Date: February 1, 1942
You have asked the legal opinion of the Section of Legality on a matter related to transportation.
You have informed us that the trains containing persons being taken to Auschwitz, mostly Jews, have cars in which the transportees are so numerous that they are forced to stand for the entire trip, which takes five days and eleven hours. Because of the close packing of standing bodies within the cars, there is a lack of air: the conditions are suffocating. Although the transportees are allowed out of the car for fifteen minutes once every eight hours, when they are each fed half a bowlful of thin gruel by the side of the tracks, the conditions of transportation cause some of them to weaken so greatly that they suffocate inside the cars. Or by somehow sliding to the floor (even though the close packing of the bodies causes some of their bodies to be held vertical for a period after they have already died), they become trampled to death. Old women, old men, and young children, you inform us, are the ones most susceptible to dying by suffocation or by being trampled after sliding to the floor.
You further inform us that, when the trains stop once every eight hours and people get off to eat, there usually are a number of transportees who are too weak to get back on the train or who feign such weakness. These individuals are quickly examined by a doctor who accompanies the train for this purpose. If the examination shows them to be too weak to continue, they are shot and left by the side of the tracks. Medical officers attest that the shootings cause no unnecessary or long lasting pain because the people are shot by pressing the muzzle of a pistol directly against the back of the head so that death is instantaneous.
You have informed us that the train cars are packed as tightly as they are because of military necessity. Our armies are fighting the Bolsheviki in a life and death struggle on the eastern front. If we lose the war on the Bolsheviki front, Germany will be laid waste and will cease to exist as a nation. There is therefore an overwhelming military necessity to use the railroad, one of Poland's few, to move a continuous stream of tanks, artillery, small arms, ammunition, food, etc. to our eastern armies. Engines and cars are thus employed exclusively for that purpose, with the sole exception that once each week an engine and ten cars are used to transport Jews to Auschwitz. This movement of the Jews is essential because they, like the Bolsheviki, are a bone in the throat to the German people and must be eliminated for Greater Germany to survive and prosper. (Not surprisingly, they often are the leaders of the Bolsheviki.) Transporting Jews to Auschwitz carries out a major policy decision of the Fuhrer and his advisers established at the Wannsee Conference in 1941 and set forth in appropriate prior memos from this office.
As you have explained to us, this railroad transportation of the Jews, as essential as it is, must be done in a way that minimizes interruption of, or interference with, the movement of supplies to our eastern armies. The cars are therefore packed as tightly as they are, since otherwise three trains per week would be required instead of just one, with a corresponding adverse impact on the movement of supplies to our armies and a correspondingly enhanced risk of losing the war against the Bolsheviki, with the accompanying destruction of Germany.
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