German Railroads, Jewish Souls

The Reichsbahn, Bureaucracy, and the Final Solution

Raul Hilberg, Christopher Browning, Peter Hayes

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781789202762, 9781789202755
• eBook ISBN: 9781789202779
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

A rich and accessible introduction to the role of the German railway system in the Holocaust, a topic that remains understudied even today.

Renowned Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg considered the German railway system that delivered European Jews to ghettos and death camps in Eastern Europe to be not only an essential component of the "machinery of destruction" but also emblematic of the amoral bureaucracy that helped to implement the Jewish genocide.

German Railroads, Jewish Souls centers around Hilberg's seminal essay of the same name, a landmark study of German railways in the Nazi era long unavailable in English. Supplemented with additional writings from Hilberg, primary source materials, and historical commentary from leading scholars Christopher Browning and Peter Hayes.

"This important book unites three prominent scholars tackling crucial questions about German railways and the Holocaust. Two essays from the late, renowned Raul Hilberg investigate their overlooked role in the extermination of the European Jews. They provide groundbreaking investigations into the German railway as the prototype of a bureaucracy and challenge its supposed banality. While Christopher Browning eloquently situates Hilberg's essays within the historical literature, Peter Hayes makes a detailed critique of the common but false belief that the deportation and annihilation of the Jews were more of a priority for the Nazis than the war effort. This question, arising from Hilberg's essays, demonstrates the continued significance of his work today."—Wolf Gruner, author, The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia: Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses

Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

THE BUREAUCRACY OF ANNIHILATION

Raul Hilberg

We are, all of us who have thought and written about the Holocaust, accustomed to thinking of this event as unique. There is no concept in all history like the Final Solution. There is no precedent for the almost endless march of millions of men, women, and children into gas chambers. The systematization of this destruction process sets it aside from all else that has ever happened. Yet if we examine this event in detail, observing the progression of small steps day by day, we see much in the destruction of Jewry that is familiar and even commonplace in the context of contemporary institutions and practices. Basically, the Jews were destroyed as a consequence of a multitude of acts performed by a phalanx of functionaries in public offices and private enterprises, and many of these measures, taken one by one, turn out to be bureaucratic, embedded in habit, routine, and tradition. It is almost a case of regarding the whole upheaval in all of its massiveness as something incredible, and then observing the small components and seeing in them very little that one could not expect in a modern society. One can go further and assert that it is the very mundaneness and ordinariness of these everyday official actions that made the destruction process so crass. Never before had the total experience of a modern bureaucracy been applied to such an undertaking. Never before had it produced such a result.

The uprooting and annihilation of European Jewry was a multipronged operation of a highly decentralized apparatus. This was no perpetration by a single department staffed with specialists in destruction. Germany never had a commissariat of Jewish affairs. The machinery of destruction was the organized German society, its ministries, armed forces, party formations, and industry.¹ In democratic countries, we are accustomed to thinking of legislatures as devices that control administrative units, infuse them with power and money, authorize them to undertake action, and by implication, of course, apportion jurisdiction between them. In Nazi Germany, there was no legislature that, like the United States Congress, can create an agency and abolish it. In Nazi Germany, every organization moved on a track of self-assertion. To some of us this may seem like anarchy. How much more remarkable then that this congeries of bureaucratic agencies, these people drawn from every area of expertise, operating without a basic plan, uncoordinated in any central office, nevertheless displayed order, balance, and economy throughout the destruction process.

The apparatus was able to advance unerringly, because there was an inner logic to its measures. A decree defining the term “Jew,” expropriations of Jewish property, the physical separation and isolation of the victims, forced labor, deportations, gassings—these were not random moves. The sequence of steps was built in; each was a stage in the development. By 1941, the participating decision-makers themselves became aware that they had been traveling on a determined path. As their assault took on gestalt, its latent structure became manifest. Now they had an overview that allowed them to see a beginning and an end and that prompted them to demand of indigenous administrations in occupied and satellite countries that the “Nuremberg principle” be adopted in the definition of the Jews and that other precedents laid down in Germany be followed in the appropriate order for the accomplishment of a “final solution.”²

Nothing, however, was simple. Neither the preliminary nor the concluding phases of the destruction process could be traversed without difficulties and complications. The Jewish communities had all been emancipated and they were tied to the Gentile population in countless relationships, from business contacts, partnerships, leases, and employment contracts, to personal friendships and intermarriages. To sever these connections one by one, a variety of measures were necessary, and these actions were taken by specialists who were accountants, lawyers, engineers, or physicians. The questions with which these men were concerned were almost always technical. How was a “Jewish enterprise” to be defined? Where were the borders of a ghetto to be drawn? What was to be the disposition of pension claims belonging to deported Jews? How should bodies be disposed of? These were the problems pondered by the bureaucrats in their memoranda, correspondence, meetings, and discussions. That was the essence of their work.

No organized element of German society was entirely uninvolved in the process of destruction. Yet this very fact, which is virtually an axiom, has been extraordinarily hard to assimilate in descriptions and assessments of the Nazi regime. It is much easier to visualize the role of a propagandist or some practitioner of violence than to appreciate the contribution of a bookkeeper. For this reason, the principal spotlight in postwar years has been placed on the SS and the Gestapo. There is some awareness also of the military, particularly where, as in occupied France, it had made itself conspicuous. Similarly unavoidable was the discovery that an enterprise like I. G. Farben had established branches in Auschwitz. Much less well known, however, are the activities of such faceless components of the destructive machine as the Finance Ministry, which engaged in confiscations, or the armed forces network of armament inspectorates, which was concerned with forced labor, or German municipal authorities that directed or participated in the creation and maintenance of ghettos in Eastern Europe. Two large bureaucracies have remained all but obscure, even though they operated at the very scene of death: the German railroads and the Order Police. This omission should give us pause.

Trains and street police have been common sights in Europe for more than a century. Of all the agencies of government, these two organizations have always been highly visible to every inhabitant of the continent, yet they have been overlooked in the analysis of the Nazi regime. It is as if their very size and ubiquity deflected attention from the lethal operations in which they were so massively engaged. What was the function of the German railroads in the annihilation of the Jews? What tasks did the Order Police perform?

Case I: The Indispensability of the Railroads

In the chain of steps that led to the extinction of millions of Jewish victims, the Reichsbahn, as the German railways were known, carried the Jews from many countries and regions of Europe to the death camps, which were situated on occupied Polish soil. The Jews were passed from one jurisdiction to another: from the civil or military authorities that had uprooted and concentrated them, to the Security Police, which was in charge of rounding them up, to the Reichsbahn, which transported them to the camps where they were gassed. Reichsbahn operations were a crucial link in this process and their significance is underscored by their magnitude. Camps account for most of the Jewish dead, and almost all of the people deported there were moved by rail. The movement encompassed 3 million Jews.

Of course, these transports were but a small portion of the Reichsbahn’s business. At its peak, the railway network stretched from Bordeaux to Dnepropetrovsk and points east, and its personnel consisted of a half million civil servants and almost twice as many other employees.³ In the Reich itself (including Austria, Polish incorporated territory, and the Białystok district), some 130,000 freight cars were being assembled for loading every day.⁴ Germany depended on its railroads to carry soldiers and civilians, military cargo, and industrial products throughout the war. A complex functional and territorial division of labor was required to administer these transport programs.

The transport minister, Julius Dorpmüller, held the office from 1937 to the end of the war. The Staatssekretär (state secretary) responsible for railways in the ministry was at first Wilhelm Kleinmann and, from the spring of 1942, Dr. Albert Ganzenmüller, a young, capable engineer and consummate technocrat who was to transport what Albert Speer was to production.⁵ Ganzenmüller’s central divisions, labeled E (for Eisenbahn or railway) included E 1 (Traffic and Tariffs), E 2 (Operations), and L (Landesverteidigung or Defense of the Land, meaning military transport). The Traffic Division dealt with financial matters, E 2 with operational considerations, and L with military priorities. Within E 2, the following breakdown should be of interest:⁶

Table 1.1. Eisenbahn Operations Division

E 2 (Operations)	Max Leibbrand (from 1942: Gustav Dilli)
21 (Passenger Trains)	Paul Schnell
211 (Special Trains)	Otto Stange

Stange administered the transport of Jewish deportees. He received the requests for trains from Adolf Eichmann’s office in the Security Police and channeled them to financial and operational offices in the Reichsbahn.⁷ The position and designation of 211 on the organization chart point to two important features of the deportation process. The first is that the Jewish deportees were always booked as people, even though they were carried in box cars. The passenger concept was essential in order that the Reichsbahn could collect the fare for each deported Jew in accordance with applicable tariffs and to preserve internal prerogatives and divisions of jurisdiction—the passenger specialists would remain in control. The second characteristic of Stange’s office is indicated by the word “special.” He dealt only with group transports, each of which had to be planned.

Passenger trains were either regular (Regelzüge), moving at hours stated in published schedules, or special (Sonderzüge), assembled and dispatched upon demand. Jews were deported in Sonderzüge and the procurement and scheduling of such trains was a lengthy and involved procedure that had to be administered at the regional level, particularly in the Generalbetriebsleitung Ost (General Directorate East), one of three such Leitungen in Nazi Germany. Ost was concerned with trains directed to Poland and occupied areas farther to the east, and hence Jewish transports from large parts of Europe were channeled through this office. An abbreviated chart of the Generalbetriebsleitung would look as follows:⁸

Table 1.2. General Directorate East of the Reichsbahn

Generalbetriebsleitung Ost	Ernst Emrich
I. Operations	Eggert (Mangold)
L	Bebenroth
P (Passenger Schedules)	Fröhlich
PW (Passenger Cars)	Jacobi
II. Traffic	Simon (Hartmann)
III. Main Car Allocation Office for Freight Cars	Schultz

In this array of officials, it was primarily Wilhelm Fröhlich and Karl Jacobi who dealt with Jewish train movements. Conferences were called and dates were fixed for transport programs aggregating forty or fifty trains at a time: ethnic Germans, Hitler Youth, laborers, Jews—all were on the same agenda.⁹ The actual schedules were written locally, in the Reichsbahndirektionen, or in the Generaldirektion der Ostbahn, the railway network in central Poland that dispatched Jews on short hauls from ghettos to death camps nearby.¹⁰ The Reichsbahndirektionen were also responsible for the allocations of cars and locomotives. Only then were transports assembled for the Jews loaded, sealed, dispatched, emptied, and cleaned, to be filled with new, perhaps altogether different cargoes, in the circulatory flow. The trains moved slowly and most were overloaded. The norm in Western Europe or Germany was a thousand persons per train.¹¹ During 1944, transports with Hungarian Jews averaged three thousand.¹² In Poland, such numbers were often exceeded. One train, fifty cars long, carried 8,205 Jews from Kolomea to the death camp of Bełz˙ec.¹³ Unheated in the winter, stifling in the summer, the cars, filled wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1. The Bureaucracy of Annihilation
• 2. German Railroads/Jewish Souls
• 3. Document Section
• 4. Raul Hilberg and Other Historians of the German Railway during the Nazi Era and the Holocaust
• 5. Hilberg, the Railroads, and the Holocaust
• Photographs
• Index