The Role of The Railway in The Final Solution
Within various phases of the Holocaust, the trains were used differently:
- After economic discrimination and separation, trains were used to concentrate the populations, either in ghettos, or—more often—to transport them to forced labour or concentration camps
- After concentration within ghettos, to transport the inmates to death camps
The scale of the extermination of members of groups targeted in the Final Solution was therefore only dependent on two factors:
- The capacity of the death camps to murder victims and process bodies
- The capacity of the railways to transport the condemned from the ghettos to the death camps
The most modern accurate numbers on the scale of the Final Solution still rely today partly on shipping records of the German railways.
Read more about this topic: Holocaust Train
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