The Third Reich Rail Component Enabling the Holocaust

"I blame the railway company for knowingly transporting Jews to the concentration camps and for killing those Jews there in a terrible way."

"I cannot give up because this hurts me every day. Every day I have to think about this and it hurts me. And I want the pain to finally pass."

"I want recognition from them and recognition always comes with an allowance."

Salo Muller, 84, surviving child of Dutch-Jewish Holocaust victims

"The Dutch Jews transported by the Deutsche Reichsbahm have simply been forgotten."

"The state is a hundred percent shareholders in the railways. Germany's moral responsibility always remains."

Axel Hagedorn, Muller lawyer

Snow-covered personal effects of those deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp litter the train tracks leading to the camp's entrance, in an image from around 1945

The German rail system during the Holocaust years of the Second World War ran over a hundred 'Final Solution' trains from the Netherlands to extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Sobibor. As indeed they did from every country of Nazi-occupied Europe, in a massive drive to exterminate European Jews from their countries of origin to satisfy the vision of a 'Judenrein' world. Henrich Himmler, Nazi SS chief in 1943 pleaded for more trains to enable the rapid transport of Jews to slave labour and death camps.

The sole Nazi representing the German train network to be charged was then-rail boss Albert Ganzenmuller, in 1973. On his first court day he suffered a heart attack, adjudged then medically unfit to stand trial. He lived until 1996 with no legal consequences for his role in transporting millions of Jews to their death. Lawyer Hagedorn, on behalf of his client, Salo Muller, has written to German Chancellor Angela Merkel to remind her that history records but does not forgive.

Jews deported from Warsaw Ghetto    US Holocaust Memorial Museum

The heirs of German wartime railways, he wrote, have a moral and clear legal obligation to recognize their predecessors' role in the slaughter of millions of Jews, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals and political dissenters, among others. The Nederlandse Spoorwegen Dutch railway company apologized for its part in the conveyance of Dutch Jews to death camps last year, after Mr. Muller successfully sued them. They paid 50 million euros in compensation, divided among survivors and their families.

Clearly, the German railway company that did the bidding of the Third Reich in its campaign to annihilate European Jewry has an obligation to acknowledge its role in the signal crime of the 20th Century. Salo Muller's parents wee transported by train from Amsterdam to Auschwitz when he was a child. He has lived with that reality all his life, tormented by visions of how his parents suffered and how they perished, all the while knowing that their fate had been shared by millions of other Jews.

Jews loading onto trains at the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw  Wikipedia  

Hie success in holding the Netherlands rail company accountable for their complicity with the Nazi occupation has spurred him to go on to demand that the German rail company admit its own responsibility in uncountable Jewish lives being forfeited to the Final Solution that produced the Holocaust. There are close to 500 Dutch survivors and approximately 5,500 next of kin, all of whom await recognition, admission of responsibility on the part of the German rail company, and accompanying reparations.

The Deutsche Reichbahn operated German railways during the Second World War, transporting about 107,000 Dutch Jews to concentration camps. The company profited to the amount of 15 million euros (in today's approximate currency accounts). During that fearful time in Jewish history, the victims themselves were charged to fund their own travel costs, which took them to their death.

Mr. Muller had been a physiotherapist with the Ajax Dutch soccer club before he embarked on this campaign.