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00:00100 years of global war can only be understood by uncovering the story of these revolutionary
00:11machines.
00:18They carried terrifying weapons that made the beach at a loving hell and brought millions
00:26of men to the heart of the conflict.
00:30It was the first time in history that anyone had ever used a train in conjunction with
00:35moving troops to a battlefield.
00:39They saved many lives at great risk.
00:43Ambulance trains are vulnerable both in the station and on the rails.
00:46The bottom line is this is a train in a war zone.
00:52But they also inspired terrible cruelty.
00:56The Japanese wanted to build this railway regardless of the cost in human lives.
01:03My father looked out that little window and he announced to everyone that we're heading
01:08for Poland.
01:11The scale and extent of the Holocaust would not have been possible without an efficient
01:16and functioning railway.
01:20These metal monsters transformed the art of war.
01:25The locomotive's speed and power could mean the difference between victory and defeat.
01:55During the Second World War, Nazi Germany boasted of the superiority of its railways.
02:03Its locomotives were faster and more innovative.
02:06This was world record at this time for steam locomotives.
02:11The Führer's train was unlike any other.
02:14Its railway guns more powerful and accurate.
02:18But there was a much darker reality.
02:29Logistics, the worry about trains, although it affected German army movements terribly,
02:34it was more important from the Nazis' point of view to murder the Jews.
02:39The story of the Nazi railways is one of pride and innovation, but also deep shame.
02:46It reveals how an entire network involving thousands of people could be used to carry
02:52out murder.
03:00This is a Volkswagen, literally the people's car.
03:05It was a Nazi idea to make car ownership a possibility for ordinary Germans.
03:11The VW was a huge success.
03:13By November 1940, 300,000 people had paid a down payment for one.
03:23The champion of the people's car was Adolf Hitler.
03:27He made sure that men like car designer Ferdinand Porsche and motorway builder Fritz Tote were
03:33part of his entourage.
03:35Hitler was a car freak, and we must be grateful for that, even today, because he developed
03:44the Autobahnen, the motorway network.
03:47He was obsessed with fast cars and the like.
03:54Although the idea predated the Nazis, they accelerated the road program.
04:00By 1938, over 1,200 miles of Autobahn had been built across Germany.
04:06It was the first high-speed road network in the world.
04:10For Hitler, Germany's railways would always be of lesser importance than cars and Autobahns,
04:17a policy that would prove to be a fatal weakness for the German war machine.
04:24Cars were part of a new Germany, a Reich that would last 1,000 years.
04:29Hitler wanted to banish the humiliation of Germany's defeat in the First World War and
04:34what he saw as the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles that followed.
04:40Germany, which had been very proud of its army, was now reduced to an army of 100,000
04:44men, no capital ships, no large ships in the navy, no aeroplanes, no tanks, no poison gas,
04:51an army of 100,000 men which could barely guard Germany's frontiers properly.
04:56Germany had had to be surrendered to the Poles, to the Danes, so all these things humiliated
05:01a great nation.
05:05And it was a French railway carriage that symbolized Hitler's hatred of the armistice.
05:11The carriage was part of Allied Commander Marshal Foch's private train.
05:16And it was here, on November 11th, 1918, in the Forest of Compiègne, that the armistice
05:22was signed.
05:23But 22 years later, Hitler would climb into the same railway carriage and have his revenge.
05:35Although Adolf Hitler believed cars and planes were the transport of the future, the Nazis
05:40didn't ignore the railways altogether, especially when they felt that it would enhance Germany's
05:46image.
05:47I think that the Nazis were sort of past masters, actually, at propaganda, and it's propaganda
05:53at all levels.
05:54It's propaganda on the radio, in the cinema, and of course the great practitioner was Hitler's
06:00propaganda chief, Dr. Josef Goebbels, who had the catchphrase, the bigger the lie, the
06:05greater its value.
06:08In 1935, this steam locomotive, the Class 05, was exhibited in Nuremberg as part of
06:15a 100 years of German railways propaganda exhibition.
06:20It was the result of many years' research and development by the German railways, known
06:26as the Reichsbahn.
06:28After the First World War, the competition between rail and road increased, and also
06:34the competition between rail and plane.
06:37So the Reichsbahn tried to make the locomotives more faster and more attractive for the customers.
06:50The 1930s were all about the need for speed, and a futuristic look in locomotive design.
06:58The British had the Mallard, which reached 126 miles per hour in July 1938.
07:05The Germans had their flying trains, such as the diesel locomotive, nicknamed the Flying
07:11Hamburger.
07:12The most significant journey, I think, of the Flying Hamburger was a test drive in 1932,
07:20and Flying Hamburger travelled between Berlin and Hamburg and attained a top speed of about
07:26160 kilometers per hour.
07:30It was the fastest regular rail connection in the world at this time.
07:39The arrival of war in September 1939 posed serious problems for the Reichsbahn.
07:47Fuel soon became scarce.
07:49The Flying Hamburger and the Flying Trains were put out of service because the diesel
07:56was used by the German army, but the steam locomotives were still in use in the passenger
08:03traffic.
08:06It was this locomotive that showed the most promise.
08:09It wasn't reliant on coal or diesel, both scarce in wartime.
08:14This electric train was used as an attempt to please and win over the Autobahn-fixated
08:20Führer.
08:22This engine and the whole of the track between Berlin, Nuremberg, Munich and Berchtesgaden,
08:31that was the favorite route of Adolf Hitler.
08:34The railways did that in order to serve Hitler best.
08:40This engine had about 10,000 HP, and 10,000 HP in an engine like this one made it run
08:47fast and made it accelerate very fast.
08:51But the German army had concerns about this electric locomotive.
08:55The overhead power cables were very vulnerable to attack.
08:59The most reliable wartime locomotive was not going to be found amongst the new streamlined
09:05engines, but in something rather more old-fashioned.
09:11Despite the radical designs and breakthroughs of the German railways in the 1930s, Hitler
09:18believed that road transport was the future.
09:21His technologically advanced 1,000-year Reich would erase the shame of Germany's defeat
09:27in the First World War.
09:29Hitler was an expert at propaganda stunts to obliterate the past.
09:33On 21 June 1940, nine months after the outbreak of the Second World War, reporters from around
09:39the world were brought to a clearing in a French forest to watch an historic ceremony.
09:45Germany had just defeated France, and in the same railway carriage and same location where
09:50the armistice was signed in 1918, Hitler carried out a very public revenge.
09:56Journalist William Shirer was there for CBS radio.
10:00I look for the expression on Hitler's face.
10:03I am but 50 yards from him and see him through my binoculars as though he were directly in
10:07front of me.
10:09I have seen that face many times at the great moments of his life, but today it is a fire
10:16with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph.
10:24He glances slowly around the clearing, and now, as his eyes meet ours, you grasp the
10:30depth of his hatred.
10:34Hitler is present there.
10:35His immediate followers, Goering, the head of the air force, his right-hand man, von
10:41Ribbentrop, the foreign secretary, they're all there to witness this scene.
10:46The French delegates come in, they're filmed.
10:48It's quite humiliating, really.
10:51We can see nicely through the car windows.
10:54Hitler takes the place occupied by Marshal Foch when the 1918 armistice terms were signed.
11:00The others spread themselves around him.
11:03The whole ceremony in which Hitler has reached a new pinnacle in his meteoric career and
11:08Germany avenged the 1918 defeat is over in a quarter of an hour.
11:16But Hitler wasn't finished.
11:18The railway carriage was then taken to Berlin as a trophy.
11:25Almost exactly a year after the victory in France, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
11:32The invasion, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, would reveal Hitler's lack of interest in
11:38railway services.
11:40The Germans had originally signed a peace pact with Russia, but in the summer of 1941,
11:47they decided to attack Russia.
11:50They made a mistake of starting on Midsummer's Day, which was June the 22nd, which was too
11:56late in the summer because they needed to get to Moscow by the winter.
12:04Hitler's ignorance about how railways were run would be disastrous.
12:08An example of this took place in the Soviet city of Minsk, soon after it was overrun by
12:13the Germans.
12:14There was a printing office for the timetables.
12:17Now, these guys, they were all Jewish, so they were shot one night, and so the railways
12:23in Minsk could not print any timetables.
12:26But Hitler was able to do it.
12:29More fundamentally, the Germans weren't properly equipped for an invasion of the Soviet Union.
12:34Their trains were even the wrong gauge.
12:38What made it so difficult for the Germans to get to Moscow?
12:42Well, the Germans didn't have the time tables.
12:45They didn't have the time tables.
12:47They didn't have the time tables.
12:49They didn't have the timetables.
12:51They didn't have the timetables.
12:54And so a new locomotive was constructed, designed for the Russian winter, made with less steel
13:00and in half the time of a conventional locomotive.
13:04It was the Kriegsloch.
13:06Simply, the war locomotive.
13:10Hitler did begin to understand that the Soviet Union was a war locomotive.
13:17Simply, the war locomotive.
13:21Hitler did begin to understand that, I'm sure he would never have admitted a mistake,
13:26but he did begin to understand that railways were absolutely crucial to the war effort.
13:32So he did try to get more locomotives built.
13:36Vast savings were achieved in the manufacture of the Kriegsloch.
13:40One of the most important and time-costing components
13:44is all these rods that bring the power from the cylinder to the wheels.
13:50Normally, each of these pieces would be made on a lathe,
13:55on a particular machine in the workshop.
13:58For the wartime locomotive, they completely changed the way of production.
14:02They took ordinary T-shape, as we call it, or double T-shape,
14:07rolled steel and cut that in short lengths
14:11and then welded that onto separately produced components on the heads of the rod.
14:18Which, of course, you could only do that when you had mass production.
14:22You wouldn't do that for one single engine.
14:25But when you did that for a thousand engines,
14:27you could do a rod like that in half of the time.
14:31A redesigned frame for the locomotive also saved resources.
14:36They changed it to a much thinner material, about 20mm,
14:41because all the thicker dimensions were used for tanks
14:45and for the armament of boats, of seaships.
14:49So the smaller material allowed higher production figures.
14:57Stalin's investment in the railways, the Russian winter
15:00and the dogged determination of his troops
15:03all ensured that Operation Barbarossa failed.
15:07Lessons from history hadn't been learned.
15:13The American Civil War and the First World War
15:16had shown how important it was for the railways
15:18to be at the heart of any modern battle plan.
15:22Not only that, the military shouldn't be in charge of logistics.
15:26One of the things the Germans didn't quite understand in the Second World War
15:31was the importance of ensuring that people with railway operating experience,
15:38in other words, railway managers, operate the timetable
15:43and determine when and where trains should go, rather than the military.
15:49And one train was to cause more disruption than any other.
15:53Hitler's own armoured train.
15:56He was a guy who loved anything that moved, particularly cars,
16:00but the idea of having a train was a really fantastic idea,
16:04a very secure way for Hitler to travel around his empire.
16:07He could communicate very easily with his generals,
16:10but he could also maintain a very high level of personal security.
16:13Nobody quite knew where he was at any given time.
16:17Hitler's train was nothing less than a mobile command headquarters.
16:22The train that's been described is called the Führer-Zonderzug,
16:25which means leader's special train.
16:28You have two very, very large locomotives at the front
16:31to haul about 20 armoured carriages.
16:34Directly behind that is called the Flakwagen,
16:37and this is a heavily disguised anti-aircraft gun
16:40which can pop up with a crew of elite Luftwaffe,
16:43handed over by Goering to protect the leader.
16:46So this could raise up and give a very nasty surprise
16:49to any Allied aircraft that decided to attempt to straff the train.
16:53It was a fully functioning Führer HQ on wheels.
16:58The windows were for the most part darkened.
17:02It was luxurious throughout.
17:05The individual coaches having washrooms with hot and cold water
17:09and a telephone connection between coaches.
17:14Hitler had a really annoying habit
17:17of suddenly changing his itinerary with virtually no notice.
17:21SOE, for example, Section X,
17:24we studied Hitler's train for two years,
17:27trying to work out how could we get at Hitler's train.
17:30And the conclusion was it was too difficult
17:33because the guy kept changing his mind every five minutes.
17:36You could never pin down where it would be.
17:38But amazingly, Hitler's train was never attacked once,
17:41so those anti-aircraft weapons were never used, never had to be used.
17:45The train was a very sociable place.
17:49Now and again, Hitler would sit diagonally facing me
17:52in the office's mess coach, drinking his beer.
17:56The firm Mitropa ran the dining car.
17:59They offered the most carefully selected culinary specialties,
18:05a land of milk and honey.
18:09And the name of this railway fortress?
18:12Amazingly, it was called America.
18:15We know that Hitler really loved trashy American novels
18:19set in the American West, cowboys and Indians, strangely enough.
18:23And he also loved what were in the Nazi period illegal Western films,
18:27most of them Hollywood productions.
18:29So I think he named it America, slightly tongue-in-cheek, we might say.
18:34After America enters the war
18:36and after Hitler declares war on the United States,
18:39the name is changed to Brandenburg,
18:41which is a much more Germanic name, of course.
18:44German railways were not just in charge of Hitler's train
18:47and the day-to-day running of the network,
18:49they were also responsible for something more deadly.
18:53Even the south coast of England was within its range.
19:02German railways impressed the world with the speed of their locomotives,
19:06but Hitler was more interested in autobahns and automobiles.
19:10His lack of investment in the railways
19:12meant that the invasion of Russia was compromised.
19:15German locomotives struggled in the low temperatures
19:18and were the wrong gauge.
19:25One military success story for the railways
19:27was financed not by the Nazis, but by private companies.
19:43This is a gun known as the K5.
19:49And it was made by one of Germany's biggest manufacturers.
19:53The K5 was developed by the Krupp Ironworks in the mid-'30s
19:59and it was not directed by the Third Reich to do so.
20:03It was kind of their own initiative.
20:05The K stands for Kanone, or cannon in German.
20:08I first saw it 40 years ago when I went for training.
20:11So one of the first things that sticks in my mind when I think of artillery,
20:15it just represents the best of technology, I'd say,
20:18the Germans produced in World War II.
20:24The big thing is it's placed on railroad trucks to increase mobility.
20:29And because it was mounted on rails,
20:31this massive artillery piece was technically part of the railway network,
20:36which posed its own set of engineering problems.
20:39As it sits right now, it only has, like, a two-degree lateral spread.
20:44So what you want to do is either put it on a curve
20:47and then aim it that way along the curve,
20:50or the Germans developed what's known as the Vogelle turntable.
20:54You can turn the thing on a circle of rails
20:57and that way you have 360-degree firing ability.
21:01This K5 now stands at the US Army base at Fort Lee in Petersburg, Virginia.
21:07It's an appropriate setting as it was during the siege of Petersburg in 1865,
21:12a significant battle at the end of the American Civil War,
21:16that guns mounted on railway carriages first came into their own.
21:21They were unsophisticated devices.
21:23It was hard to predict what they would hit.
21:2790 years later, artillery technology had improved significantly.
21:32The K5 is loaded from behind.
21:35There's cars which are carrying the projectiles, so they have 550 pounds.
21:39The troops move them up to the breach,
21:42and then they load it up into the breach.
21:44They've got a ramming rod.
21:46Then you load propellant within a cartridge, and it forms a seal.
21:51So when it does fire, it's not coming out the back.
21:55The gunner attaches a cord, or as we know in the artillery, is a lanyard.
21:59He just pulls on the cord.
22:01The primer is hit, igniting the propellant,
22:05which then pushes the round out the tube,
22:08maybe to go 20 miles to the impact zone.
22:12That range meant that the K5 could terrorize not just foreign armies,
22:17but also civilians.
22:20The K5 was shelling England, actually landing shells on English soil.
22:25I'm sure it didn't do English morale a lot of good,
22:28but I think the British kept a stiff upper lip, as they say, and dealt with it.
22:39On the beaches of Anzio in Italy in January 1944,
22:43two K5s named Robert and Leopold
22:46did particular damage to the Allied troops trying to get a foothold there.
22:50An Anzio that made the beach out of living hell,
22:53and this prompted the Allies to send aircraft out
22:57to try to track down these weapons,
22:59and ultimately they actually were able to capture the weapons.
23:04This gun is made up of parts of both the captured K5s
23:08and retains a nickname acquired in Italy.
23:12The American troops started calling Leopold and Robert
23:17The American troops started calling Leopold Anzio Annie.
23:21They're thinking about their girlfriends back home.
23:23And Robert, they called it Anzio Express.
23:29With Anzio Annie now on American soil,
23:32the K5's advanced technology could be used for an even deadlier purpose.
23:38American scientists learned how to develop an atomic cannon
23:41which can fire an atomic projectile,
23:44and out of that research came Atomic Annie,
23:47which looks an awful lot like Anzio Annie, in fact.
23:51And it was tested successfully in 1953
23:54and served in the U.S. Army until about the mid-'60s.
24:05German railways operated these giant guns with great efficiency,
24:10but they also took on a more chilling task.
24:13The coordination of the murder of millions of innocent civilians across Europe.
24:23In October 1941,
24:25the most shameful period in the history of German railways began.
24:32In the heart of Berlin is a deserted railway platform.
24:37It was Platform 17 of Grunwald Station.
24:40It's from here thousands of Jews were sent by train
24:43to ghettos, concentration camps and extermination camps
24:47as part of Hitler's so-called Final Solution.
24:51In the Nazis' warped mind,
24:53the Jews were an enemy equal to the British,
24:57to the Americans and to the Russians,
24:59but not only that, they were over and above the three major Allied powers.
25:05Joseph Goebbels told the German people
25:08in November 1941,
25:10''We are in the midst of the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
25:14''Compassion or regret are entirely out of place here.''
25:19German railways, the Reichsbahn,
25:21were key in the plans to systematically exterminate the Jews
25:25and other so-called undesirables, such as homosexuals and the mentally ill,
25:30sending them to camps like Auschwitz, Treblinka and Theresienstadt.
25:36Adults were forced to pay for a full-price one-way ticket.
25:40Children under four went free.
25:44The SS and the Reichsbahn shared the proceeds.
25:48It is no exaggeration to say that the scale and extent of the Holocaust
25:53would not have been possible
25:55without an efficient and functioning railway.
25:59As Nazi Germany conquered more countries in 1939 and 1940,
26:04it was faced with a chilling dilemma.
26:06There was a contradiction in the Nazi idea that, on the one hand,
26:10they wanted to kick Jewish people out of Germany.
26:13On the other hand, suddenly the Jewish population got bigger
26:17because of the occupied territories.
26:20So they were thinking of other ideas.
26:24The Nazis set up a Reich's transportation ministry,
26:27which there hadn't been before.
26:29It was an enormous logistical operation, really,
26:32and, of course, the technician was Adolf Eichmann.
26:35He was the person that organised the trains,
26:37and so logistics, the worry about trains,
26:40although it affected German army movements terribly,
26:43from their point of view, it was more important,
26:46from the Nazis' point of view, to murder the Jews.
26:50When Hitler invaded Belgium in September 1939,
26:54families like the shopkeepers, the Grunowskis,
26:57found themselves under an oppressive regime.
27:02They came and took all the stock of our little shop.
27:09And one day, I was having my breakfast,
27:14And one day, I was having my breakfast,
27:18with my mother and my sister.
27:22And suddenly, the door was opened by two men.
27:27They yelled,
27:29Gestapo! Ausweis!
27:32My mother turned white.
27:36Luckily, my father was absent.
27:39The Gestapo officers asked about him.
27:44My mother told them that he was dead.
27:48Make use of your case to go away.
27:52She pointed me and asked,
27:56And the little two? Yes, the little two.
28:00The family were taken to the Dossin barracks,
28:03part of the Mechelen transit camp,
28:05an important railway junction 20 miles north of Brussels,
28:09one of hundreds of camps across the Reich.
28:13When they deported the Jewish population out of Germany,
28:18they told them that they were sent to labor camps,
28:22to do labor, and to evacuate them.
28:27They didn't say they were deported.
28:29They were saying they were evacuating them.
28:33In the Dossin barracks, I was not unhappy,
28:38because I was protected by my mother and my sister.
28:43And there were many children.
28:47By the time that Simon and his family got to the Dossin barracks in March 1943,
28:5319 trains had departed for the camps from there in the previous six months.
28:58Each train carried about 1,000 people.
29:03Although those imprisoned with Simon didn't know their precise destination,
29:08they knew full well that if they could escape, they should.
29:13Others had tried.
29:15In previous convoys, some were able to jump off the train.
29:21We were housed in rooms of 100 people,
29:27with banks of three levels.
29:30I trained myself to jump from the ice bank
29:34with a view to my escape from the train.
29:38Simon's training was to pay off.
29:40He would get the opportunity to escape Convoy 20
29:44as it made its way to Auschwitz.
29:53The Nazis were proud of Germany's innovative trains
29:57and boasted about the power of their railway guns and war locomotives.
30:04But in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.,
30:07is a stark reminder of the barbarism of the Nazi railways.
30:12When there weren't enough passenger trains to carry out the final solution,
30:16the SS turned instead to wagons never intended for human transportation.
30:23When this railcar was built in 1920,
30:26its function was to ship freight,
30:29whether that's livestock, whether those are crates, to different companies.
30:34But during the course of the Second World War,
30:36its function dramatically changed.
30:39It served in their plans to redesign Europe
30:43for their population transfers.
30:47Irene Weiss was 13 years old
30:49when she and her family were taken from their home in Hungary
30:53and along with hundreds of other Jews, placed in a ghetto.
30:57These cattle cars arrived.
30:59This was in a place that was a brick factory.
31:05They just started shouting orders
31:07for everyone to get into the cattle cars.
31:11And we piled in, many, many, into one train.
31:16And they never told us where we were going.
31:20Just a month ago, we were in our homes,
31:22living like normal people, like families do,
31:25with parents and children,
31:27and suddenly were packed into a cattle car like animals,
31:31sitting on the floor.
31:33It was very dark, just one little window,
31:37and it was packed with people.
31:40And, you know, for modesty's sake,
31:44the men went to one side and the women to the other,
31:48and they put a bucket in the middle there for a toilet.
31:53It was just terrifying.
31:58The conditions inside these railcars were horrific.
32:02You would have up to 100 people crammed into these railcars
32:08with no food, no water.
32:12What often made conditions worse
32:15was that deportation trains weren't considered high priority.
32:19The army's timetable was paramount.
32:22Very often, these wagons,
32:25stuffed with hundreds of people in intolerable conditions
32:30with no toilets and sanitation,
32:33were sat in sidings for hours and sometimes days at a time
32:39while trains with greater priority went by.
32:43On one occasion, Hitler's train stopped right beside a Holocaust train
32:48that was taking people to a death camp,
32:50and apparently Hitler was eyeballed by people on the train,
32:54and he was rather upset by this
32:56and didn't want to see those kind of things any more.
33:00For Irene, the purpose of her journey eventually became all too clear.
33:05My father looked out that little window,
33:08and when we left a certain railroad crossing,
33:11he announced to everyone that we're heading for Poland,
33:14and that really just terrified everyone.
33:18We were sure this time we knew where we were going
33:22because we had heard rumours that the Nazis in Poland
33:25had been killing people in whole villages of Jewish people,
33:29and now what we heard began to make sense.
33:35After many days in the cattle wagon,
33:38the train carrying Irene and her family came to a halt.
33:42We were expecting the door to open and that we would be shot.
33:47They had arrived at the extermination camp at Auschwitz.
33:54There was a lot of commotion and shouting and yelling
33:57and lots of Nazi soldiers around and prisoners.
34:01Extraordinarily, their arrival was captured on camera by an SS photographer.
34:08And there were Nazi soldiers yelling to women and children to one side
34:13and men to the other side, and all that happened very quickly.
34:17In a matter of seconds, my mother and two little brothers were off to one side,
34:22Serena, my older sister, off to the other side.
34:26I was yelling her name, Serena, Serena, wait for me.
34:30I was totally paralysed at this point.
34:33I just realised that she won't catch up with my mother.
34:37And so, many years later, I realised that that was captured, my standing there.
34:48After a month in the transit camp in Nazi-occupied Belgium,
34:52the wait for 11-year-old Simon Granowski and the other detainees was finally over.
34:58A man has come in our room and said,
35:03you go away tomorrow, the train is there, it's waiting for you.
35:09And the people asked him, where?
35:14You go to work. Yes, but where?
35:18Be quiet. No problem.
35:22Simon, his mother and 1,400 others were to be packed onto trains for Auschwitz.
35:29This was Convoy 20,
35:32and it was soon to become famous in the history of Nazi railways.
35:37Very soon after leaving Mechelen, I felt that the train stopped
35:44and I heard shooting and yelling in German.
35:52It was the start of a daring ambush by the Belgian resistance.
35:56They brought the entire train to a standstill
35:59by using the red light of a hurricane lamp.
36:02And they opened a car, a captain's car, not mine,
36:08and they liberated 17 people.
36:13But the train left again,
36:16and I fell asleep in my mother's arms on the floor of the car.
36:24Encouraged by the earlier ambush,
36:26prisoners in Simon's cattle car set about opening their own door.
36:31Suddenly, my mother woke me up.
36:36The train was moving, but the sliding door was open.
36:41She led me to the door,
36:44and there two or three people jumped off the train before me.
36:50And when it was my turn,
36:53my mother lowered me
36:58until my feet reached the running board of the car.
37:03The last words I ever heard from my mother are,
37:09the train goes too fast.
37:13And I jumped.
37:18Simon found himself in unfamiliar countryside near Kutukoven,
37:2360 miles east of Brussels.
37:27But this resourceful boy scout had a few tricks up his sleeve.
37:32I ran at random,
37:35and I sung a little tune in the mood
37:39to give me courage.
37:42I ran so...
37:57And by random, I found this village,
38:01and so I chose this house because it was a little house.
38:09The owner took Simon to the local policeman.
38:13When I saw that man with his uniform
38:18and his gun on his belt,
38:22I was terrified.
38:26But this was no ordinary policeman.
38:29Jean Hertz was also a member of the resistance.
38:33He told me, don't be afraid.
38:36I'm a good Belgian.
38:38I will not betray you.
38:42I fell on him, on this man, a miracle.
38:49Hertz and his wife looked after Simon
38:52and helped reunite him with his father.
38:54But Simon couldn't enjoy his freedom.
38:57I thought to the other people in the train,
39:01I hoped that my mother would join me by another way.
39:10But she has not joined me.
39:18My mother and now my three siblings
39:21certainly died the day they arrived
39:23within the time allotted for walking to the gas chambers.
39:29Irene probably only survived Auschwitz
39:32because she looked old for her age.
39:34The guards thought Serena was her daughter.
39:38The two sisters, together with their aunts Rose and Piri,
39:42escaped execution, but their ordeal wasn't over.
39:47In January 1945, keen to hide their crimes,
39:51the SS guards took the remaining inmates away
39:54from the advancing Russians and into Germany.
39:57The brutality continued.
40:02The train stopped at one point
40:05and it was being refilled with water
40:09because these were steam engines.
40:11We heard this gushing of the water
40:14and there was an open cattle car.
40:17We were so dehydrated
40:21that my aunt dangled her cup over the open cattle car
40:26and heard that gushing of the water.
40:29It was just a horrendous, painful thing.
40:32And this guard just got up and he began to hit her,
40:37knock her down.
40:39There was no water, but also we got the message,
40:43don't try that again.
40:47Irene, Serena and their aunt Rose survived the war.
40:52They were fortunate.
40:56By May 1945, two out of three European Jews
41:01had been killed as part of the final solution.
41:05The last deportation from Platform 17 at Berlin's Grunwald station
41:10took place in March 1945.
41:13It's estimated that by then,
41:1655,000 Berlin Jews who left there had been murdered.
41:23The chilling fact is the final solution,
41:26dependent as it was on the Reichsbahn network,
41:29couldn't have happened without the cooperation
41:32of thousands of railway workers.
41:36There were tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people.
41:40So that there were people at the local level,
41:43the regional level and the national level that played a role in this.
41:47They know what they were doing.
41:49They thought this is in the interest of the new Germany,
41:52of the new National Socialist Germany.
41:54We want to support it and we do it.
41:57Hitler's obsession with cars and autobahns,
42:00far from securing the future of the Third Reich,
42:03helped bring about its demise.
42:06The Germans were ahead of the British and much of the world
42:11in terms of developing railway technology.
42:14But Hitler rather underinvested in the railways.
42:19And that was a crucial mistake
42:22because railways were the way of getting both troops and supplies
42:27around much more effectively.
42:29So because he had not invested sufficiently in the railways,
42:33that did hamper the German war effort to a great extent.
42:39Nazi railways are remembered now,
42:41not for their technological achievements,
42:44but for aiding mass murder.
42:47They knew what was going on.
42:49They were sitting on the locomotives,
42:51they were working on the train stations,
42:53or they were just a clerk in the financial department.
42:57But if you look, if you scratch a little bit,
43:00you will see they were all involved.
43:03Or maybe not all, but most of them were involved.
43:06The story of the railways and the Holocaust
43:09is one of the blackest parts of railway history.
43:30For more UN videos visit www.un.org