Thanks David!
I'm impressed the museum is keeping the car in a state of preservation, and not restoration. Restored to "as new" condition it wouldn't have the same impact.
We have the Virginia Holocaust Museum here in Richmond, and one of those cars is displayed as well. First, the sight of it makes you shudder a bit, and then you're shocked by how small it is compared to an American boxcar. Just the idea of how so many people were packed into those things...
I don't have the words.
Hitler’s plan for a “Final Solution” relied on careful mobilization and scheduling to efficiently shuttle millions of victims, often whole Jewish communities, across the European railway network in train carriages to the death camps, where victims were rapidly murdered (1–4, 10, 14). The complex logistics of this effort were solved through the involvement of the Deutsche Reichsbahn (German National Railway). The Reichsbahn employed almost half a million civil servants and 900,000 workers, who were made available for the job (1), and knowingly participated in the killings (14, 15). The Reichsbahn shuttled victims in “special trains” that kept to a well-formulated time schedule (section S2). It has been argued that the IBM Corporation also participated in helping to ensure that Hitler’s special trains ran on time and provided a punch card system to help achieve this goal (15). The Reichsbahn railway network was a critical component of the Nazi’s blueprint for genocide and destruction. Records of train schedules and movements, fragmentary as they are, have since become an important source of data used to estimate the spatial and temporal patterns of victims who were shuttled to the death camps.
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