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. The plan was being realized in the utmost secrecy. In reality, from 1942 on, for most Jews, deportations meant only death at either Bełżec, Chełmno, Sobibór, Majdanek, Treblinka, or Auschwitz-Birkenau. The victims were told they were being taken to labour camps in Reichskommissariat Ukraine. The Nazis disguised their "Final Solution" as the mass " resettlement to the east". The use of railroads enabled the Nazis to lie about the "resettlement program" and, at the same time, build and operate more efficient gassing facilities which required limited supervision. The fully enclosed nature of the locked and windowless cattle wagons greatly reduced the number and skill of troops required to transport the condemned Jews to their destinations. Although the prisoner trains took away valuable track space, they allowed for the mass scale and shortened duration over which the extermination needed to take place. To implement the "Final Solution", the Nazis made their own Deutsche Reichsbahn an indispensable element of the mass extermination machine, wrote historian Raul Hilberg. ĭuring the liquidation of the ghettos starting in 1942, the trains were used to transport the condemned populations to death camps. It was a euphemism referring to the Nazi plan for the annihilation of the Jewish people. The quagmire 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. By the end of 1941, most ghettoised Jews had no savings left to pay the SS for further bulk food deliveries. However, the new system was unsustainable. They were sealed off from the general public in hundreds of virtual prison-islands called Jüdische Wohnbezirke or Wohngebiete der Juden. Jews were legally banned from baking bread. Permanent ghettos had direct railway connections, because the food aid (paid for by Jews themselves) was completely dependent on the SS, similar to all newly built labour camps. 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. In 1939, for logistical reasons, the Jewish communities in settlements without railway lines in occupied Poland were dissolved. 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 the purpose of economic exploitation. Within various phases of the Holocaust, the trains were employed differently. Members of this class were used in the Holocaust. German-made DRB Class 52 steam locomotive used by the Deutsche Reichsbahn during World War II.
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