Bidding to Build Trains in CA, Deutsche Bahn Railroad Whitewashes Its Nazi Past
“In recognition of the railroad workers’ unique achievements in this war I decree December 7 the Day of the German railroad worker.” — Adolf Hitler, December 7, 1943
Who is going to build California’s “train to nowhere”?
From a technical point of view, the likely bidders from France and Japan are far ahead of the competition. The French TGV (developed by Alstom and the state-owned SNCF) and the Japanese “bullet train” have a long track record of reliability. The Chinese CSR, on the other hand (which has hooked up with General Electric), is a relatively new player in the field, while the German high-speed train ICE has a long history of malfunctions and routinely drives German passengers to despair.
But both CSR and the German venture of Siemens and the state-owned railroad operator Deutsche Bahn (DB) are willing to sweeten up the deal: CSR’s offer includes financing; Siemens is luring law-makers with the promise to create 1,000 new jobs in Sacramento. So the race is still open, and other factors come into play.
In August, a bill was passed in California’s Senate and Assembly requiring companies vying for contracts to build California’s high-speed rail system to disclose their involvement in deportations to concentration camps during World War II. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told Pajamas Media:
We supported the act in order to encourage companies with WWII-era histories related to slave labor and abetting genocide to acknowledge those actions and apologize accordingly.
Although Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill, it is nevertheless already a success: the French railroad company SNCF, which transported 75,000 Jews from France to the death camps between 1942 and 1944, apologized for the first time and launched a website where it presents all its efforts to “shed light on the facts.”
“The apology was apparently not prompted by regret,” the Los Angeles Times criticized. Maybe that’s correct.
Even a half-hearted apology, however, is still more than what the German railroad company — which, needless to say, transported a much bigger number of Jews to the gas chambers and shooting sites — has ever been willing to offer. Says Hans-Rüdiger Minow, chairman of the German organization Train of Memory:
Deutsche Bahn has a selective view on history. … It pretends to bear no responsibility for the deportations because it was founded only in 1994. On the other hand, it is celebrating its 175th anniversary.
The anniversary of the first steam locomotive trip in Germany is being celebrated in Nuremberg between December 7 and 14. Five hundred high society guests were invited, and Chancellor Merkel and company CEO Rüdiger Grube spoke. Grube stated in a press release in May:
The railroad has always brought people together. … It helped to spread ideas and to rapidly promulgate progress. We look back at a fascinating history, without fading out the seamy sides.
What might be the “seamy sides” of this history? Would it be possible to vaguely circumscribe the deportation of more than three million Jews without using the words “deportation,” “murder,” “death,” “Holocaust,” or “Auschwitz,” let alone any other word that could indicate that people have been killed (and that the railroad may have something to do with it), and without even mentioning the Jews?
Grube shows how it’s done:
In its history, the railroad has also been a tool of domination. DB actively deals with the role of the Deutsche Reichsbahn under National Socialism.
He then switched to other important topics like the anniversary tour, the company’s gift shop, and very appealing anniversary ticket offers.
It should be noted that the Jews who were transported from all over Europe to their deaths got discounts, too:
The charge would be half the third-class rate provided that at least four hundred people were being shipped. … Children under ten traveled at half fare; those under four traveled free (Raul Hilberg, German Railroads/Jewish Souls).
“Sonderzüge” (“special trains”) were organized, and many thousands of railroad employees gave their best to make sure that the genocide could be carried out on schedule. On August 13, 1942, Obergruppenführer Wolff, chief of Himmler’s personal staff, wrote to Albert Ganzenmüller, deputy general director of the Reichsbahn and undersecretary of state at the Transport Ministry:
With particular joy I noted your assurance that for two weeks now a train has been carrying, every day, 5,000 members of the chosen people to Treblinka, so that we are now in a position to carry through this population movement at an accelerated tempo. I, for my part, have contacted the participating agencies to assure the implementation of the process without friction. I thank you again for your efforts in this matter and, at the same time, I would be grateful if you would give to these things your continued personal attention. (Quote from: Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews)
And that’s what happened. The goal of annihilating European Jewry couldn’t have been reached if it had not been given absolute priority — even over the efforts to win the war.
Milk it.
So … is there going to be a similar requirement that a japanese bidder disclose its role in the massive, widespread mistreatment of POWs – up to and including working them to death and sometimes chopping their heads off so that photos could be taken? What about japan’s adventures in china – should they be disclosed too?
I don’t have anything particularly against japan, and I have no ties to germany, but this is just opportunistic BS. Should bids in germany require US bidders to lay out any ties they might have had with the bombing of dresden? How about the dropping of the two atomic bombs or the firebombing of tokyo? Or how about every single american company with ties to the pentagon be required to apologize for vietnam every single time they bid for a project?
SNCF had well and truly “disclosed” its involvement in transporting jews, well before this recent apology. And the german railway’s connection to nazi germany is essentially symbolic. The company’s been devolved and reformed so many times that the only real connection is that (a) it’s german, and (b) it runs trains.
Get a grip. This is just letting political agendas get in the way of common sense capitalism. If germany did this to the US, you’d be bitching about those nasty anti-american europeans.
Well said Matthew.
Um….Reichsbahn involved in Nazi crimes? Who would have thought that possible?
Probably next time we will learn that the Wehrmacht was -shocker!- involved in WW2!
there is not an ameican railroad company that could build our new rail ways?
I frequently ask the same question. Why is this business being farmed out to foreign companies. Isn’t there an American company that can build these trains? Is there one that can make the shift from another form of vehicle building? What about the Oldsmobile or Pontiac divisions of GM that have recently shut down. Do we need these trains so quickly that we can’t wait for one of our own compaies to make the transition to railroad car building? What about all this money the banks are now holding that needs to be invested in new businesses and that they are holding back on investing in anything but Wall Street? Has our de-industrialization gone this far? This issue is a symptom of something much bigger that should be in the forefront of our attention.
I guess another way to put the question is “should taxpayers be given the best value for their money?”
If an american company happens to do that, then that’s fantastic. If not, then you need to decide which is more important.
And if you solve the problem by whacking up trade barriers to make “foreign” bids less competitive, expect europe to do the same
Reality is tricky, isn’t it?
Here’s the up-side – most of the work will actually be done by americans regardless. Local contractors will do most of the digging, lifting, moving and welding. The company that actually wins the bid will mostly be supplying technology and project management. Local companies will still make a bundle.
Free trade really does work.
Tabulating Machine company provided then state of the art software to run the Nazi railroad system, tabulating machine company is known today as IBM.
The Bush-Harriman-Brown banking partnership provided loans and financing to the Nazi war effort, the Bush family went on to provide Two presidents for the USA.
Standard Oil, Kodak, Coca Cola/Fanta, Chase bank, many American companies supported, worked with, financed, and otherwise profited from collaboration with Nazi’s.
After WW2 the US govt secretly brought thousands of German Scientists, doctors, engineers and intelligence officers to kick start the space program, Biowarfare, and other secret programs
The CIA was organized by members of Nazi Intelligence services and agencies.
Maybe a little more research is in order..?
What’s so hard to understand here?
Lenin: Class-based International Socialism
Hitler: Race-based National Socialism
Obama: Class- and Race-based Post-National Socialism
They’re all on the same team: fascism.
Dr. Khan Krum,
I believe that you have here strayed from the Pajamas Media guideline of not straying from the topic.
At risk of doing the same, I ask you, “ad hominem”:
What are you getting at? Which Dead Horse are you flogging?
… and, also, you are quite mistaken, Dr. Khan. The cosmos emerged from “the fragments of an ‘Aigg’ laid by a diving duck on the knee of Ilmatar, goddess of the air,” as scientifically revealed here:
http://www.finlit.fi/kalevala/index.php?m=1&l=1 and http://sacred-texts.com/neu/kveng/index.htm
[in hoc non sequitur vincit!]
I’ve used the DB numerous times. I owned a Volkswagen and possess Chase cards. I read plenty Random House books and drink Coca-Cola. One of my cars is a Ford and I’ve used aspirin for headaches caused by hours in front of an IBM computer, not to mention using Kodak film most of my life.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s father was a Nazi. Surely California’s high-speed rail system will be build by the Germans we have been protecting for the past 65 years.
Good one!
Where’s the national outcry against those eminently fertile fields called “Hypocrisy” and “Double-think?”
I disavow the notion of inherited guilt. Sixty five years after the end of the war, I think we can be assured that no one who had anything to do with the Holocaust is working for Deutsche Bahn.
It’s as tiring as these apologists for slavery. Everyone alive at that time is dead. Punish the guilty. Quit assigning blame to the uninvolved.
I agree. If there are any Nazis who participated in the Holocaust working for the company, then go after them. Further, how much guilt can you put on a company that was under the thumb of a murderous dictatorship? Does anyone honestly believed this or any other German company could’ve refused Hitler’s dictates?
Do you know what I find highly interesting? The same people who whine about the actions of Deutsche Reichsbahn nearly 80 years ago would have no problem with:
1. Loading fundamentalist Christians up on similar trains
2. Loading Jews up on similar trains
3. Loading blacks up on similar trains
4. Loading Mexicans up on similar trains
5. Aborting babies in numbers that make the Holocaust seem like a Sunday picnic.
It was nearly 80 years ago. Do us all a favor and get over it. Was it wrong? You bet. And so is abortion, but you liberal wankers don’t have a problem with that. If the Jews had been given guns, once it became obvious what was going on, they would have fought back and did (the Warsaw ghetto, the German resistance); pre-born children are the most helpless amongst us, and with a few exceptions (notably those fundamentalist Christians people would like to see share a fate not unlike the Jews) no one has a problem with it.
Your hypocrisy slip is showing.
Come on, what’s the big deal? There are a lot worse things in life than being a Nazi.
You got it right, C.
Constitutionalist @8
Ok, let’s just get this straight:
Are you actually saying that “liberal wankers” would be happy to see fundamentalist christians, mexicans, jews and “blacks” loaded onto trains and sent to the gas chambers? Have I misunderstood what you’re saying there? If that IS what you’re saying, I’d like to see your evidence.
See, the problem is that you’ve just called “liberals” the equivalent of nazis. That’s a pretty big claim. It’s not unfair to ask you to back that up with some pretty convincing data. Otherwise you’re just slandering people you don’t like.
And a little history lesson: The people who made the most fuss about japan and hitler prior to WWII were the “liberals” and trade-unionists. For all their faults, the lefties in the 30′s saw the danger that more conservative business interests were willing to ignore. Neville Chamberlaine was a conservative. His own party backed his appeasement strategy. The odd man out on the conservative side was churchill, and it took the failure of the conservative appeasement strategy to give him the influence he needed.
In australia we had bob menzies – actually one of the more impressive conservatives – doing battle with waterfront unions in 1938 over their refusal to load iron for shipment to japan. It earned him the nickname “pig iron bob”
Roosevelt had to fight a conservative congress every step of the way to let him act on the rising threat in europe and the pacific. Congress kept passing laws banning him from giving assistance to anyone. Until pearl harbor of course. Then they got a clue.
It’s actually depressing when people who call themselves conservative dredge up examples from WWII to throw at lefties. It’s depressing because it’s historically so ignorant. If you actually knew the facts, you’d never ever bring it up.
Bravo, Matthew! All thumbs up. Very well said. Perhaps our Nation would be better suited to dealing with reality if some citizens’ comfort zone and form of “activism” was other than labelling others as “Nazis” on discussion boards… a most serious, perhaps nigh unto blasphemous, ridiculousness, and a grievous insult to those who were destroyed in the Holocaust and in the battle lines of WWII…!
I wouldn’t go that far. I mean – there are actually people who WANT to be seen as nazis.
I was addressing the specifics of what Constitutionalist wrote. I just don’t see the point in attaching labels. It’s lazy, and usually just incorrect.
Welp, good point(s), anywho.
Name a German company that doesn’t have a Nazi past.
SAP?