Alfred Gottwaldt (1949–2015)
In Memoriam

Alfred Gottwaldt (1949–2015) was a great railroad historian, but he will probably be remembered most for his immense contribution to the history of the Reichsbahn before and during World War II. His work focused particularly on the integration between Nazism and the Reichsbahn in the role of the latter during the war and, in that respect, especially its role during the Holocaust.

Over the past forty-five years, Gottwaldt wrote, edited, and co-authored more than 100 books and articles. From 1983 to 2014, he served as senior curator of the Rail Division at the German Museum of Technology in Berlin. He headed this department with much expertise and an impressive degree of skill until his retirement in 2014.

Born on October 4, 1949, in Berlin, Gottwaldt was infected from early childhood with the “railway virus.” He simply loved trains and railways and was fascinated by them. His growing passion led him eventually to become a railway expert, dedicating his life to the technical, cultural, political, and historical aspects of railways. However, his conscience and personality drove him also to deal with another dimension of the German railways, which became the main and central theme of his enormous corpus of work — the Holocaust. In general, it is safe to say that at least half of Alfred Gottwaldt’s publications dealt specifically with the Holocaust and World War II, and the other half with technical issues pertaining to railways in general.

Gottwaldt began his academic life by studying law, political science, and modern history at the University of Frankfurt am Main. He then pursued a short career as a lawyer, but was soon to change direction. At the beginning of the 1980s, and until 1985, he served as the editor of the railway magazine LOK.1 In 1983, he started to work as curator of the then newly established “Museum of Transport and Technology,” which, since 1996, is known as the Museum of Technology in Berlin. Until October 2014, Gottwaldt served as senior curator of the Rail Division; as such, he was responsible for the preparation and construction of a permanent exhibition on the railways, which spreads over approximately 6,000 square feet, titled “Trains, Locomotives and People.” He also saw to it that a number of exhibits from the former museum of traffic in Hamburg, which were suitable for the technical museum, were moved to Berlin.

Gottwaldt was most proud of his role as senior curator of two exceptional exhibits. First, after a long search, he succeeded in finding the long “hidden” legendary Car 11 from the court train of German Kaiser Wilhelm II and having it brought permanently to the museum. The second was an authentic cattle car found in the Warsaw area in the mid-1980s, which had been used as part of the death trains in the Generalgouvernement during World War II. This cattle car, one of three on display in museums around the world (the other two are in Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), was deliberately not restored, in keeping with Gottwaldt’s instructions, in order to sustain its authenticity. As he put it, “We only removed the dust and put it as is on display.”

In 1985, Gottwaldt was involved in the preparation  of an exhibition in Nuremberg called “Zug der Zeit ­ Zeit der Züge” (“Train Time, Time of the Trains”), marking the 150th anniversary of the German Railways. In 2007, he directed and curated an exhibition titled, “Sonderzüge in den Tod” (“Special Trains to Death”) at the Museum of Technology. This was the first exhibition in Germany to show the Reichsbahn’s affiliation with National Socialism on a large scale and its involvement in the Holocaust.

In his time away from his museum duties, Gottwaldt became a railway historian, and, soon after its founding, became a member of the DGEG- Deutsche Gesellschaft für Eisenbahngeschichte (The German Railway Historical Company). In addition, he also pursued a doctoral thesis over a number of years, and, in 2010, was awarded a Ph.D. from the prestigious Technische Universität Berlin.

Gottwaldt was a unique historian, but not the conventional academic type. His immense knowledge of the history of the railways during the Third Reich was unrivaled. In Germany, only Eugen Kreidler, the first to write a monograph on the German railways during World War II, could match Gottwaldt’s knowledge. In the English-speaking world, his only real contender was Alfred Mierzejewski. However, whereas the latter’s style is more analytical and critical, Gottwaldt’s books and articles were more informative and chronological; they were also rich in information that derived from all sorts of sources, especially due to his unique access as curator to collections of images, documents, port-folios, and sketches.2 Although he could speak English fluently — and even with a distinctly British accent, a result of a period he spent in the UK during the 1970s — Gottwaldt published only in German, and, for some odd reason, his writings were never translated.

Still, Alfred Gottwaldt possessed a unique expertise and knowledge of the history of European railroads, as well as an understanding of the logistical and technological aspects of operating trains and a complex network of rail lines in wartime Europe. These are fields with which Holocaust historians are generally not well acquainted. Yet comprehension of the logistical considerations and methods of planning schedules and routes is vital for the study of the deportations and the uprooting of Jews during the Holocaust era.

In his numerous publications he focused mainly on the German National Railroad and the period of National Socialism in Germany. In addition to tracing the technical development of the German Railways — in particular its rolling stock, as well as its cultural history — Gottwaldt provided essential insights into the Reichsbahn’s role in the anti-Jewish policy. His research is essential to an understanding of the discrimination against Jewish passengers in the Reich, as well as the Reichsbahn’s contribution to the persecution of the Jews, and its assistance in their deportation from the Reich and other European countries to the death camps in Poland.

Gottwaldt’s work does not only cover the impact that the Nazi seizure of power had on the Reichsbahn’s “Jewish personnel” and “Jewish travelers,” but also provides a profound insight into the structure and organization of the rail company during the peacetime years of the Third Reich.3 Gottwaldt shows that the Deutsche Reichsbahn, under General Director Julius Dorpmüller, followed the Third Reich’s Jewish policy soon after Hitler came to power by dismissing Jewish railway officials and boycotting Jewish suppliers. His extensive studies describe these historical facts by using a wealth of biographies and going into much detail on antisemitic operations within the railways before September 1, 1939. These could be seen as the roots leading to the future disaster. Gottwaldt also looked into the individual fates of persecuted railway men, such as Ernst Spiro and Paul Levy, as well as the legal, logistical, and technical aspects of the deportations and transports.4  His short biography of Benno Orenstein, the famous Jewish railway builder and locomotive manufacturer, turned out to be his last publication ever.5

When once asked why he had decided to dedicate his life’s work and research to such a grave topic, he referred to the first major Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt in the mid-1960s, with Fritz Bauer as the prosecutor. He testified in later years that, as a fifteen-year-old high-school student, he had been tremendously influenced by this trial.

His publications on the construction of the German war locomotives during World War II under Armaments Minister Albert Speer and two biographies of Minister of Transport Julius Dorpmüller demonstrated convincingly and forcefully just how deeply involved the Ministry of Transport was in the persecution of Jews within the Third Reich apparatus and the Holocaust; it only apparently gave the appearance of an “apolitical” technical administration.6  This in many ways was Alfred
Gottwaldt’s greatest contribution to the study of the Holocaust.

The notion that the rail company and the Ministry of Transport were saturated with Nazi ideological doctrine even in the 1930s leaves no open questions regarding its role in the destruction of European Jewry. This part of his work also fit well with a larger corpus of German research that began to emerge toward the end of the 1980s. Many scholars demonstrated the deep involvement of a broad array of ostensibly non-ideological institutions and organizations in the Nazi project, which completely undermined an earlier common approach that distinguished between Nazis and ordinary Germans.

A special focus of Gottwaldt’s work was the production  of war locomotives. In the third edition of his book, Deutsche Kriegslokomo­ tiven 1939–1945, which came out in 1983, he stated that many of the machines described had been built with significant involvement of forced labor, including persecuted Jews and prisoners of war.7

Details of the horrifying journeys to the death camps and ghettos appear in many memoirs and postwar accounts of Holocaust survivors. Their testimonies reveal the terrible physical conditions inside the sealed rail cars, in addition to the intense fear and anxiety. Subsequently, the rail car has become one of the symbols of the Holocaust. The current centrality attributed to the role of the deportation trains stands in marked contrast to their relative marginality in the immediate post-Holocaust era. During this period the mass murder of European Jews was most associated in academic research as well as in popular discourse with installations such as gas chambers and death camps, perpetrators like Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, along with murderous organizations and agencies primarily linked to the SS (RSHA, Einsatzgruppen, etc.).

Less attention  was devoted to the seemingly ordinary and often anonymous bureaucrats sitting behind desks in the offices of the German National Rail Company, preoccupied with tedious tasks like scheduling the departures and arrivals of deportation trains and allo- cating rail cars and engines for this purpose. Similarly, the role played by engine drivers and maintenance workers of the Reichsbahn and other European rail companies was overlooked.

In his monumental study, The Destruction of the European Jews,8 Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg methodically mapped the complex structure of the Reichsbahn and other European rail companies under its control and supervision. Hilberg’s study explained how these transportation  companies collaborated with the bureaucratic mechanism that implemented the “Final Solution.”

In many aspects Alfred Gottwaldt’s  works, particularly his co-production  with Dianne  Schulle, Die Judendeportationen  aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941–1945,9 took Hilberg’s study several steps further by reconstructing the practical process of the deportation of Jews from each and every city within the Greater German Reich (Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia). Indeed, the book serves as a benchmark for a basic chronology of the deportation  of Jews from the Greater German Reich in 1941–1945. The meticulous work provides an overview of the deportations from the Third Reich and the role of the Reichsbahn within this process, an element that had been missing from Holocaust and World War II historiography.

The result is a unique reference book that adds much information and data about the transports in general.10 The routes taken by the trains are described in detail, including those of empty trains returning after discharging their “passengers.”

Gottwaldt used a variety of sources. As already observed by Raul Hilberg,11 relevant records of the Nazi security services (RSHA), as well as those produced by the Reich’s Ministry of Transport, are quite scarce and of a fragmentary nature.12 The lack of archival records originating from these two state agencies, which were directly responsible for the execution of Jewish transports, thus creates a serious obstacle for any research on the topic.

Despite these difficulties, however, Gottwaldt managed to reconstruct the deportation  process in Germany by using a variety of alternative sources. Among these were surviving documents from the Gestapo headquarters in Düsseldorf and Würzburg, which had served as evidence in postwar investigations and trials, such as the Eichmann trial and the legal proceedings against Albert Ganzenmüller,13 who had been the understate  secretary of the Reichsbahn. In addition, Gottwaldt relied on a range of studies that had been published previously by other historians relating to deportations from Germany and Czechoslovakia.14 The publication of regional and local memorial proj- ects in Germany, listing names of deportees and the dates of transport, also contributed to his study.15

In contrast to other studies and memorial projects that focused mainly on identifying the deportees,16 Gottwaldt’s research and methodology emphasized the event itself: the Transport. He reconstructed routes of deportation trains, marked the precise origin of transports and train stations used for this purpose, and the location of assembly sites (Sammellager) in which Jews were detained prior to their deportation. The book provides information and resources for future further studies on the final stages of German Jewry during the Holocaust.

Another important methodological contribution concerns the precise definition of a transport. Gottwaldt applied the term “Transport”17 not only to the large-scale groups of Jews generally associated with the term, but also to relatively small groups of Jews, sometimes numbering only a few individuals,18 termed by Nazi authorities as Einzeltransporte (“Individual Transports”). This definition expands the scope of the transports and provides a more complete picture of the deportation process in Germany.

The book is divided chronologically according to the distinct waves of deportation and expulsion of Jews from Nazi Germany. Gottwaldt argues that the system of launching mass transports  of Jews actually developed and evolved in the Reich, before transports were carried out from other European countries.19 He examined the period starting with the deportation of Polish Jews from Germany in October 1938, and continuing with early resettlement plans, such as the transports  from Vienna and Ostrava to Nisko in October 1939. He then proceeded to describe the mass deportation of German Jews to ghettos, killing sites, and death camps in Eastern Europe beginning in the autumn of 1941 (Lodz, Riga, Minsk, Kaunas, and Auschwitz- Birkenau), as well as the transports sent from Germany and Austria to Theresienstadt from June 1942 onward.

Gottwaldt’s further work with Diana Schulle in the book on the Jewish policy of the ministry of transportation, titled “Juden ist die Benutzung von Speisewagen untersagt,” reveals that, even before World War II, the officials of the ministry willingly accepted the dismissal of their Jewish colleagues, initiated the boycott of Jews, agreed to the confiscation of drivers’ licenses, and approved individual travel bans on Jews.20 In strong contrast to that, in his book Eisenbahner gegen Hitler, Gottwaldt dealt with the resistance and opposition by German railway workers during the Holocaust. Thus, he raises an issue that had been largely overlooked until then in historical research.

While Hilberg and almost twenty-five years later Mierzejewski dealt with the business policy of the Reichsbahn and the actions of its elite, Gottwaldt was the only one to look into the lives of the ordinary personnel.21  This became a great passion in his work, to record the biographies of railway men and railway engineers, and he published numerous articles in journals and books on the topic. He also dealt with Reichsbahn senior officials and technicians, such as the father of the “Unit Locomotives,” Richard Paul Wagner.22

Gottwaldt served, too, as consultant for the Yad Vashem deportations project (“Transports to Extinction”). Since 2008, the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem has engaged in a broad study in an attempt to record and reconstruct all transports of Jews that took place during the Holocaust. The project is carried out on a continental scale: all places of origin within Nazi-dominated Europe and the Mediterranean are included. The database has documented transports  from the Greater German Reich (Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia), France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Greece. Ultimately, the project will record most of the transports dispatched from Nazi-occupied countries, thus displaying the geographical boundaries of the “Final Solution.”

Influenced in part by the methodology applied by Gottwaldt, the database relies on a variety of archival sources, including Nazi documentation, postwar legal records, as well as survivors’ testimonies. The diversity of sources enables a reconstruction of the transports and provides a broad overview of the events. The use of testimonies and diaries of deportees contributes vital information regarding the actual deportation process and journeys (descriptions of assembly sites, routes, stops). But perhaps even more significantly, these personal accounts shed light on an aspect that cannot be found in official documents of the Nazi security services or the rail companies: the experience of the victims, uprooted violently from their homes, and then locked helplessly in sealed cars, sometimes for days, en route to their deaths. The database presents logistical information about every transport, includ- ing an estimate of the number of deportees, names of relevant train stations, reconstructed routes of deportation trains, dates of departures and arrivals, destinations, and the identity of perpetrators and agencies involved in the execution of the transports.

Alfred Gottwaldt most graciously advised the project’s staff on a variety of topics, mainly of a technical nature, which included in-depth explanations about the operation and maintenance of engines and trains, the duration of train journeys, scheduling processes, the allocation of rail cars during World War II, methods of ticketing and planning routes. Similarly, Gottwaldt was a founding member and served on the Board of Trustees of the Bochum Railway Museum in North Rhein-Westphalia.23 He displayed great empathy in his contacts with the victims of Nazism and argued forcefully to ensure that the historic “Gleis17” track at the Berlin-Grunewald station became a national memorial and monument.

Six months into retirement, Alfred Gottwaldt died unexpectedly, on August 16, 2015; he was only sixty-five years old. His work had set new standards of research, and, in that sense, he was a pioneer in his field of expertise. Over the years his numerous unforgettable lectures, which he delivered in Germany and on tours around the world at international institutions such as Yad Vashem, the United States Ho- locaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the Villa Wannsee in Berlin, and in Japan, always ensured full houses. Those who were privileged to be in the audiences will no doubt retain the memory of his personality and his brilliant rhetorical ability. He could present a complex and serious issue in clear and simple language, but he could also tell a good joke, and had an exceptional sense of humor. All this made him a highly sought-after speaker.

Gottwaldt participated in several workshops at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, in which he displayed his deep knowledge and his sincere will to assist other researchers and young scholars. Most recently, he spoke on “Julius Dorpmüller - The Hindenburg  of the German National Railways and Hitler’s  Second Transport Minister,” at Yad Vashem’s international scholars’ workshop on “‘Transport’: The Deportation of the Jews During the Nazi Period” in July 2014, and on “Railway Organization and Conduct of Mass Transportation during the Period of Heydrich’s ‘1.Nahplan’ in 1939 in Former Poland,” at the June 2015 international scholars’ workshop on “The First Months of the German Occupation in Poland.”

Gottwaldt’s work shed light on the practical measures that had been necessary in order to carry out the rapid and mass deportations of German Jews during the Holocaust. He has left a valuable and far- reaching legacy in the field of the history of railways and the Reichs-bahn. The massive quantity of his scholarly work will continue to serve as a central resource for future studies concerning the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, and particularly the Reichsbahn.

• 1. Alfred B. Gottwaldt, ed., Lok­Magazin, Jahrbuch 2. Berichte — Statistik — Fotografien. Aktuelles von der Schiene 1982/83 (Stuttgart: Franckh‘sche Verlag- shandlung, 1983).
• 2. Eugen Kreidler, Die Eisenbahnen im Machtbereich der Achsenmächte während des Zweiten Weltkrieges — Einsatz und Leistung fur die Wehrmacht und Kriegswirtschaft (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1975); Alfred Mierzejewski, The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich: A History of the German National Railway (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Yaron Pasher, Holocaust Versus Wehrmacht: How Hitler’s ”Final Solution” Undermined the German War Effort (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015), pp. 5, 159.
• 3. Alfred Gottwldt, Die Reichsbahn und die Juden 1933–1939: Antisemitismus bei der Eisenbahn in der Vorkriegszeit (Wiesbaden: Marixverlag, 2011), pp. 279–303.
• 4. Alfred Gottwaldt, Paul Levy. Ingenieur der Hedschasbahn und der Reichsbahn (Ber- lin: Herausgegeben vom Centrum Judaicum, Hentrich & Hentrich, 2014); Alfred Gottwaldt, “Die Deutsche Reichsbahn und Ihre Judischen Eisenbahner,“ Jahrbuch fur Eisenbahn Geschichte, Band 34 (Berlin: Deutsche Geselschaft Fur Eisenbahnge- schichte E.V, 2002), pp. 85–88.
• 5. Alfred Gottwaldt, Benno Orenstein: Ein jüdischer Lokomotivbauer (Berlin: Hein- rich and Heinrich, 2015).
• 6. Alfred Gottwaldt, Dorpmüllers Reichsbahn. Die Ära des Reichsverkehrsminiters Julius Dorpmüller 1920–1945 (Freiburg: EK-Vlg, 2009); idem, Julius Dorpmüller die Reichsbahn und die Autobahn. Verkehrspolitik und Leben des Verkehrsministers bis 1945 (Berlin: Argon, 1995).
• 7. Alfred Gottwaldt, Deutsche Kriegslokomotiven 1939–1945. Lokomotiven, Autos, Panzerzüge und Kanonen — Design, Konstruktion und Anwendung (die Eisenbahn im Zweiten Weltkrieg, 2) (Stuttgart: Franckh‘sche Verlagshandlung, 1983).
• 8. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); see also idem, “German Railroads/Jewish Souls,” Society, vol. 14, no. 1 (December 1976), pp. 162–174, as it appeared in Michael R. Marrus, ed., The Nazi Holocaust: Historical Articles on the Destruction of European Jews; Volume 3: The “Final Solution”: The Implementation of Mass Murder (Westport, CT: Meckler, 1989), pp. 520–556; and Sonderzüge nach Auschwitz (Mainz: Dumjahn, 1981).
• 9. Alfred Gottwadt and Diana Schulle, Die Judendeportationen aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941–1945 (Wiesbaden: Marixverlag, 2005).
• 10. Gottwaldt and Schulle, Die Judendeportationen aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941–1945.
• 11. Hilberg, “German Railroads/Jewish Souls,” pp. 522–524.
• 12. Gottwaldt and Schulle, Die Judendeportationen aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941–1945, p. 16.
• 13. Ibid.; Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen Duisburg, Gerichte Rep. 388 Nr. 415, 417–471 und Nr. 696–705: Verfahren gegen Ganzenmüller, Dr. Albert, Dipl. Ing., taatssekretär im Reichsverkehrsministerium und stellvertretender Generaldirek- tor der Deutschen Reichsbahn wegen Beihilfe zum Mord und Freiheitsberaubung im Amt mit Todesfolge durch die Organisation der jüdischen Deportationen in die östlichen Vernichtungslager Laufzeit (1942–45), 1980, Aktenzeichen 8 Js 430/67 8 Ks 1/71 8 Js 750/67 (Staatsanwaltschaft Düsseldorf: NS-Gewaltverbrechen).
• 14. Gottwaldt refers to a long list of studies that include, among others, the above- mentioned works of Raul Hilberg.
• 15. Heiner Liechtenstein, Mit der Reichsbahn in den Tod. Massentransporte in den Holocaust 1941 bis 1945 (Köln: Bund, 1985); Hans G. Adler, Der verwaltete Mensch. Studien zur Deportation aus Deatschland (Tubingen: Mohr, 1974).
• 16. For example, see Serge Klarsfeld, Memorial de Juifs de France (Paris: Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, 1978).
• 17. Gottwaldt and Schulle, Die Judendeportationen aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941–1945, p. 23.
• 18. Ibid.
• 19. Ibid., p. 14.
• 20. Alfred Gottwaldt and Diana Schulle, “Juden ist die Benutzung von Speisewagen untersagt” Die antijüdische Politik des Reichsverkehrsministeriums zwischen 1933 und 1945 (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2007).
• 21. Alfred Gottwaldt, Eisenbahner gegen Hitler. Widerstand und Verfolgung bei der Reichsbahn 1933–1945 (Wiesabden: Marix Verlag, 2009); Hilberg, “German ailroads/Jewish Souls”; Mierzejewski, The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich: A History of the German National Railway.
• 22. Alfred Gottwaldt, Wagners Einheitslokomotiven: Die Dampflokomotiven der Reichsbahn und ihre Schöpfer (Freiburg: EK-Verlag, 2012).
• 23. “Transports to Extinction: Shoah (Holocaust) Deportation Database, an online guide,” Yad Vashem research project. https://deportation.yadvashem.org?language=en