A train commemorating the thousands of children murdered by the Nazis has ended its journey near the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
The train, which has been touring Germany since November, features an exhibition of pictures and letters from Holocaust victims. It is expected to open at the main train station in the town, now known by its Polish name of Oswiecim. The train was not scheduled to enter the site of the former camp.
Organiser Hans Minow said he felt humbled to have been allowed to finish the journey at the site of the former camp.
"It is not easy to confront ourselves because we are not the victims but we are the sons and daughters of the perpetrators," Mr Minow said. "We say this knowing that perhaps our fathers and mothers - if not participated - they did not do what they had to do when the crimes started," he added.
Controversy
A wreath-laying ceremony was scheduled at the site where the deportations arrived. About 230,000 children, mainly Jewish, were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Second World War.
Hundreds of young people from across Germany accompanied the commemorative train on its final stage.
Earlier in the journey the state-owned rail operator Deutsche Bahn drew heavy criticism from the exhibition's organisers when it refused to allow the train to stop at Berlin's central station in April. Deutsche Bahn said this would have caused major disruption to normal services. The exhibition took place at Ostbahnhof, the main station of the former East Berlin. The company also faced criticism over its demand for $110,000 (£55,000) in fees for use of its network. The government urged it to drop the charge.
Deutsche Bahn took over responsibility for Germany's rail network from the Nazi-era Reichsbahn, which was used to transport millions of Jews to their deaths in concentration camps.
BBC
Showing posts with label Reichsbahn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reichsbahn. Show all posts
May 10, 2008
January 24, 2008
German railways admits complicity in Holocaust
German railways today admitted the central role its Nazi-era predecessor played in the Holocaust, saying that without the cooperation of the network the systematic murder of millions of people could never have happened.
Launching its first ever touring exhibition about the Holocaust, the state rail company Deutsche Bahn (DB) said the tracks and freight of the Reichsbahn were integral to the Nazis' extermination plan.
"Without the Reichsbahn the industrial murder of millions of people would not have been possible," said DB's in-house historian, Susanne Kill. Three million Jews and Roma - including around 1.5m children - were gathered from across Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe and transported on Reichsbahn railway tracks in cattle wagons to extermination camps. The process involved carefully kept timetables, reliable contingents of drivers and precise coordination with the military that always had priority over the tracks.
Prisoners were even charged a fare for the journey, allowing the railways to earn millions of Reichsmarks from the death transports. Adults paid 4 pfennigs per kilometre, children 2 pfennigs, while those under the age of 4 travelled free. Trainloads of 400 or more, which amounted to massive overcrowding, received a 50% discount.
But the exhibition, Special Trains to Death, which has opened on Berlin's Potsdamer Platz and will move to railway stations around the country, has courted considerable controversy. The head of DB, Hartmut Mehdorn, long resisted the idea of showing it at a working railway station, lest it "put off" commuters from using the trains.
He has also refused to allow a "Train of Memory" full of biographies of child Holocaust victims, which is due to reach Auschwitz concentration camp in May, to use its tracks unless it paid tens of thousands of euros. Mr Mehdorn argued that the topic was better suited to a museum. But supporters said exhibiting it at a railway station would increase its impact and the numbers of people who saw it.
Today the transport minister, Wolfgang Tiefensee, who pushed for the station option despite resistance from within DB, told the Guardian: "I'm glad that people will be confronted with this topic in a public place on their way to or from work, because the question is still one for everyone, not just the railways to answer - how was it possible that people allowed such crimes to happen?"
Max Ansbacher from Würzburg recalled the fear, hunger and cold he felt when, at the age of 15, he was transported by windowless cattle wagon to Auschwitz in October 1944.
"The journey began in the dark," he said. "The wagon shunted backwards and forwards for ages, adding to our sense of insecurity ... people screamed and children and the sick cried constantly. We drank water from melting icicles ... we didn't know what Auschwitz was, we only knew it was where we were going. The farmers in the fields laughed at us when we asked them where it was and symbolically sliced their hands across their throats."
A large amount of documentation has helped historians detail the close cooperation between the Nazi regime and the railways which was necessary for the Holocaust to succeed.
In January 1943, Heinrich Himmler, who was head of the SS, the Nazi elite force, wrote to Albert Ganzenmüller, the secretary of state for transport and the deputy director of the Reichsbahn, pleading for more train stock.
"If I have any hope of quickly dealing with matters, I must have more haulage trains. Help me to get more," he said.
Ganzenmüller was the only member of the railways ever to go on trial for organising the deportations. But on his first day in court in 1973 he suffered a heart attack and was declared medically unfit. Although he lived for a further 23 years, he never faced a further probe into his role.
Guardian
Launching its first ever touring exhibition about the Holocaust, the state rail company Deutsche Bahn (DB) said the tracks and freight of the Reichsbahn were integral to the Nazis' extermination plan.
"Without the Reichsbahn the industrial murder of millions of people would not have been possible," said DB's in-house historian, Susanne Kill. Three million Jews and Roma - including around 1.5m children - were gathered from across Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe and transported on Reichsbahn railway tracks in cattle wagons to extermination camps. The process involved carefully kept timetables, reliable contingents of drivers and precise coordination with the military that always had priority over the tracks.
Prisoners were even charged a fare for the journey, allowing the railways to earn millions of Reichsmarks from the death transports. Adults paid 4 pfennigs per kilometre, children 2 pfennigs, while those under the age of 4 travelled free. Trainloads of 400 or more, which amounted to massive overcrowding, received a 50% discount.
But the exhibition, Special Trains to Death, which has opened on Berlin's Potsdamer Platz and will move to railway stations around the country, has courted considerable controversy. The head of DB, Hartmut Mehdorn, long resisted the idea of showing it at a working railway station, lest it "put off" commuters from using the trains.
He has also refused to allow a "Train of Memory" full of biographies of child Holocaust victims, which is due to reach Auschwitz concentration camp in May, to use its tracks unless it paid tens of thousands of euros. Mr Mehdorn argued that the topic was better suited to a museum. But supporters said exhibiting it at a railway station would increase its impact and the numbers of people who saw it.
Today the transport minister, Wolfgang Tiefensee, who pushed for the station option despite resistance from within DB, told the Guardian: "I'm glad that people will be confronted with this topic in a public place on their way to or from work, because the question is still one for everyone, not just the railways to answer - how was it possible that people allowed such crimes to happen?"
Max Ansbacher from Würzburg recalled the fear, hunger and cold he felt when, at the age of 15, he was transported by windowless cattle wagon to Auschwitz in October 1944.
"The journey began in the dark," he said. "The wagon shunted backwards and forwards for ages, adding to our sense of insecurity ... people screamed and children and the sick cried constantly. We drank water from melting icicles ... we didn't know what Auschwitz was, we only knew it was where we were going. The farmers in the fields laughed at us when we asked them where it was and symbolically sliced their hands across their throats."
A large amount of documentation has helped historians detail the close cooperation between the Nazi regime and the railways which was necessary for the Holocaust to succeed.
In January 1943, Heinrich Himmler, who was head of the SS, the Nazi elite force, wrote to Albert Ganzenmüller, the secretary of state for transport and the deputy director of the Reichsbahn, pleading for more train stock.
"If I have any hope of quickly dealing with matters, I must have more haulage trains. Help me to get more," he said.
Ganzenmüller was the only member of the railways ever to go on trial for organising the deportations. But on his first day in court in 1973 he suffered a heart attack and was declared medically unfit. Although he lived for a further 23 years, he never faced a further probe into his role.
Guardian
Labels:
Auschwitz,
Deutsche Bahn,
Holocaust,
Reichsbahn,
Special Trains to Death
November 13, 2007
Holocaust train sets off to tell the story of Auschwitz
A train has pulled out of a German railway station to travel more than six decades back in time. Its destination: hell on earth. The Train of Commemoration is a travelling exhibition dedicated to the children deported by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Over the next six months, it will visit 30 cities between Frankfurt and its final destination – the Auschwitz death camp.
The train left Frankfurt station on Friday to begin a six-month, 1,864-mile trip through southern Germany to the Auschwitz Memorial near the present-day town of Oswiecim in Poland. It is scheduled to arrive on 8 May – the 63rd anniversary of VE Day.
An estimated 1.5 million children and young people were rounded up between 1940 and 1944 and transported by the former state railway, the Reichsbahn, to the concentration camps. Fewer than 10 per cent survived. The exhibition train is made up of a vintage 1921 locomotive and four carriages detailing both the bureaucracy of genocide and the human responses to it.
The displays include Reichsbahn maps, letters, chronologies, laws and regulations, as well as official documents related to the railway's role in carrying children from across Europe to their deaths. There are also poignant letters, drawings and poems from some of the unwilling passengers who never made the return trip. The exhibition commemorates the Jewish, Sinti and Roma victims of the Nazis from Germany, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Greece, Poland and the former Soviet Union. It also aims to honour the aid organisations which helped to save children from the death camps.
"Trains were the decisive means of transportation for carrying people to the concentration camps and the ghettoes," said Hans-Ruediger Minow, of the private initiative which organised the exhibition. "At that time, it was only in the stations that other people witnessed the fate of the deported at all."
Many Holocaust survivors now live in Israel, struggling with mental health problems and physical handicaps related to their ordeals. Banded together in a new organisation called "Children of the Shoah", they plan to file lawsuits against Germany over the coming months for more money to help them live better lives.
Margot Kleinberger was 11 when she was deported from Hanover. "After we were persecuted everywhere on the streets for being Jews, we thought the trains would take us to a better place," said the 76-year-old. "But almost no one survived the camps where they took us." Stops along the train's route will be used to display the exhibition and to collect more photos and oral testimonies. The organisers say that the exhibition "serves as a warning against the return of racist hatred, right-wing extremism and national megalomania".
The question of how to commemorate the role of Germany's rail system in the Holocaust sparked controversy in October last year. At the time, the German Transport minister, Wolfgang Tiefensee, wanted the country's railway stations to host an exhibition organised by the anti-Nazi campaigner Beate Klarsfeld, which had already been successfully shown in France.
But Hartmut Mehdorn, the head of the Reichsbahn's successor Deutsche Bahn – – refused to allow the exhibit in its stations. "The subject is far too serious for people to engage with it while chewing on a sandwich and rushing to catch a train," he said.
The row ended in December when a deal was struck to have an exhibition in German stations and the Deutsche Bahn museum in Nuremberg. That display, which is not related to the Train of Commemoration, will open on 27 January – the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945.
Independent
The train left Frankfurt station on Friday to begin a six-month, 1,864-mile trip through southern Germany to the Auschwitz Memorial near the present-day town of Oswiecim in Poland. It is scheduled to arrive on 8 May – the 63rd anniversary of VE Day.
An estimated 1.5 million children and young people were rounded up between 1940 and 1944 and transported by the former state railway, the Reichsbahn, to the concentration camps. Fewer than 10 per cent survived. The exhibition train is made up of a vintage 1921 locomotive and four carriages detailing both the bureaucracy of genocide and the human responses to it.
The displays include Reichsbahn maps, letters, chronologies, laws and regulations, as well as official documents related to the railway's role in carrying children from across Europe to their deaths. There are also poignant letters, drawings and poems from some of the unwilling passengers who never made the return trip. The exhibition commemorates the Jewish, Sinti and Roma victims of the Nazis from Germany, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Greece, Poland and the former Soviet Union. It also aims to honour the aid organisations which helped to save children from the death camps.
"Trains were the decisive means of transportation for carrying people to the concentration camps and the ghettoes," said Hans-Ruediger Minow, of the private initiative which organised the exhibition. "At that time, it was only in the stations that other people witnessed the fate of the deported at all."
Many Holocaust survivors now live in Israel, struggling with mental health problems and physical handicaps related to their ordeals. Banded together in a new organisation called "Children of the Shoah", they plan to file lawsuits against Germany over the coming months for more money to help them live better lives.
Margot Kleinberger was 11 when she was deported from Hanover. "After we were persecuted everywhere on the streets for being Jews, we thought the trains would take us to a better place," said the 76-year-old. "But almost no one survived the camps where they took us." Stops along the train's route will be used to display the exhibition and to collect more photos and oral testimonies. The organisers say that the exhibition "serves as a warning against the return of racist hatred, right-wing extremism and national megalomania".
The question of how to commemorate the role of Germany's rail system in the Holocaust sparked controversy in October last year. At the time, the German Transport minister, Wolfgang Tiefensee, wanted the country's railway stations to host an exhibition organised by the anti-Nazi campaigner Beate Klarsfeld, which had already been successfully shown in France.
But Hartmut Mehdorn, the head of the Reichsbahn's successor Deutsche Bahn – – refused to allow the exhibit in its stations. "The subject is far too serious for people to engage with it while chewing on a sandwich and rushing to catch a train," he said.
The row ended in December when a deal was struck to have an exhibition in German stations and the Deutsche Bahn museum in Nuremberg. That display, which is not related to the Train of Commemoration, will open on 27 January – the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945.
Independent
Labels:
Auschwitz,
Holocaust,
Oswiecim,
Reichsbahn,
VE Day
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