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92-478: In the 5–7 August 1941 massacre, 8,000 Jews were murdered just outside of Pińsk. The subsequent creation of the ghetto was followed – over a year later – by the murder of the imprisoned Jewish population of Pińsk, totalling 26,000 victims: men, women and children. Most killings took place between 29 October and 1 November 1942 by Police Battalion 306 of the German Order Police , and other units. It

184-554: A citywide fire resulted in the transfer of power to Brześć within months. Jews constituted over half the number of Pińsk residents, and 17.7% of the general population in the region. New Jewish schools were opened, as well as a clinic, a bank, an old-age home, and an orphanage. In 1939, following the Soviet invasion of Poland in accordance with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact , Pińsk and the surrounding territories were taken over by

276-675: A low priority, and SS officials such as Franz Novak often faced difficulty in securing the rolling stock needed. The first trains with German Jews expelled to ghettos in occupied Poland began departing from central Germany on 16 October 1941. Called Sonderzüge (special trains), the trains had low priority for the movement and frequently had to wait for other trains to pass, inevitably extending transport time beyond expectations. In Western and Central Europe, trains usually consisted of third class passenger carriages, but in Eastern Europe they usually used freight wagons or cattle wagons ;

368-775: A pace that the Germans deemed too slow. The last train from France left Drancy on 31 July 1944 with over 300 children. After the invasion , Greece was divided between the Italian, Bulgarian, and German zones of occupation until September 1943. Most Greek Jews lived in Thessaloniki (Salonika) ruled by Germany, where the collection camp was set up for the Jews also from Athens and the Greek Islands . From there 45,000–50,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau between March and August 1943, packed 80 to

460-577: A ship requisitioned by the Quisling government and taken to Hamburg , Germany. From there, they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau by train. In total, 770 Norwegian Jews were sent by boat to Germany between 1940 and 1945. Only two dozen survived. Following invasion of Poland in September 1939 Nazi Germany disbanded the Polish National Railways ( PKP ) immediately, and handed over their assets to

552-532: A train left for Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor extermination camps , or Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt , in 94 outgoing trains. About 60,000 prisoners were sent to Auschwitz and 34,000 to Sobibor. At liberation approximately 870 Jews remained in Westerbork. Only 5,200 deportees survived, most of them in Theresienstadt , approximately 1980 survivors, or Bergen-Belsen , approximately 2050 survivors. From those on

644-682: A wagon. There were also 13,000 Greek Jews in the Italian, and 4,000 Jews in the Bulgarian zone of occupation. In September 1943, the Italian zone was taken over by the Third Reich. Overall, some 60,000–65,000 Greek Jews were deported in Holocaust trains by the SS to Auschwitz, Majdanek, Dachau and the subcamps of Mauthausen before the war's end, including over 90% of Thessaloniki's prewar population of 50,000 Jews. Of these, 5,000 Jews were deported to Treblinka from

736-646: A year, officially between 20 April and 29 October 1942, much shorter than most Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland . The relocation action took place on 1 May 1942. Food was rationed, and a barbed-wire fence erected. The following month, in June 1942, the first murder operation took place there, with 3,500 Jews rounded up in Pińsk and nearby Kobryń , and transported to Bronna Góra (the Bronna Mount) to be shot. This

828-608: Is widely seen as simplistic by Jewish scholars, because the Italian Jewish community of 47,000 constituted the most assimilated Jews in Europe. About one out of every three Jewish males were members of the Fascist Party before the war began; more than 10,000 Jews who used to conceal their identity, because antisemitism was part of the very ideal of italianità , wrote Wiley Feinstein. The Holocaust came to Italy in September 1943 after

920-551: The Deutsche Reichsbahn and other European railways under the control of Nazi Germany and its allies , for the purpose of forcible deportation of the Jews , as well as other victims of the Holocaust , to the Nazi concentration , forced labour , and extermination camps . The speed at which people targeted in the " Final Solution " could be exterminated was dependent on two factors:

1012-569: The Amsterdam ghetto before being moved to Westerbork transit camp in the north-east near the German border. Deportees for "resettlement" leaving aboard the NS passenger and freight trains were unaware of their final destination or fate, as postcards were often thrown from moving trains. Most of the approximately 100,000 Jews sent to Westerbork perished. Between July 1942 and September 1944 almost every Tuesday

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1104-714: The Deutsche Reichsbahn in Silesia , Greater Poland and in Pomerania . In November 1939, as soon as the semi-colonial General Government was set up in occupied central Poland, a separate branch of DRB called Generaldirektion der Ostbahn ( Kolej Wschodnia in Polish) was established with headquarters called GEDOB in Kraków ; all of the DRB branches existed outside Germany proper. The Ostbahn

1196-508: The German police . The insurgents were shooting from secretly set-up bunkers, so reinforcements were brought in to continue the ghetto liquidation. According to the Nazi-issued final report, 17,000 Jews were killed during the insurgency, bringing the total to 26,200 victims before the ghetto's closure. Ten thousand were murdered in one day and the rest on the next day, with few managing to escape into

1288-879: The Hungarian State Railways (MÁV) in Northern Transylvania (Erdély). The non-native Jews were expelled from the Hungarian territory; some 20,000 were transported to occupied Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia , while the Transylvanian Jews were sent back to Romania. Hungary took part in Operation Barbarossa , supplying 50,000 Jewish slave labour for the Eastern Front. Most of the workers were dead by January 1943. Later that year, Hitler discovered that Prime Minister Miklos Kállay secretly conferred with

1380-619: The Majdanek concentration camp , and at Auschwitz II-Birkenau . In the German-occupied USSR, at the Maly Trostenets extermination camp , shootings were used to kill victims in the woods. At Chełmno , victims were killed in gas vans , whose redirected exhaust fed into sealed compartments at the rear of the vehicle. These were used at Maly Trostenets as well. Neither of these two camps had international rail connections; therefore,

1472-599: The Reichsbahn . The Holocaust trains were always managed and directed by native German SS men posted with that express' role throughout the system. The transports to camps under Operation Reinhard came mainly from the ghettos. The Warsaw Ghetto in the General Government held eventually over 450,000 Jews cramped in an area meant for about 60,000 people. The second-largest Ghetto in Łódź held 204,000 Jews. Both ghettos had collection points known as Umschlagplatz along

1564-531: The Riga Ghetto , or sent directly to Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibór, extermination camps built in spring and summer of 1942 only for gassing. Auschwitz II Birkenau gas chambers began operating in March. The last death camp, Majdanek, began operating gas chambers in late 1942. At Wannsee, the SS estimated that the "Final Solution" could ultimately eradicate up to 11 million European Jews; Nazi planners envisioned

1656-504: The SS fees. According to an expert report established on behalf of the German "Train of Commemoration" project, the receipts taken in by the state-owned Deutsche Reichsbahn for mass deportations in the period between 1938 and 1945 reached a sum of US$ 664,525,820.34. Powered mainly by efficient steam locomotives, the Holocaust trains were kept to a maximum of 55 freight cars on average, loaded from 150% to 200% capacity. The participation of German State Railway (the Deutsche Reichsbahn )

1748-819: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , "The Germans established at least 1000 ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone." The list of locations of the Jewish ghettos within the borders of pre-war and post-war Poland is compiled with the understanding that their inhabitants were either of Polish nationality from before the invasion, or had strong historical ties with Poland. Also, not all ghettos are listed here due to their transient nature. Permanent ghettos were created only in settlements with rail connections, because

1840-565: The Vichy Government was involved in the "Final Solution". In total, the Vichy government deported more than 76,000 Jews, without food or water (pleaded for by the Red Cross in vain), as well as thousands of other so-called undesirables to German-built concentration and extermination camps aboard the Holocaust trains, pursuant to an agreement with the German government; fewer than 3 percent survived

1932-629: The Wannsee Conference of 1942, the Nazis began to murder Jews in large numbers at death camps, newly built as part of Operation Reinhard . Since 1941, the Einsatzgruppen , mobile extermination squads, were already conducting mass shootings of Jews in Eastern Europe. The Jews of Western Europe were either deported to ghettos emptied through mass killings, such as the Rumbula massacre of the inhabitants of

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2024-564: 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 Reich Ministry of Transport , 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

2116-765: The " resettlement program ". Jews were transported to their deaths in Holocaust trains from liquidated ghettos of all occupied cities, including Łódź Ghetto , the last in Poland to be liquidated in August 1944. In some larger ghettos there were armed resistance attempts , such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising , the Białystok Ghetto Uprising , the Będzin and the Łachwa Ghetto uprisings, but in every case they failed against

2208-581: The "Final Solution", the Nazis made the Deutsche Reichsbahn an indispensable element of the mass extermination machine, wrote historian Raul Hilberg . The Nazis disguised their "Final Solution" as the mass " resettlement to the east ". The victims were told they were being taken to labour camps in Reichskommissariat Ukraine . In reality, from 1942 on, for most Jews, deportations meant being murdered at either Bełżec , Chełmno , Sobibór , Majdanek , Treblinka , or Auschwitz-Birkenau . The plan

2300-525: The 1939 Intelligenzaktion and the 1940 German AB-Aktion in Poland ) or imprisoned at the Nazi concentration camps . Managerial jobs were staffed with German officials in a wave of some 8,000 instant promotions. The new Eastern Division of DRB acquired 7,192 kilometres (4,469 mi) of new railway lines and 1,052 km of (mostly industrial) narrow gauge in the annexed areas . The Deutsche Reichsbahn acquired new infrastructure in Poland worth in excess of 8,278,600,000  złoty , including some of

2392-651: The Dutch national rail company Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS) apologised for its role in the deportation of Jews to the death camps. Norway surrendered to Nazi Germany on 10 June 1940. At the time, there were 1,700 Jews living in Norway. About half of them escaped to neutral Sweden. Round-ups by the SS began in the fall of 1942 with the support of the Norwegian police. In late November 1942, all Jews of Oslo including women and children were put on

2484-480: The German Railways for transport of the Jews. The Reichsbahn was paid the equivalent of a third class railway ticket for every prisoner transported to his or her destination: 8,000,000 passengers, 4 Pfennig per track kilometer, times 600 km (average voyage length), equaled 240 million Reichsmarks . The Reichsbahn pocketed both this money and its own share of the cash paid by the transported Jews after

2576-436: The German takeover of the country due to its total capitulation at Cassibile . By February 1944, the Germans shipped 8,000 Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau via Austria and Switzerland, although more than half of the victims arrested and deported from northern Italy were rounded up by the Italian police and not by the Nazis. Also between September 1943 and April 1944, at least 23,000 Italian soldiers were deported to work as slaves in

2668-456: The German war 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 benefit of the German war machine. The Netherlands was invaded on 10 May 1940 and fell under German military control. The community of native-Dutch Jews including the new Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria was estimated at 140,000. Most natives were concentrated in

2760-692: The Germans did not have enough Jews to fill an entire train's worth of wagons, so the victims were kept locked inside overnight at layover yards. The Holocaust trains also waited for military trains to pass. An average transport took about four days. The longest transport of the war, from Corfu , took 18 days. When the train arrived at the camp and the doors were opened, everyone was already dead. The SS built three extermination camps in occupied Poland specifically for Operation Reinhard: Bełżec , Sobibór , and Treblinka . They were fitted with identical mass-killing installations disguised as communal shower rooms. In addition, gas chambers were developed in 1942 at

2852-501: The Holocaust varied by country. After Germany invaded Belgium on 10 May 1940, all Jews were forced to register with the police as of 28 October 1940. The lists enabled Belgium to become the first country in occupied Western Europe to deport recently immigrating Jews. The implementation of the "Final Solution" in Belgium centred on the Mechelen transit camp (Malines) chosen because it

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2944-416: The Jews from the former Serbian province of Vardar Banovina and Thrace (today's North Macedonia and Greece ). The "deportations to the east" of 13,000 inmates, mostly to Treblinka extermination camp began on 22 February 1943, predominantly in passenger cars. In four days, some 20 trainsets departed under severely overcrowded conditions to occupied Poland requiring each train to stop daily to dump

3036-922: The Jews of Bulgaria proper were not deported. Czechoslovakia was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1939. Within the new ethnic-Czech Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia the Czechoslovak State Railways (ČSD) were taken over by the Reichsbann and the new German railway company Böhmisch-Mährische Bahn (BMB) was set up in its place. Three-quarters of Bohemian and Moravian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, of whom 33,000 died in Theresienstadt Ghetto . The remainder were transported in Holocaust trains from Theresienstadt mainly to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The last train for Birkenau left Theresienstadt on 28 October 1944 with 2,038 Jews of whom 1,589 were immediately gassed. The French national SNCF railway company under

3128-577: The Nazi train guards and the three resistance members – equipped only with one pistol between them – the train started again. Of the 233 people who attempted to escape, 26 were shot on the spot, 89 were recaptured, and 118 got away. Bulgaria joined the Axis powers in March 1941 and took part in the invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece. The Bulgarian government set up transit camps in Skopje , Blagoevgrad and Dupnitsa for

3220-535: The SS for further deliveries. The quagmire was resolved at the Wannsee conference of 20 January 1942 near Berlin , where the " Final Solution " (die Endlösung der Judenfrage) was set in place. The settlements listed in the Polish language, including major cities, had all been renamed after the 1939 joint invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union. Renaming everything in their own image had been one way in which

3312-673: The Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa . Advance forces of the Wehrmacht entered Pinsk on 4 July 1941. Christian inhabitants welcomed the German army as liberators from the Soviet regime, greeting them with bread and flowers. Under new anti-semitic regulations, Jews were forbidden to leave the city or shop in the market and were required to wear armbands with the Star of David . Random killings, beatings, looting, requisitions, and abduction of Jews for forced labour took place. A Judenrat (Jewish Council)

3404-514: The Soviet Union, and legally emigrate to the West to help form the nascent State of Israel . Poland was the only Eastern Bloc country to allow free Jewish aliyah without visas or exit permits upon the conclusion of World War II. By contrast, Stalin forcibly brought Soviet Jews back to USSR along with all Soviet citizens, as agreed to in the Yalta Conference . Some Jewish populations remained in

3496-476: The Soviet Union. By 1999, only 317 Jews lived in the city. Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland Ghettos were established by Nazi Germany in hundreds of locations across occupied Poland after the German invasion of Poland . Most ghettos were established between October 1939 and July 1942 in order to confine and segregate Poland's Jewish population of about 3.5 million for

3588-655: The Soviet Union. The NKVD secret police conducted raids and shut down all synagogues and shops. Mass deportations to Siberia followed. At that time, the population became over 90% Jewish due to the influx of refugees from German-controlled western Poland . The area was annexed into the Soviet Byelorussian Republic after the Elections to the People's Assemblies of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus conducted in an atmosphere of terror. On 22 June 1941 Germany invaded

3680-553: The USSR along the pre-war border with Poland since the Great Purge . The ghetto inhabitants – most of whom were murdered during Operation Reinhard – possessed Polish citizenship before the Nazi–Soviet invasion of Poland, which in turn enabled over 150,000 Holocaust survivors registered at CKŻP to take advantage of the later repatriation agreements between the governments of Poland and

3772-520: The United States. It corresponds to approximately $ 100,000 per survivor. Drancy internment camp served as the main transport hub for the Paris area and regions west and south thereof until August 1944, under the command of Alois Brunner from Austria. By 3 February 1944, 67 trains had left from there for Birkenau. Vittel internment camp served the northeast, closer to the German border from where all transports were taken over by German agents. By 23 June 1943, 50,000 Jews had been deported from France,

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3864-405: The Western Allies. To stop him, Germany launched the Operation Margarethe in March 1944, and took over control of all Jewish affairs. On 29 April 1944, the first deportation of Hungarian Jews to Birkenau took place. Between 15–25 May according to SS-Brigadeführer Edmund Veesenmayer 138,870 Jews had been deported. On 31 May 1944, Veesenmayer reported an additional 60,000 Jews were sent to

3956-406: The bodies of Jews who died during the previous 24 hours. In May 1943, the Bulgarian government led by King Boris III expelled 20,000 Jews from Sofia and at the same time, made plans to deport Bulgaria's Jews to the camps pursuant to an agreement with Germany. A Holocaust train from Thrace was witnessed by Stefan I , the Metropolitan Bishop of Sofia , who was shocked by what he saw. Ultimately,

4048-400: The camp closed down per Globocnik 's directive. Of the more than 245,000 Jews who passed through the Łódź Ghetto , the last 68,000 inmates, by then the largest final gathering of Jews in all of German-occupied Europe, had been murdered by the Nazis after 7 August 1944. They were told to prepare for resettlement; instead, over the next 23 days they were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau by train at

4140-416: The camps in six days, while the total for the past 16 days stood at 204,312 victims. Between May and July 1944, helped by Hungarian police, the German Sicherheitspolizei deported nearly 440,000 Hungarian Jews, mainly to Auschwitz-Birkenau, or 437,000 at the rate of 6,250 per day. Approximately 320,000 Hungarian Jews are estimated to have been murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau before July 1944. On 8 July,

4232-436: The capacity of the death camps to gas the victims and quickly dispose of their bodies, as well as the capacity of the railways to transport the victims from Nazi ghettos to extermination camps. The most modern accurate numbers on the scale of the "Final Solution" still rely partly on shipping records of the German railways. The first mass deportation of Jews from Nazi Germany, the Polenaktion , occurred in October 1938. It

4324-445: The closing of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, the transport/arrival timetable was 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, Heinrich Himmler sent a letter to Albert Ganzenmüller , the Under-secretary of State at the Reich Transport Ministry, requesting: "need your help and support. If I am to wind things up quickly, I must have more trains." Of

4416-411: The deportation of Jews from Hungary had stopped due to international pressure by the Pope , the King of Sweden , and the Red Cross (all of whom had recently learned about the extent of it). However, in October 1944 some 50,000 Jews were forced on a death march to Germany following a coup d'état which put the Hungarian pro-Nazi government back in control. They were forced to dig anti-tank ditches on

4508-413: The deportations. According to Serge Klarsfeld , president of the organization Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France , SNCF was forced by German and Vichy authorities to cooperate in providing transport for French Jews to the border and did not make any profit from this transport. However, in December 2014, SNCF agreed to pay up to $ 60 million worth of compensation to Holocaust survivors in

4600-424: The deportations; the Transport Ministry organized train schedules; and the Foreign Office negotiated with German-allied states and their railways about "processing" their own Jews. The deportation trains did not make major demands on the railways' resources; a typical day during the 1941-2 period would see 30,000 rail services operated by the Reichsbahn - of these, just two would be deportation trains. They were also

4692-425: The deportees would never return to Slovakia. Except for Croatia, Slovakia was the only Axis ally to pay for the deportation of its own Jewish population. Most of the Jewish population perished in two waves of deportations. The first, in 1942, took away two-thirds of the Slovak Jews; the second wave after the Slovak National Uprising in 1944 claimed another 13,500 victims, 10,000 of whom did not return. Switzerland

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4784-578: The deteriorating situation in occupied Belgium before the liberation. The percentages of Jews who were deported varied by location. It was highest in Antwerp, with 67 percent deported, but lower in Brussels (37 percent), Liége (35 percent) and Charleroi (42 percent). The main destination for the convoys was Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland . Smaller numbers were sent to Buchenwald and Ravensbrück concentration camps , as well as Vittel concentration camp in France. In total, 25,437 Jews were deported from Belgium. Only 1,207 of these survived

4876-422: The end of World War I . In the April 1919 Pinsk massacre , during the Polish–Soviet War , the Polish garrison summarily executed 35 Jewish men without due process on the suspicion of plotting a pro-Soviet counterattack. In the subsequent decade the city grew to 23,497 inhabitants as part of the Polesie Voivodeship in the Second Polish Republic . It was briefly declared the capital of the province in 1921 but

4968-441: The estimated six million Jews exterminated during World War II, two million were murdered on the spot by the military, Waffen-SS , Order Police battalions and mobile death squads of the Einsatzgruppen aided by and the local auxiliary police . The remainder were shipped to their deaths elsewhere. Most Jews were forced to pay for their own deportations, particularly wherever passenger carriages were used. This payment came in

5060-418: The factories in Poznań and Chrzanów were mass-producing for the Eastern Front the redesigned "Kriegslok" BR52 locomotives stripped of non-ferrous metals and instead made mostly of steel; locomotives in that battlespace were not expected to survive for long, so managers eliminated the use of higher-value metal like bronze, chrome, copper, brass, and nickel. Before the onset of Operation Reinhard which marked

5152-497: The first wave were not Belgian citizens, resulting from the intervention by Queen Elisabeth with the German authorities. In 1943, the deportations of Belgians resumed. In September, Jews with Belgian citizenship were deported for the first time. After the war, the collaborator Felix Lauterborn stated in his trial that 80 percent of arrests in Antwerp used information from paid informants. In total, 6,000 Jews were deported in 1943, with another 2,700 in 1944. Transports were halted by

5244-510: The food aid (paid by the Jews themselves) was completely dependent on the Germans, making even the potato-peels a hot commodity. Throughout 1940 and 1941, most ghettos were sealed off from the outside, walled off or enclosed with barbed wire, and any Jews found outside them could be shot on sight. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest ghetto in all of Nazi-occupied Europe, with over 400,000 Jews crammed into an area of 3.4 square kilometres (1.3 sq mi), or 7.2 persons per room. The Łódź Ghetto

5336-402: The forest. The ghetto ceased to exist entirely. Not a single house was burned down. After the war, Poland's borders were redrawn and Pinsk became part of the Soviet Union. Some of the Jews who survived the Holocaust returned, but they were prohibited from reopening a synagogue. In the 1970s and 1980s, most of them emigrated. Pinsk became part of independent Belarus in 1991 after the collapse of

5428-415: The form of direct money deposit to the SS in light of the "resettlement to work in the East" myth. Charged in the ghettos for accommodation, adult Jews paid full price one-way tickets, while children under 10–12 years of age paid half price, and those under four went free. Jews who had run out of money were the first to be deported. The SS forwarded part of this money to the German Transport Authority to pay

5520-494: The ghettos after their destruction. Many Jewish people were not able to leave the ghettos, either because they were too destitute or because they were still surrounded by Germans. This resulted in many of the ghettos' inhabitants dying from harsh conditions such as exposure, lack of food, and diseases. Those who left faced the challenge of seeking a place where they as displaced people could be resettled. Holocaust train Holocaust trains were railway transports run by

5612-399: The inclusion of Jews living in neutral and non-occupied countries such as Ireland , Sweden , Turkey , and the United Kingdom . Deportations on this scale required the coordination of numerous German government ministries and state organisations, including the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), the Reich Transport Ministry , and the Reich Foreign Office . The RSHA coordinated and directed

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5704-410: The invaders sought to redraw Europe's political map . All Polish territories were assigned as either Nazi zones of occupation (i.e. Bezirk Bialystok , Provinz Ostpreußen , etc.), or annexed by the Soviet Union , soon to be overrun again in Operation Barbarossa . The Soviet Ukraine and Byelorussia witnessed the "Polish Operation" of the NKVD , resulting in the virtual absence of ethnic Poles in

5796-402: The invasion. The liquidation of the Jewish ghettos across occupied Poland was closely connected with the construction of secretive death camps —industrial-scale mass-extermination facilities—built in early 1942 for the sole purpose of murder . The Nazi extermination program depended on rail transport, which enabled the SS to run and, at the same time, openly lie to their victims about

5888-778: The largest locomotive factories in Europe, the H. Cegielski – Poznań renamed DWM, and Fablok in Chrzanów renamed Oberschlesische Lokomotivwerke Krenau producing engines Ty37 and Pt31 (designed in Poland), as well as the locomotive parts factory Babcock-Zieleniewski in Sosnowiec renamed Ferrum AG (tasked with making parts to V-1 i V-2 rockets also). Under the new management, formerly Polish companies began producing German engines BR44, BR50 and BR86 as early as 1940 virtually for free, using forced labor . All Polish railwaymen were ordered to return to their place of work, or face death. Beating with fists became commonplace, although perceived as shocking by Polish long-term professionals. Their public executions were introduced in 1942. By 1944,

5980-504: The latter packed with up to 150 deportees, although 50 was the number proposed by the SS regulations. No food or water was supplied. The covered freight wagons were fitted with only a bucket latrine . A small barred window provided irregular ventilation, which oftentimes resulted in multiple deaths from either suffocation or exposure to the elements. Polish forced labourers and Soviet prisoners of war were transported in similar poor conditions, also resulting in many deaths. At times,

6072-511: The most deadly phase of the Holocaust in Poland many Jews were transported by road to killing sites such as the Chełmno extermination camp , equipped with gas vans . In 1942, stationary gas chambers were built at Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek and Auschwitz. After the Nazi takeover of PKP, the train movements, originating inside and outside occupied Poland and terminating at death camps, were tracked by Dehomag using IBM -supplied card-reading machines and traditional waybills produced by

6164-452: The overwhelming German military force, and the resisting Jews were either executed locally or deported with the rest of prisoners to the extermination camps . By the time Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe was liberated by the Red Army, not a single Jewish ghetto in Poland was left standing. Only about 50,000–120,000 Polish Jews survived the war on native soil, a fraction of their prewar population of 3,500,000. In total, according to archives of

6256-441: The purpose of economic exploitation. In 1939, for logistical reasons, the Jewish communities in settlements without railway lines in occupied Poland were dissolved. By the end of 1941, about 3.5 million Polish Jews had been segregated and ghettoised by the SS in a massive deportation action involving the use of freight trains. Permanent ghettos had direct railway connections because the food aid (paid for by Jews themselves)

6348-656: The purpose of persecution, terror, and exploitation. In smaller towns, ghettos often served as staging points for Jewish slave-labor and mass deportation actions, while in the urban centers they resembled walled-off prison-islands described by some historians as little more than instruments of "slow, passive murder", with dead bodies littering the streets. In most cases, the larger ghettos did not correspond to traditional Jewish neighborhoods, and non-Jewish Poles and members of other ethnic groups were ordered to take up residence elsewhere. Smaller Jewish communities with populations under 500 were terminated through expulsion soon after

6440-400: The rail tracks, with most deportations from Warsaw to Treblinka taking place between 22 July and 12 September 1942. The gassing at Treblinka started on 23 July 1942, with two pendulum trains delivering victims six days each week ranging from about 4,000 to 7,000 victims per transport, the first in the early morning and the second in the mid-afternoon. All new arrivals were sent immediately to

6532-710: The rate of 2,500 per day. Căile Ferate Române (Romanian Railways) were involved in the transport of Jewish and Romani people to concentration camps in Romanian Old Kingdom , Bessarabia , northern Bukovina , and Transnistria . In a notable example, after the Iasi pogrom events, Jews were forcibly loaded onto freight cars with planks hammered in place over the windows and traveled for seven days in unimaginable conditions. Many died and were gravely affected by lack of air, blistering heat, lack of water, food or medical attention. These veritable death trains arrived to their destinations Podu Iloaiei and Călăraşi with only one-fifth of their passengers alive. No official apology

6624-608: The regions of Thrace and from Macedonia in the Bulgarian share of the partitioned Greece, where they were gassed upon arrival. Under Hungarian control, the number of Jews officially increased to 725,007 by 1941. Of this total, 184,453 Jews lived in Budapest. While in alliance with Nazi Germany, Hungary acquired new provinces at both the First and the Second Vienna Awards (1938; 1940). The Hungarian Army received vital help from

6716-494: The road westward. A further 25,000 Jews were put in an "international ghetto" under Swedish protection engineered by Carl Lutz and Raoul Wallenberg . When the Soviet Army liberated Budapest on 17 January 1945, of the original 825,000 Jews in the country, less than 260,000 Jews were still alive, including 80,000 Hungarian natives. The popular view that Benito Mussolini resisted the deportation of Italian Jews to Germany

6808-403: The roof from cans sealed hermetically. Once off the transports, the prisoners were split by category. The old, the young, the sick, and the infirm were sometimes separated for immediate death by shooting, while the rest were prepared for the gas chambers. In a single 14-hour workday, 12,000 to 15,000 people would be killed at any one of these camps. The capacity of the crematoria at Birkenau

6900-483: The sixty-eight transports to Auschwitz 1052 people returned, including 181 of the 3450 people taken from eighteen of the trains at Cosel . There were 18 survivors out of approximately one thousand people selected from the nineteen trains to Sobibor, the remainder being murdered on arrival. For the Netherlands, the overall survival rate among Jews who boarded the trains for all camps was 4.86 percent. On 29 September 2005,

6992-609: The subsequent Warsaw Ghetto Uprising resulting in new deportations. The 1942 Höfle Telegram of the total number of victims most of whom were transported by train to Operation Reinhard death camps, including cumulative numbers known today, is as follows: The Höfle Telegram lists the number of arrivals to the Reinhard camps through 1942 as 1,274,166 Jews based on Reichsbahn own records. The last train to be sent to Treblinka extermination camp left Białystok Ghetto on 18 August 1943; all prisoners were murdered in gas chambers after which

7084-411: The trains stopped at the nearby Łódź Ghetto and Minsk Ghetto , respectively. From there, the prisoners were taken by trucks. At Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, the killing mechanism consisted of a large internal-combustion engine delivering exhaust fumes to gas chambers through pipes. At Auschwitz and Majdanek, the gas chambers relied on Zyklon B pellets of hydrogen cyanide, poured through vents in

7176-532: The undressing area by the Sonderkommando squad that managed the arrival platform, and from there to the gas chambers. According to German records, including the official report by SS Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop , some 265,000 Jews were transported in freight trains from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka during this period. The murder operation code-named Grossaktion Warsaw concluded several months before

7268-507: The war. The only time during World War II that a Holocaust train carrying Jewish deportees from Western Europe was stopped by the underground happened on 19 April 1943, when the Transport No. 20 left Mechelen with 1,631 Jews, heading for Auschwitz. Soon after leaving Mechelen, the driver stopped the train after seeing an emergency red light, set by the Belgians. After a brief firefight between

7360-670: Was 20,000 bodies per day. The standard means of transport was a 10-metre long (32 ft 9 + 3 ⁄ 4  in) freight car , 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 trainset of 2,500 people in 50 cars, each boxcar loaded with 50 prisoners. In reality, however, boxcars were routinely loaded to 200% of capacity or 100 people per car. This resulted in an average of 5,000 people per trainset. During

7452-487: Was being realized in the utmost secrecy. In late 1942, during a telephone conversation, Hitler's private secretary Martin Bormann admonished Heinrich Himmler , who was informing him about 50,000 Jews already exterminated in a concentration camp in Poland. "They were not exterminated – Bormann screamed – only evacuated, evacuated, evacuated!", and slammed down the phone, wrote Enghelberg. Following

7544-433: Was completely dependent on the SS , similar to all newly built labour camps. Jews were legally banned from baking bread. They were sealed off from the general public in hundreds of virtual prison-islands called Jüdische Wohnbezirke or Wohngebiete der Juden . However, the new system was unsustainable. By the end of 1941, most ghettoised Jews had no savings left to pay the SS for further bulk food deliveries. The quagmire

7636-570: Was crucial to the effective implementation of the " Final Solution of the Jewish Question ". The DRB was paid to transport Jews and other victims of the Holocaust from thousands of towns and cities throughout Europe to meet their death in the Nazi concentration camp system. As well as transporting German Jews, DRB was responsible for coordinating transports on the rail networks of occupied territories and Germany's allies. The characteristics of organized concentration and transportation of victims of

7728-488: Was formed on 30 July 1941. On the night of 4 August, 300 Jews were detained in order to compel the council to assemble Jews between the ages of 16 and 60, ostensibly for a labour detail. Thousands of men were marched out of the town and shot in prepared trenches. In the next two days, the Germans rounded up additional Jews, including younger boys and some women, who were also shot. By 8 August 1941, 8,000 Jews were murdered in this manner. The ghetto in Pińsk existed only for half

7820-539: Was granted 3,818 kilometres (2,372 mi) of railway lines (nearly doubled by 1941) and 505 km of narrow gauge, initially. In December 1939, on the request of Hans Frank in Berlin, the Ostbahndirektion was given financial independence after paying back 10 million Reichsmarks to DRB. The removal of all bomb damage was completed in 1940. The Polish management was either executed in mass shooting actions (see:

7912-560: Was released yet by Căile Ferate Române for their role in the Holocaust in Romania. On 9 September 1941, the parliament of the Slovak State ratified the Jewish Codex, a series of laws and regulations that stripped Slovakia's 89,000 Jews of their civil rights and means of economic survival. The ruling Slovak People’s Party paid 500 Reichsmarks per expelled Jew, in exchange for a promise that

8004-417: Was resolved at the Wannsee conference of 20 January 1942 near Berlin , where the "Final Solution of the Jewish question" ( die Endlösung der Judenfrage ) was set in place. It was a euphemism referring to the Nazi plan for the annihilation of the Jewish people. During the liquidation of the ghettos starting in 1942, the trains were used to transport the condemned populations to death camps. To implement

8096-478: Was the forcible eviction of German Jews with Polish citizenship fuelled by the Kristallnacht . Approximately 30,000 Jews were rounded up and sent via rail to refugee camps. Within various phases of the Holocaust , the trains were employed differently. At first, they were used to concentrate the Jewish populations in the ghettos , and often to transport them to forced labour and German concentration camps for

8188-474: Was the hub of the Belgian National Railway system. The first convoy left Mechelen for extermination camps on 22 July 1942, although nearly 2,250 Jews had already been deported as forced laborers for Organisation Todt to Northern France. By October 1942, some 16,600 people had been deported in 17 convoys. At this time, deportations were temporarily halted until January 1943. Those deported in

8280-463: Was the location of secluded massacres of Jews transported by Holocaust trains from the Brześć Ghetto as well. The Pińsk Ghetto's population swelled, with Jews deported en masse from all neighbouring settlements until food ran out. The liquidation of the ghetto began on 28 October 1942. The German motorized battalion met armed resistance from underground fighters, which came as a complete shock to

8372-540: Was the second largest mass shooting operation in a single settlement to that particular date during the Holocaust , after Babi Yar where the death toll exceeded 33,000 Jews. The Babi Yar shootings were surpassed only by the Nazi Aktion Erntefest of 3 November 1943 in the Lublin district with 42,000–43,000 Jews murdered at once over execution pits, dug specifically for this purpose. Poland gained independence at

8464-424: Was the second largest, holding about 160,000 inmates. In documents and signage, the Nazis usually referred to the ghettos they created as Jüdischer Wohnbezirk or Wohngebiet der Juden , meaning " Jewish Quarter ". By the end of 1941, most Polish Jews were already ghettoized, even though the Germans knew that the system was unsustainable; most inmates had no chance of earning their own keep, and no savings left to pay

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