World War II is full of film stories. Scenarios featuring spies who played a crucial role in key moments of the conflict; deception operations on a scale never seen before; heroic and intriguing missions; and the occasional strategic disaster. The story of the ‘ghost train’, on the other hand, is told as one of the many darker chapters of the war.

The train between Toulouse, France, and the Dachau concentration camp was one of many transporting those deported as part of the Final Solution for forced labour or simply the extermination of the Jews. But the journey in the summer of 1944 was torturous, not only because of the prisoners’ knowledge of their destination, but also because of the journey itself.

Carrying around 724 people, the final pass of this human cattle train, known by the aforementioned nickname of the ‘ghost train’, was so raw.

The endless journey of the ghost train

Dachau was the first concentration camp established by the Nazis and was located in a former munitions factory about 11 miles northwest of Munich. Opening in March 1933It was intended to be a labor and reintegration camp. Like many other camps during the regime, it became an extermination camp, active for 12 years until the Americans arrived in April 1945.

On the left is the Dachau field. You can see the barracks

All kinds of prisoners were locked up here, including enemies of the regime (political opponents, Spanish republicans, communists or Soviet prisoners of war) as well as those who adhered to the racist and homophobic ideas of the Nazis (Jews, gypsies and homosexuals). From the outside it looked like a military camp, but inside there were 34 barracks with a maximum capacity of about 200 prisoners.

The most effective way the Nazis used to feed these camps was train transport, called ‘genocide trains’. It is shown in many films. How do they gather people like cattle? His destination was one of these fields, in overcrowded carriages. The journeys were usually short, as the trains did not stop. But the last train journey between Toulouse and Dachau was endless.

It is the end of June 1944. Three weeks after the Normandy landings, the Allies were advancing at a good pace through the occupied territories. However, the Nazis were fighting enemy troops They kept the shredders runningThere is no point in continuing to maintain the structure of the camps in cold blood, with the Soviets pressing in the east and the Americans, British, Canadians, French and Dutch forces following you in the west. That’s how it was.

Determined to intensify his persecution of rivals, enemies of the Third Reich, and those he deemed inferior, Hitler continued to fill trains with camps as destinations. Fearing a British and American incursion into the Vernet d’Ariège camp in southern France, around 400 prisoners set off for Toulouse on 30 June.

Among them were the ‘Vernet seven’, a group of officers who remained loyal to the Second Spanish Republic and were forced to flee to France. On July 2, 402 prisoners and 150 resistance fighters from the Vernet camp They were crammed into groups of 80 people in wagons that could hold a maximum of 40. The weather was hot, water and food were scarce, and it was clear the Nazis did not want them to be comfortable.

Monument in Sorgues where some people helped escape

There were also members of the Nazi military police whose job it was to make sure they did not escape. The 905-kilometer journey to Dachau could be done in three days. But it took almost two months to arrive. The situation in France was complicated for the Germans because of the Allied advance, and the classical train route was not viable. Bombings at stations, sabotaging of the rails by the French resistance or the destruction of bridges prevented normal travel and meant hell for the prisoners.

The Allies were not sabotaging that train specifically, but rather sabotaging the infrastructure that would make it harder for German reinforcements to reach the Normandy front, but it did affect the prisoners. These conditions meant that the train had to stop for days at stations, change routes, and wait for long periods of time for the tracks to be repaired. Sometimes it would turn around, and as if that weren’t enough, it would stop for bombing.

Let’s remember that there were stories of supplies being lacking and prisoners sleeping in rows. There were also escape attempts. Sometimes they were successful, sometimes they were not, and the Germans used punishments such as closing a car and turning it into an oven in the scorching sun, or an execution, where the double standards of some officers can be seen.

In retaliation for the Resistance’s actions, they selected 10 prisoners from Bordeaux who were taken to the outskirts of the city with 46 other prisoners to be shot. Up to three times. This was because one of the officers refused to do it because it was not according to procedure (i.e. taking them to the concentration camps yes but shooting them no), so they had to return to the area two more times to finally be executed.

Dozens more prisoners were embarked during the journey, and up to 724 prisoners were transported through the stages, and ‘Accidents’ haven’t stoppedAllied aircraft attacked the convoy several times, killing both Germans and deportees and damaging the locomotive twice. Between all the stops, some civilians attempted to help the prisoners, but these actions rarely resulted in victory.

“Work will make you free” is written on one of the gates of Dachau

An estimated 200 people managed to escape, but the Ghost Train finally arrived at Dachau on August 28, almost two months after its departure, with 536 prisoners on board. Almost half of these did not survive.

Dachau in fiction

Remember that the barracks had a capacity of about 200 prisoners? When the Americans arrived on April 29, 1945, there were 1,600 people in some of the barracks, many of them on the verge of death, and it is estimated that in total the camp received over 200,000 prisoners from 30 different countries.

The Dachau camp became the main character of television thanks to the magnificent episode of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’s magnificent ‘Blood Brothers’. Here we can see the conditions of the prisoners when the Americans arrived and the soldiers’ disbelief that such a thing existed. What they did not know at the time (at least the heroes of the series) was that it was not the only thing that came from Dachau. It is also shown that German civilians were forced to bury the camp victims.

Now this nickname ‘ghost train’ comes not from the conditions of the journey or the deaths, but from the fact that the train changes, the comings and goings of the original train and the fact that the change of route sometimes results in no one knowing exactly where the train is.

Pictures | Schmidane, Hans-Peter Scholz

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