Bahn Flyer engl. - Deutsche Bahn AG

SPECIAL TRAINS TO DEATH
Deportation of Jews from Mainfranken, Würzburg April 1942
Federal Archives Würzburg
Deportations with Deutsche Reichsbahn
Deutsche Reichsbahn was responsible for the deportation of innumerable
people, and thus directly involved in the Holocaust. Without
the railway, the systematic murder of the European Jews, Sinti and
Roma would not have been possible. During World War II, some
three million people from almost the whole of Europe were transported
by train to the Nazi extermination camps.
The exhibition "Special Trains to Death. Deportations with Deutsche
Reichsbahn" is intended to remind visitors of the immeasurable suffering
caused to these people. The exhibition presents the fates of
individual children, women and men who were taken from their
native towns and transported to the death camps. Interviews with
survivors depict the atrocious conditions on the trains, while documents
and graphics illustrate how these transports were organised
by Deutsche Reichsbahn and show the operational procedures.
The touring exhibition was drawn up in cooperation with the Centrum
Judaicum and Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin. It is based
on the permanent exhibition at the Deutsche Bahn Museum in
Nuremberg which shows the history of Deutsche Reichsbahn during
the National Socialist era. The photos and biographies of the Jewish
children deported from France were researched and compiled for
the exhibition by Serge and Beate Klarsfeld.
In July 1942, repairs on the railway line to the extermination camp
Sobibor delayed deportation of the people living in the Warsaw
Ghetto. And so through his personal adjutant Karl Wolff, "SS Reichsführer"
Himmler approached the Deputy General Director of Deutsche
Reichsbahn, State Secretary Albert Ganzenmüller. With Ganzenmüller's
consent, this was soon followed by the deportation of several thousand
men, women and children every day to the recently erected
extermination camp Treblinka. The cooperation is documented by
correspondence.
Steffi Bernheim F. F. D. J. F.
Steffi Bernheim was born on 11 January 1930 in Berlin. The Bernheim
family fled from Germany to France and lived in Paris in rue
de Provence 60. Steffi was arrested during a large-scale raid and
eventually deported to Auschwitz with transport No. 23 on 24
August 1942. Her mother Rebecca had already been brought to
the extermination camp; father Walter and brother Norbert followed
with transport No. 57 on 18 July 1943.
Brothers Gert and Hans Rosenthal
Centrum Judaicum
On 19 October 1942, a transport
left Moabit freight station in
Berlin with 959 people for Riga
in Latvia. Most of the people
who had been in the special
train were taken into the surrounding
woods and shot dead
immediately on arrival.
There were 140 children among
the victims, also including Gert
Rosenthal (born 24 July 1932)
who had lived as an orphan in a
Jewish children's home. Gert
was the younger brother of Hans Rosenthal who later became
known as an entertainer (1925 – 1987). Seventeen year-old Hans
went into hiding and lived in a garden shed where he remained
concealed until the end of the war.