German Railroads, Jewish Souls: The Reichsbahn, Bureaucracy, and the Final Solution

by Raul Hilberg, Peter Hayes (Contributor), Christopher R. Browning (Contributor)

Renowned Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg considered the German railway system that delivered European Jews to ghettos and death camps in Eastern Europe to be not only an essential component of the “machinery of destruction” but also emblematic of the amoral bureaucracy that helped to implement the Jewish genocide. Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Kindle Edition

Published August 1, 2019

About the author

Raul Hilberg was an Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the world's preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as a seminal study of the Nazi Final Solution.

Reviews

[Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Did you ever wonder who paid for the transportation of European Jews to the death camps?
How was it financed?
If not for the railroad system how would they have been transported?
This book submits the shocking reality.

It is haunting, revolting, and emotionally wrenching.

I offer a few quotes: “…we would have to say that the Jews were booked as people and shipped as cattle.” (Pg.26)
“There was, incidentally, a possibility of surcharges for ‘exceptional filth’ or damages to [rail] cars.” (Pg.28)

At pages 77-79 my vision began to blur and I had to stop and take a break.

Having finished the book (which is not very long) I suggest that it will ‘transport’ you (no pun intended) to a new level of horror you never thought possible.

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly well-researched account of the Nazi’s ‘machinery of destruction’; the ‘Sonderzuge’ conveying roughly 3 million European Jews to their deaths in sordid Arbeits- and/or Vernichtungslager in the East of the then German Reich from 1941 to 1944. Chilling statistics. As testament to the efficiency of these ghastly ‘special transports’, as one researcher put it; ‘no Jew was left alive for lack of transport.’