Regular as Clockwork

Nowadays, people often complain when a train is running late, me included, by the way. However, recently, I have changed my way of thinking about that.

Throughout Europe during World War II, the military used the railways to accommodate an industrialized scale of murder. It could only work if the trains ran on time. The photograph at the beginning of the blog shows a train at Westerbork, operated by NS Nederlandsche Spoorwegen (Dutch Railways).

The SS deported nearly 107,000 people from Camp Westerbork on 97 transports. On July 15, 1942, the first transport left for Auschwitz-Birkenau. From March 2, 1943, through November 16, 1943, there was a weekly schedule: every Tuesday a train with a thousand and sometimes more than three thousand people left. The last transport left on September 13, 1944.

The transport was regular as clockwork.

In June 2019, the Dutch Railway accepted a recommendation that it pay up to €50m to relatives of thousands of people it transported to Nazi death camps during the second world war. That figure is really like a drop in the ocean.



Sources

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/27/dutch-railway-to-pay-out-50m-over-role-in-holocaust

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