Expert: Stuart Anderson - 10/23/2009

Question
My humble greetings to you Stuart,

I am a railroad enthusiast.  My inquiry may sound like research for the holocaust, but my questions are more for railroad operations during the period between 1940 to 1945.  

Is there a generic source I can check for WWII Deutsche Reichbahn traffic volumes between the years 1940 to 1945?  I wish to segregate freight, war, passenger, and holocaust traffic.

I will be asking other members of this panel the same question, so perhaps someone in the group can direct me towards a source of rail traffic information.

Thank you very much for your response.  

Answer
Hey Lester,
This info comes from a train-spotting friend of mine!

one chance would be going to the Deutsches Museum Verkehrszentrum in Munich:
http://www.deutsches-museum.de/en/verkehrszentrum/exhibitions/

But I feel their resources might be quite limited. I'd go to the DB Museum in Nürnberg (http://www.deutschebahn.com/site/dbmuseum/en/start.html) - they should have a library too. For (official) passenger transport I'd go for reprints of passenger railway timetables - this publisher has a selection of reprints of different materials available: http://www.ritzau-kg.de/html/verlagsprogramm_ns.html

Freight is a bit uncertain, but there are usually excerpts of documents available at documetation centres such as in Dachau - or the "Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände (Party Rally Grounds)" http://www.museums.nuremberg.de/documentation-centre/index.html in Nuremberg. I am also pretty sure the NRM (National Railway Museum) in York, Yorks., UK has a collection of documents in its library.

There is also a project called "Zug der Erinnerung/Train of Commemoration" (http://www.zug-der-erinnerung.eu/) that keeps touring the country - they've got documents, witness reports and photos. Please note that the latter trains never appeared in any public timetable - some if not all ran by speical 'on-demand' orders issued by the respective authorities.

There is no 'generic' source cos documents are scattered amongst museums, documentation centres, some are in posession of the former occupational forces, others have been found in ruins and are now in private posession.

Because of the scattering of information, and because of the various tricks to keep the trains secret, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the sources. There are some special-interest books but knowing how well such things are researched I wouldn't recommend any of them as resources considered valid by academic standards.

Hope it helps!

Stuart