Holocaust trains

The Holocaust trains
Polish Jews being loaded onto trains at Umschlagplatz of the Warsaw Ghetto, 1942. The site is preserved today as the Polish national monument
Operation
Period	1941 – 1944
Location	Nazi Germany, Occupied Poland; Belgium, Bulgaria, the Baltic states, Bessarabia, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Romania
Prisoner victims
Total	4,000,000 (mostly Jews)
Destination	Transit ghettos, Nazi concentration camps, forced labour and extermination camps

Holocaust trains were railway transports run by the Deutsche Reichsbahn national railway system under the strict supervision of the German Nazis and their allies, for the purpose of forcible deportation of the Jews, as well as other victims of the Holocaust, to the German Nazi concentration, forced labour, and extermination camps.

Modern historians suggest that without the mass transportation of the railways, the scale of the "Final Solution" would not have been possible. The extermination of people targeted in the "Final Solution" was dependent on two factors: the capacity of the death camps to gas the victims and "process" their bodies quickly enough, as well as the capacity of the railways to transport the condemned prisoners from the Ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe and Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland to selected extermination sites. The most modern accurate numbers on the scale of the "Final Solution" still rely partly on shipping records of the German railways.

The first mass deportation of Jews from Nazi Germany occurred in less than a year before the outbreak of war. It was the forcible eviction of German Jews with Polish citizenship fuelled by the Kristallnacht. Approximately 30,000 Jews were rounded up and sent via rail to refugee camps. In July 1938 both the United States and Britain at the Évian Conference in France refused to accept any more Jewish immigrants. The British Government agreed to take in the shipment of children arranged by Nicholas Winton in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on the conditions that he pay the cost (via Czech travel agency Cedok) and arrange for the foster care. Winton managed to arrange for 669 children to get out on eight trains to London (a small group of 15 were flown out via Sweden). The ninth train was to leave Prague on 3 September 1939, the day Britain entered World War II. The train never left the station, and none of the 250 children on board were seen again. All European Jews trapped under the Nazi regime became the target of Hitler's "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".