Albert Ganzenmüller

On 16 July 1942, Karl Wolff, the Personal Adjutant to Heinrich Himmler, complained to the newly appointed State Secretary about irregular transport and track repairs on the line to the extermination camp at Sobibor.

The senior management of the eastern division of the railways, ‘Gedob’ (Generaldirektion der Ostbahnen), is in constant touch with the security service (Sicherheitsdienst) in Krakau.

The latter is in agreement that transport from Warsaw to Sobibor via Lublin should continue while the reconstruction work on this stretch renders such movements impossible ([until] approximately October 1942.Karl Wolff thanked him on 13 August 1942 in a personal letter: … I note with particular pleasure from your communication that a train with 5,000 members of the chosen race has been running daily for 14 days and that we are accordingly in a position to continue with this population movement at an accelerated pace.

The Holocaust trains were hired by Adolf Eichmann, and the Reichsbahn demanded one-way fares be paid by the victims, although children below the age of four were allowed free travel to their deaths.

The cattle cars in which the victims were carried were completely unheated in winter and unventilated in hot weather and so the passengers were exposed to either hypothermia or heat stroke.

The public prosecutor's office continued to investigate him after 1957, as the exchange of correspondence with Wolff and Himmler had been discovered and published by the historian Gerald Reitlinger.

The charge was that by organising transport the 68-year-old Ganzenmüller had aided and abetted the murder of millions of Jewish men, women and children whose wrongful detention had resulted in death.