In 1939, 84 trains moved eastwards every day - by June of 1941, eight months after the start of the "Otto" program, 220 trains moved eastwards every day. During the fist five months of 1941, nearly 34.000 trainloads of supplies and troops were unloaded in the east. With respect to the railway wagons, the following figures represent the number of German and captured wagons available for use:
On 01 January 1942: 84.000 wagons.
On 01 June 1942: 142.000 wagons.
On 01 December 1942: 203.000 wagons.
The best year for the German rail system was during the summer of
1943. Nearly every important rail line in the Soviet Union had been converted to the standard gauge.
Every day, over 200 trains departed Germany for the eastern front.
Deutsche Reichsbahn - The German State Railway in WWII
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 Reich Minister of Transport,
Julius Dorpmüller 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.
...
After the Soviet Army began making severe inroads into the
German-occupied Europe and the Allies landed in
Normandy in June 1944, 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. Conversely, the subsequent
death marches had the advantage of being able to utilize the forced labour to build defences.
As the Soviet and Allied Armies made their final pushes, the Nazis transported some of the concentration camp survivors either to other camps located inside the collapsing Third Reich, or to the border areas where they believed they could negotiate the release of captured Nazi
Prisoners of War in return for the "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.
Holocaust train - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
By mid-1944, the Final Solution had largely run its course. Those Jewish communities within easy reach of the Nazi regime had been largely exterminated, in proportions ranging from about 25 percent in France to more than 90 percent in Poland. On 5 May, Himmler claimed in a speech that "The Jewish question has in general been solved in Germany and in the countries occupied by Germany."
During 1944, in any case, the task became steadily more difficult. German armies were evicted from the Soviet Union, the Balkans and Italy, and German forces—as well as forces aligned with them—were either defeated or were switching sides to the Allies. In June, the western Allies landed in France. Allied air attacks and the operations of partisans made rail transport increasingly difficult, and the objections of the military to the diversion of rail transport for carrying Jews to Poland more urgent and harder to ignore.
At this time, as the Soviet armed forces approached, the camps in eastern Poland were closed down, any surviving inmates being shipped west to camps closer to Germany. Local commanders continued to kill Jews, and to shuttle them from camp to camp by forced "death marches" until the last weeks of the war.
Already sick after months or years of violence and starvation, prisoners were forced to march for tens of miles in the snow to train stations; then transported for days at a time without food or shelter in freight trains with open carriages; and forced to march again at the other end to the new camp. Those who lagged behind or fell were shot. Around 250,000 Jews died during these marches.
The largest and best-known of the death marches took place in January 1945, when the Soviet army advanced on Poland. Nine days before the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz, the SS marched 60,000 prisoners out of the camp toward
Wodzisław (German: Loslau), 56 km (35 mi) away, where they were put on freight trains to other camps. Around 15,000 died on the way.
Year Jews killed
1933–1940 under 100,000
1941 1,100,000
1942 2,700,000
1943 500,000
1944 600,000
1945 100,000
The Holocaust - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
