facilities existed, and the stench of urine and excrement added to the victims’ humiliation and suffering. Many died before the trains reached their destinations. 

Indeed, many Holocaust survivors recall that it was in the trains that they first realized the true magnitude of the danger and loss of control confronting them. In the words of one local survivor, the late Bronia Roslawowski, “When they took us to the train station and I saw those cattle trains, I said, ‘It is a disaster.’”