[güttsfükk]

I have no background info except they were taken in Schwandorf, Germany

[Magenta]

Ooooh!! Very nice find!

[Kerri]

What a horrific scar on human history it all was...RIP to all souls lost to feed the demented fantasies of a nutbag.

[Kerri]

Work made them free my ass.

[bob351]

All these pictures do nothing for me, the numbers on my grandparents arms speak volumes.

[emeraldlizards]

Originally Posted by Kerri ↗

What a horrific scar on human history it all was...RIP to all souls lost to feed the demented fantasies of a nutbag.

So incredibly sad and unjust...

[el_topo]

All that hatred, just because someone is different than you, is there no end to this madness?

[lobo221]

[William May]

This is kind of a puzzle photo set. Some of the pics show people in wagons......It appears that this train was carrying prisoners, got stopped somewhere, and then was liberated. The people in the carts are obviously prisoners, but the Germans would never have loaded them in the carts to move them. They would have shot them on the spot if they couldn't march. So if they were removed from the train, then it must have been rescue, and this photo set is documenting the saving of the surviving train prisoners, and the burying of the bodies found on the train. (There was a high death toll on the transports, due to no food or water, and exposure) The photo of the bodies in the train would tend to confirm this. The Germans would never have photographed the bodies left after the railroad cars were emptied out, because they didn't care. They just dragged out the dead bodies so the cars were empty for the next load of prisoners.
The lime in the first pic, was used by the Germans to dispose of bodies, but was also used by the allies when burying the huge numbers of dead, to try and stop the spread of disease. So my first thought was the lime came from the Germans, but after looking at the entire photo set, it appears it was probably used by the rescuers to dispose of the dead bodies that they had to remove.
Something else is the lack of a locomotive or train crew. The Reichsbahn (German State Railway) was responsible for all rail movement, even that by the Nazi military. The train crew would never have left the train, but it looks like they took the locomotive and left the train to it's fate. Cruel on one hand, but it may be the reason that these people survived. If they had made it to a camp, they would have almost certainly been killed on arrival, which is what was happening at the end of the war. Industry was destroyed, so there was no longer any use for slave labor, and most of the camps were being overrun by prisoners from other camps, so at the end of the war, nearly every transport train load of people were simply gassed or shot. They didn't even bother with the "selection" process. It would be interesting to know what the backstory of these photos was.

[William May]

Just a final note about the train crew that is missing in the pics.....
The train crew and conductor were personally responsible for their train, so for them to just abandon it would have been pretty rare. It may have been so close to the end that they no longer cared. Or they may have decided to make sure this load of people did NOT make it to a camp.
The train crews themselves (with a few very rare exceptions) were not sadists or Nazis. They were responsible for rail transport, and although they probably knew what they were carrying, there wasn't much they could do about it. Transport was a critical part of the war effort, and hindering it was punishable by shooting.
I am not aware of any war crimes trials for train crews. They were some of the few employees that were working overtime before the war ended, and then still worked overtime after the war ended, transporting people and material to avoid a post-war famine or other catastrophe.