Julius Dorpmüller

Julius Dorpmüller (1939)

Julius Heinrich Dorpmüller (born July 24, 1869 in Elberfeld (today a district of Wuppertal ), † July 5, 1945 in Malente-Gremsmühlen ) was a German railway engineer and politician . From 1926 until his death he was director general of the Deutsche Reichsbahn , from 1937 additionally Reich Minister of Transport and briefly in May 1945 Reich Minister of Post .

Dorpmüller studied railway and road construction at the Technical University of Aachen . After graduation, he began his career with the Prussian State Railways in 1893 . In the years before the First World War , he gained international experience in China and was soon regarded as an internationally recognized railway specialist. In 1920 he was accepted into the service of the Deutsche Reichsbahn , where he rose very quickly and was involved in the preparatory work and consultations for the Dawes plan . In 1925, one year after the founding of the Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft, he became deputy to the director general Rudolf Oeser , whom he succeeded after his death in 1926. After Hitler came to power in 1933, he retained his post despite initial vehement criticism from SA and NSDAP members. Dorpmüller was able to protect the internal autonomy of the Reichsbahn from interference by party authorities, but instead implemented the National Socialist rearmament and race policy in the Reichsbahn. He also pushed the Reichsbahn to take over the construction of the autobahn. From 1937 he was also Reich Minister of Transport in personal union.

During the Second World War , Dorpmüller remained the top railroader, despite various attempts, especially by Albert Speer , to replace him. Under his leadership, the Reichsbahn achieved the greatest transportation and transport services in its history. At the same time, under Dorpmüller, she also secured supplies for the Wehrmacht on all fronts of the war and was involved in transporting the victims of the Holocaust to the extermination camps . In view of his good reputation from pre-war times, the Western Allies initially designated the Reichsverkehrminister to lead the reconstruction of the Reichsbahn. Dorpmüller, who was already seriously ill, died shortly after the end of the war .

For years after the war, the board of directors of the Deutsche Bundesbahn and many railway workers saw Dorpmüller as an exemplary expert whose memory was held in honor. It was only in the 1980s, when the role of the Reichsbahn and its general director in the crimes of the Third Reich was increasingly discussed and processed by historians, that the Bundesbahn distanced itself from him.

Life

Youth and education

Julius Dorpmüller was the eldest son of the railroad - engineer Heinrich Dorpmüller (1841-1918) and his wife Maria Anna, born Raulff (1839-1890) in Elberfeld born. His father came from a Westphalian family and grew up in Unna . In the year before his first son was born, he entered the service of the Prussian State Railways . Heinrich Dorpmüller managed to rise to the position of production engineer, and he was also the inventor of various railway engineering aids. His Dorpmüller track knife was awarded by the Association of German Railway Administrations in 1882 and was used by many administrations in the following years.

After Julius, his siblings Maria (1871–1966), Heinrich (1874–1935) and Ernst (1877–1958) were born. The father was transferred to Mönchengladbach in 1871 and to Aachen a few years later . Julius Dorpmüller attended school in both cities and graduated from the Kaiser-Karls-Gymnasium in Aachen in 1888 . He then studied railway and road construction at RWTH Aachen University from 1889 to 1893 . His brothers also studied there, and they later also entered the railroad service. All three brothers belonged to the Corps Delta Aachen. In this corps, Dorpmüller made connections with some of his later colleagues and employees, including his predecessor as Reich Minister of Transport, Paul von Eltz-Rübenach , who was a member of the corps at the time.

In order to continue his training, after the first state examination in 1893, Dorpmüller joined the Royal Railway Directorate in Cologne as a government building manager . From 1894 to 1895 he did military service as a one-year volunteer with the 5th Westphalian Infantry Regiment No. 53 . In 1897 he took part in the competition for the Schinkel Festival of 1898 of the Architects and Engineers Association in Berlin as one of 14 engineers on the task of designing a seaport at the mouth of a river subject to ebb and flow . His work was awarded a Schinkel medal and at the same time counted as a trial work for the second state examination ( assessor ), which he passed in the summer of 1898. After being appointed government master builder in the engineering field, Dorpmüller moved to the Saarbrücken directorate , where he was taken on as scheduled on December 30, 1903, while being appointed railway construction and operations inspector . His tasks included, among other things, the reconstruction planning for the main train stations in Saarbrücken and Neunkirchen . In 1905, his superiors certified that he was “excellently suited for any managerial position”.

Dorpmüller took a leave of absence in 1907 and joined the Chinese Shantung Railway in Tsingtau as head of the technical office . In 1908 he became German chief engineer for the construction of the Imperial Chinese State Railway Tientsin – Pukow , which was financed by German and English bonds and which went into full operation in November 1912 with the completion of the Luokou Railway Bridge , the first railway bridge over the Yellow River by the MAN Gustavsburg plant went. Dorpmüller has been in charge of the operation of this railway since 1912. During his stay in Tientsin in 1910, the Prussian King gave him the character of a building officer.

The First World War cut ties with Germany. Dorpmüller was initially able to continue its activity. In 1917 he was relieved of his service due to China's declaration of war against the German Reich and returned to Europe disguised as a Dutch missionary via Manchuria and the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1918. After his return in May 1918, he reported to the German railroad troops in Berlin . He was ordered to Bucharest in the Balkans and served as part of the German Caucasus troops under General Kress von Kressenstein in Georgia . Dorpmüller worked there in the field railways in the organization of the Transcaucasian railways .

Promotion to Reichsbahn general director

Before the end of the First World War, Dorpmüller was given the scheduled position as a member of the Central Railway Office and the local railway management in Saarbrücken in July 1918, when he was appointed government and building councilor. From January 1919 he was the head of civil engineering for the Stettin Railway Directorate . As early as December 23, 1919, while being appointed by the Prussian state government to the senior building officer with the rank of senior government councilor, he went to the Essen directorate. He had to end his thoughts on going back to China as a consultant for Krupp after Krupp did not receive the announced contract to rebuild the railway bridge over the Yellow River that had been destroyed in the war. As part of the Länderbahnen, the Prussian State Railways merged with the newly founded Deutsche Reichsbahn on April 1, 1920, and Dorpmüller was taken into service. In the following year he was the German representative in negotiations with the Reparations Commission on the financial assessment of the rolling stock given to the Allies after the armistice .

Reich Transport Minister Wilhelm Groener appointed Dorpmüller President of the Reich Railway Directorate in Opole on May 23, 1922 . In the time after the uprisings in Upper Silesia and the new demarcation between the German Empire and Poland, Dorpmüller was responsible for organizing the newly established management and adapting the rail network of the former Kattowitz Railway Directorate, which was divided by the demarcation, to the changed requirements in the important Upper Silesian industrial area . Likewise, in accordance with the conservative attitude of the Reichsbahn management, it was supposed to minimize the co-determination of the Reichsbahn staff, which had been introduced since 1918 . Dorpmüller showed himself to be equal to these tasks, but also made the railway unions an enemy at an early stage.

In preparation for the Dawes Plan , the new Minister of Transport, Rudolf Oeser, sent Dorpmüller to the London Conference as an expert in May 1924 . He was also subsequently involved in the deliberations on the new State Railroad Act , with which the Deutsche Reichsbahn was converted into a stock corporation called the "Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft". This society was to pay the reparations from its profits to which the empire had been obliged in the Treaty of Versailles . As a stock corporation, the Reichsbahn should operate economically and largely independently of political influences. The Reich as owner only had a say through the Reichsbahn administrative council, which also included representatives of the victorious powers and business. The Dawes Plan and the politicians and experts involved in it on the German side were vigorously attacked by the Volkish and the National Socialists . As a representative of the “Dawesbahn”, Dorpmüller was also attacked by National Socialists such as Gottfried Feder or Hans Buchner , a business editor of the Völkischer Beobachter .

From October 1, 1924, Dorpmüller was President of the Reich Railway Directorate in Essen , where he primarily dealt with the consequences of the Belgian - French occupation of the Ruhr . Due to the occupation, the management was based in Hamm at that time . In accordance with the resolutions of the London Conference, after the Dawes Plan came into force, government operations gradually ended until November 16, 1924, and the railways in the Ruhr area returned to German operations after an almost two-year break. Dorpmüller mastered this difficult task extremely successfully and therefore recommended himself for higher functions.

At the request of the seriously ill General Director and former Reich Minister of Transport, Rudolf Oeser, who had been in office since September 1924, the Board of Directors of the Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft created the post of permanent representative of the General Director in 1925. Dorpmüller was appointed to this post on July 1, 1925, confirmation by Reich President Paul von Hindenburg followed on July 3, 1925. Due to Oeser's frequent absence due to illness, Dorpmüller was soon de facto in charge of the Reichsbahn alone. On December 10, 1925, at the request of the Faculty of Construction, the Technical University of Aachen awarded him the title of Dr.-Ing. In recognition of his services to the railway industry and the reputation of German technology and its export opportunities abroad. e. H. After being appointed deputy, he had already moved to Berlin. Dorpmüller was a bachelor, his sister Maria ran the household for him.

Announcement of the appointment of Dorpmüller as President of the Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft

On June 4, 1926, just one day after the death of his predecessor Rudolf Oeser, he was elected General Director by the Board of Directors of the Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft. This quick election aroused criticism, especially from the trade unions, because Dorpmüller had rigidly dealt with the rights of co-determination in Opole and was also considered a “man of big industry”. The Reich government itself had considered the former Chancellor Hans Luther and Reich Minister of Transport Rudolf Krohne . In the Reichstag , the quick and irreverent approach met with strong criticism. The Reich government also felt that it had been left out and saw its influence on the Reichsbahn endangered. Reich Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann judged Dorpmüller to be unsuitable after he had claimed in a speech to the Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie (RDI) that the Reichsbahn's freight tariffs could be reduced by 27% without the Dawes Plan. Stresemann saw his compliance policy at risk. Dorpmüller's appointment was actually carried out primarily by industrial representatives on the administrative board, in addition to Chairman Carl Friedrich von Siemens, above all by Paul Silverberg , a representative of the Rhenish lignite industry , and the steel industrialist Peter Klöckner . Karl von Stieler , the influential Vice President of the Board of Directors from the ministerial bureaucracy, also wanted to avoid a politician as general director. Because of this public discussion, Minister Krohne delayed the submission of the confirmation to the Reich President. Hindenburg wanted to have the personnel problem solved and put pressure on the Reich government. His State Secretary Otto Meissner finally drafted an agreement together with Siemens and Krohne which in future provided for at least the appointment of the Deputy General Director by the Reich President and early consultations in the event of future selection of the General Director. Dorpmüller's speech at the RDI was described as an error that will no longer occur in the future. The new general manager was finally confirmed by Hindenburg on October 19, 1926. The Board of Directors confirmed Dorpmüller several times in the following years, most recently in 1935.

A series of accidents in the summer of 1926 contributed to the criticism of Dorpmüller's appointment, which raised doubts about operational safety in both the right-wing and left-wing press. In addition to the railway accident in Langenbach , the railway attack near Leiferde with 21 dead was particularly spectacular . After an anonymous letter initially indicated an act of revenge by a dismissed Reichsbahner, Die Rote Fahne , the party newspaper of the KPD , wrote of a “record of lies in the Dorpmüller press”.

Opening of the Hindenburgdamm in 1927

As General Director, Dorpmüller knew how to surround himself with capable employees, to whom he also gave great freedom of action. His head of press, Hans Baumann, developed new ideas for traffic advertising, such as the "Reichsbahn calendar" designed by Jupp Wiertz . With the course book, which was first published in 1927, the head of the passenger train schedule, Alfred Baumgarten , developed an essential medium for the sale of transport services. He appointed Max Leibbrand , who made a name for himself with the introduction of the “flying hamburger” , as the top manager of the Reichsbahn .

Reich President Hindenburg, who had participated in Dorpmüller's appointment, appreciated the naming of Hindenburgdamm and in the following years kept in close contact with the new General Director, who was often a guest in the presidential box of the Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden . Dorpmüller also frequented Berlin's social life in other ways and acquired a certain reputation as a hard-drinking entertainer. Internally, Dorpmüller mainly focused on the rationalization and modernization of the Reichsbahn, which also went hand in hand with downsizing. Whereas in 1918 the state railways still had a million employees, this number had fallen to around 710,000 by 1927. The number of Reichsbahn divisions was also reduced. Against the fierce resistance of the countries concerned, Würzburg lost their directorates in 1930 and Magdeburg in 1931 . On the other hand, Dorpmüller did not succeed in dissolving the Bavarian group administration , which Bavaria had secured as a separate intermediate instance when the Länderbahnen were merged. The economic boom in the second half of the 1920s made it possible for Dorpmüller to both meet the reparation obligations of the Dawes Plan and to take significant steps to modernize the Reichsbahn. Despite all the criticism, the railway workers and their unions did not deny him their respect: a union newspaper wrote on his 60th birthday: “For the railway workers, Dorpmüller is a man of the trade who has seen the world and who also knows how a railway is built must. ”In contrast, right-wing forces continued to revile him as an assistant to the“ fulfillment politicians ”. They also criticized his salary, which at 122,000 Reichsmarks was well above that of the Transport Minister with 35,000 Reichsmarks, for example Adolf Hitler in a speech at an NSDAP event on June 3, 1927. Dorpmüller, regardless of the criticism at home and abroad, often appeared as Representative of the Reichsbahn, including when visiting foreign railway administrations or as host of the second World Power Conference in Berlin in 1930. The Reichsbahn general director spoke fluent English and French and had extensive international contacts. The League of Nations therefore made him chairman of a commission for public works of international importance in 1931.

The rail zeppelin

The hesitant progress in electrifying the Reichsbahn network is an example of the limited possibilities under the framework conditions of the Dawes Plan . Dorpmüller, who was quite open to technical experiments such as the high-pressure locomotive H 02 1001 or the rail zeppelin - with which he took a trip himself on October 14, 1930 - saw great economic advantages in the possible reduction of operating and personnel costs. However, it was not possible for the Reichsbahn to raise the required high initial investments to the extent desired. The proportion of the electrically operated network therefore remained comparatively small compared to many European countries such as Italy, France or Switzerland until the Second World War.

The global economic crisis and the Schenker treaty

Julius Dorpmüller (1932)

From 1930 onwards, due to the global economic crisis, the transport services of the Reichsbahn sank rapidly. In 1932 the Reichsbahn made losses for the first time. In addition to the generally required revival of the economy, the Reichsbahn management saw a way out of this crisis in combating the competition from road transport that arose in the 1920s . Above all, freight transport by truck was a problem for the Reichsbahn as a competitor even before the global economic crisis. In 1930, Dorpmüller put the loss of income from truck traffic at around 250 million Reichsmarks. He called for legal measures to protect the Reichsbahn, above all through stricter concession regulations for truck haulage companies and an increase in vehicle tax . In particular, Dorpmüller turned against undercutting the rail tariffs by haulage companies. The government had increased the gasoline and benzene tax slightly, but Dorpmüller saw this as inadequate.

At the same time, Dorpmüller took other approaches against the street competition. The Reichsbahn had already established close relationships with the Schenker forwarding company since 1925 and granted it a loan of 17 million Reichsmarks. In February 1931, Schenker and the Reichsbahn signed the so-called "Schenker Agreement", which gave Schenker the monopoly as a haulage company for the transport of piece goods and express goods to and from German train stations. They could exercise this monopoly themselves or pass it on to local companies. Given the road network at that time and the level of technical development for trucks, long-distance freight transport was almost exclusively carried out by rail, so the Reichsbahn had the opportunity to hit the freight forwarding business seriously. Their aim was to use the tariff structure, together with the contract, to secure a quasi-state monopoly in road traffic. The Reichsbahn had also secretly bought the Schenker company in January 1931. Dorpmüller emphasized to the public that the contract was primarily intended to reduce transport costs for the German economy. The criticism from freight forwarders, chambers of commerce and members of the Reichstag was considerable, and many companies feared their ruin.

On February 18, 1931, the General Director had to answer questions from the Reich Cabinet. He informed Chancellor Heinrich Brüning and the ministers about the contract and the purchase of the Schenker company. The cabinet felt snubbed by the Reichsbahn, Reich Minister of Transport Theodor von Guérard - unlike the Reichsbahn board of directors - had not been informed beforehand by Dorpmüller. Guérard accused Dorpmüller of deceiving that the purchase contract had to be approved by the Reich government. The trucking contract with Schenker is just a sham contract to mislead the public. At the meeting, Dorpmüller was nevertheless able to convince the cabinet to keep the purchase agreement secret.

Ultimately, the Reichsbahn had to open the Schenker contract to other haulage companies. These could join the contract on the same terms. Dorpmüller also asked for approval of the Schenker contract in a published correspondence. At the same time, the board of directors under Carl Friedrich von Siemens sought the approval of the Schenker purchase in a confidential correspondence with the government. At the same time, the Reich government passed a new ordinance that made all long-distance freight transport over 50 kilometers subject to approval, but the Reichsbahn had to forego certain low tariffs to undercut truck traffic. As a result, it became apparent that the freight forwarders could creatively circumvent the new regulations, for example by designating them as long-distance works .

Brüning held the Reichsbahn general director in high regard and considered him as transport minister for his second cabinet. Due to the Schenker contract and the public discussion, he renounced it and appointed Gottfried Treviranus as Reich Minister of Transport. It was then left to the latter to approve the amended Schenker contract on December 6, 1931, after the freight forwarding industry had also given its approval. In March 1932 the new treaty came into force. However, the contract did not provide a permanent solution to the conflict between rail and road, as Dorpmüller had hoped for.

In the Third Reich until the start of the war

Dorpmüller as a controversial director general

Dorpmüller in the audience at a speech by Reich Transport and Postal Minister Paul von Eltz-Rübenach around 1935/36

Dorpmüller with Lammers and Hitler on February 4, 1937 on the balcony of the Reich Chancellery at a rally after his appointment as Reich Minister of Transport on February 2, 1937

During the time of National Socialism , Dorpmüller, who was not party to any party until 1941, rose to become Reich Minister of Transport on February 2, 1937. That was not what it looked like after Hitler came to power . Shortly after Hitler came to power, the associations of haulage companies and forwarding agents complained to the new Chancellor about the Schenker contract and demanded that it be withdrawn. Dorpmüller was able to convince Hitler in March 1933 to keep the contract. On the other hand, Hitler rejected a monopoly for road freight transport requested by Dorpmüller.

More critical for Dorpmüller was the criticism expressed for years by NSDAP representatives of the Reichsbahn and him as general director. As a company that operated largely independently of the will of the Reich Government, the Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft had not met many requests for job creation measures, special tariffs and other benefits. The "NS-Fachschaft Reichsbahn" had criticized this "industry compliance" and "compliance policy" many times. Another thorn in the side of the National Socialists was the employment of Jews at the Reichsbahn and its subsidiaries. Before 1933, Dorpmüller had selected its employees exclusively on the basis of professional criteria, with Ludwig Homberger , an internationally recognized financial expert, a baptized Jew was a member of the Reichsbahn executive board. The head of the Reichsbahn Central Office for Purchasing, Ernst Spiro, was also Jewish, as was Alfred Baumgarten, the train timetable officer, and Marcell Holzer , the director and former co-owner of the Schenker forwarding company.

The NSDAP members at the Reichsbahn, who were mainly to be found in the middle and lower ranks, soon became active against Dorpmüller. As early as March 1933, the Nazi student council submitted a petition to the Reich Chancellery demanding, among other things, the removal of all Jews from the Reichsbahn head office and a review of the director's salaries. The Reichsbahn architect Richard Brademann , a member of the NSDAP since 1931, submitted a list of all allegedly Jewish employees. On April 6, 1933, an SA troop briefly occupied the headquarters in Berlin's Vossstrasse , repeated the demands and demanded the resignation of the board of directors.

Dorpmüller, whose national conservative political stance, which was still rooted in the empire, was known in the Weimar Republic, however, had the support of President Hindenburg. Like many representatives of the conservative elite, he quickly adjusted to the new conditions and specifically sought alliances with “moderate” National Socialists. The consciously apolitical orientation of the Reichsbahn and many railway workers as a company serving the whole people - regardless of the economic objectives under the framework conditions of the Dawes Treaty - contributed to this rapid adjustment. Formally, the form of organization according to this internationally binding treaty remained in place until 1937, but like the Weimar Constitution , it was in fact suspended by the complete political control of the National Socialist regime. With an appeal to the railway workers on the occasion of the passing of the Enabling Act , Dorpmüller sided with the "national government" without reservation on March 24, 1933.

The criticism of the more radical National Socialists of Dorpmüller could not be appeased. The general manager therefore turned to Hitler and Minister of Transport Paul von Eltz-Rübenach . Hitler, who was dependent on a functioning traffic system and wanted peace and quiet in this area, commissioned SA leader Rolf Reiner in May 1933 with the formation of a "leadership staff of the NSDAP at the Reichsbahn" to investigate the allegations made against Dorpmüller and the Reichsbahnleitung as well as restoration. The Nazi student council was initially prohibited from further activities against the Reichsbahn leadership. The grudges against Dorpmüller ran deep among the NS-Reichsbahnern, despite the ban, for example, on June 21, 1933, thousands of Reichsbahner gathered in front of the Transport Museum in Nuremberg for a demonstration with slogans like “Fort with Dorpmüller”, “Out with the Jews” and "We receive 18 Mk a week, Dorpmüller 100,000 Mk" read. In Berlin, National Socialist railroad workers reacted to the announcement that Reiner, together with Dorpmüller and Carl Friedrich von Siemens, had “ envisaged " bringing the administrative board into line, with spontaneous demonstrations in Vossstrasse in front of the headquarters. Hitler had to receive and calm down the leaders of the Nazi student council in the neighboring Reich Chancellery.

Dorpmüller finally managed to win Hitler's support for remaining in office. Not only the support from Hindenburg and Eltz-Rübenach contributed to this, Dorpmüller's willingness to live up to the regime's expectations had also prepared the ground for it. At the management level and in the board of directors, unpopular members were now relieved or dismissed and replaced by National Socialists loyal to the line. Dorpmüller quickly parted with almost all “non-Aryan” employees or those who did not like the new rulers in any other way. As early as May 1933, he promoted Wilhelm Kleinmann, who had been a member of the NSDAP since 1931, from his previous position as head of the West Head of Operations to President of the Reich Railway Directorate in Cologne . In Mainz, Erfurt and Regensburg, too, railway workers with NSDAP party members took the lead in the management. The previous representative of the General Director and HR Director Wilhelm Weirauch , who was particularly criticized for the downsizing during the Great Depression, was replaced by Kleinmann on July 25, 1933. Dorpmüller proposed other party comrades, but was unable to assert himself with all personnel proposals in the conservatively dominated board of directors. In cooperation with Kleinmann, who ostentatiously appeared in SA uniform , whose technical competence was not doubted, the Reichsbahn boss managed to calm the situation down in the following months. Last but not least, Dorpmüller's quick willingness to take over the construction of the Reichsautobahn with the Reichsbahn contributed to stabilizing his position in the polycratic network of rule typical of National Socialism . After Hindenburg's death on August 2, 1934, at whose burial in the Tannenberg memorial he took part, Dorpmüller called on the railroad workers to agree in the subsequent referendum to merge the offices of Reich Chancellor and Reich President and swore the officials of the Reichsbahn headquarters to Hitler as "Führer and Reich Chancellor". In September 1934, after intervening with Eltz-Rübenach and Martin Bormann , Dorpmüller was finally able to obtain Rudolf Hess's approval for the dissolution of the leadership staff. He had ultimately defended the internal autonomy and sole professional responsibility of the Reichsbahn, but accepted that the Reichsbahn would implement and represent the National Socialist ideology and the politics of the Third Reich without any problems. This compromise was to last until the end of the Third Reich in 1945.

Implementation of the National Socialist policy at the Reichsbahn

One of the first steps in terms of National Socialist policy was the removal of all "non-Aryans" from the service of the Reichsbahn. The Reichsbahn, which was not formally a Reich authority until 1937, was not obliged to apply the law enacted in April 1933 to restore the professional civil service . She did it anyway under Dorpmüller's leadership. Only civil servants who had been employed before 1914 were initially spared, and the Reichsbahn also applied the front-line combatant privilege . Personal employees of Dorpmüller, such as his press officer, Hans Baumann, and senior officials in the main administration such as Alfred Baumgarten and Ernst Spiro were quickly transferred to subordinate positions, dismissed or retired “at their own request”, even if they met the conditions of the Civil Service Act. The only exception among the “non-Aryan” senior Reichsbahners was Ludwig Homberger, whose expertise even the new Deputy Director General Kleinmann initially considered indispensable. Dorpmüller also suggested resigning from the Board of Directors Silverberg, like Homberger of Jewish origin. Social democrats, communists and trade unionists also lost many of their jobs, and some, such as the trade unionist and board member Matthäus Herrmann , were imprisoned. For this purpose, unemployed people were hired through job creation measures, with NSDAP members and especially old fighters benefiting particularly. The "German greeting" was introduced on the Reichsbahn on July 15, 1933 on the instructions of Dorpmüller - however, this order had to be partially withdrawn after a few weeks because it was confused with the hand signals of the train crew during the brake test .

Construction site of the Reichsautobahn near Berlin around 1936

The construction of the Reichsautobahn was another element of National Socialist policy, the implementation of which Julius Dorpmüller adopted almost unconditionally. Dorpmüller had already participated in the Hafraba Association's first events in 1927 and kept in contact with its managing director Willy Hof . Even Heinrich Brüning had discussed as Chancellor plans to take over the financing of motorway construction by the Reichsbahn and then through a toll to refinance itself Dorpmüller whereas had resisted. Hitler took over these plans and incorporated the Reichsbahn under the direction of Dorpmüller. After initial resistance, Dorpmüller saw this as an opportunity both to secure his personal position and to decide the competition with the private goods industry for the railways. Hitler assured him that the Reichsbahn should be responsible for the uniform management of all long-distance freight traffic. On August 25, 1933, the company for the establishment of the Reichsautobahnen was founded as a subsidiary of the Reichsbahn, Julius Dorpmüller became chairman of both the executive board and the administrative board of the new company. In June, Dorpmüller, at the head of a large delegation, traveled to Italy together with Reich Labor Minister Franz Seldte to study motorway construction there.

Dorpmüller received a competitor for Hitler's favor and responsibility for the construction of the motorway with the appointment of Fritz Todt as "General Inspector for German Roads". In this position, Todt was responsible for the route management and planning approval for the motorways. Hitler valued Todt, who had been a party member since 1923, as a loyal and at the same time professionally competent follower. On September 23, 1933, Dorpmüller was at least able to hand Hitler the spade for the groundbreaking ceremony for the construction of the first section of the Reichsautobahn between Frankfurt and Heidelberg. The Reichsbahn general director was also often present at other groundbreaking ceremonies and opening ceremonies, but in the public perception he was mostly behind Hitler and Todt as well as other party celebrities.

The alignment of the federal states finally made it possible for Dorpmüller to put his long-cherished wish into practice and to dissolve the Bavarian group administration on October 1, 1933. As compensation, Bavaria received a new central Reichsbahn office in Munich. In the following year, the federal states lost their previous rights of co-determination in the approval of railway lines and railway supervision through the law on the rebuilding of the Reich . In the following years, Dorpmüller was also able to dissolve the comparatively small Reichsbahndirectors Oldenburg and Ludwigshafen , both successors to earlier regional railways.

Further modernization of the Reichsbahn

The labor market and economic policy of the National Socialists also included the expansion and modernization of rail transport. Contrary to the blood-and-soil ideology of National Socialism, modern technology and rationalization were the focus of this expansion. However, the modernization of the Reichsbahn lagged behind the construction of the Autobahn and the development of the Wehrmacht and the armaments industry, despite its considerable strategic importance . Building on plans and preliminary work from the Weimar period, the Reichsbahn was able to develop a good reputation as a modern transport company at home and abroad, despite a lack of steel contingents and insufficient investment funds. In 1935 and 1936, the centenary of the first German railroad, the Ludwigs-Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft from Nuremberg to Fürth , which opened on December 7, 1835, and the 1936 Summer and Winter Olympics offered the General Director many opportunities to attract the public to the services of the Reichsbahn present. During this time his reputation as “Germany's first railroader” and “Hindenburg of the railroad” arose, which was systematically expanded in the following years and during the war. Through various trips abroad, Dorpmüller made contacts with other railway companies and experts. Among other things, major trips abroad took him to the Polish State Railways in 1935, to the Third World Power Conference in Washington, DC in 1936 , including meetings with American railroad directors and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and to Sweden in 1937 , where the SJ gave him a special train with a festively decorated locomotive as a sign of respect provided.

First test drive of the "flying hamburger"

The Reichsbahn demonstrated its claim as a modern transport company in Nuremberg in 1935 at the large anniversary exhibition to mark the 100th anniversary of the commissioning of the first German railway , on which its most modern vehicles, such as the one that has been traveling between Hamburg and Berlin since 1933, at speeds of up to 160 km / h “ Flying Hamburgers ”, the Henschel-Wegmann train with the streamlined locomotive of the DR class 61 , the new “ Glass Train ” and other new locomotives and cars were presented. Julius Dorpmüller opened the exhibition together with Transport Minister Eltz-Rübenach on July 14, 1935, both of them took a tour of the driver's cab in historical costumes of the first German locomotive, the " Adler ", replicated on the occasion of the anniversary . Dorpmüller once again presented itself to the public as the top railroad worker and leading figure. Hitler also took part in a large vehicle parade on December 8th in Nuremberg, who otherwise was rarely a guest at Reichsbahn events. In the press that was switched into line, however, it was no longer mentioned that the Reichsbahn sent its last “non-Aryan” officials into unwanted retirement that year, including board member Ludwig Homberger.

The Olympic Games in 1936 led to a further push in modernization. In Berlin, the first section of the north-south tunnel for the Berlin S-Bahn was inaugurated. The extensive services of the Reichsbahn to transport the masses of visitors, especially during the Berlin Summer Games, impressed many observers. But there was a personal loss for Dorpmüller. His younger brother Heinrich, who was responsible for the preparation and planning of the special Olympic traffic at the Reichsbahndirektion Berlin, died shortly after the games on September 1st due to overwork. Other parts of the Reichsbahn network were also modernized. Instead of the outdated ferry connection to the island of Rügen , Dorpmüller inaugurated the new Rügen dam on October 5th . In freight transport, the Reichsbahn increasingly expanded door-to-door transport by road scooters and container transport as a forerunner of container transport and accelerated shunting operations with small locomotives .

Delivery of the high-speed locomotive 05 001 near Borsig in March 1935

The record run of the high-speed locomotive of the DR class 05 was used as propaganda in the media of the Third Reich, which were synchronized. On May 11, 1936, the 05 002 locomotive reached a top speed of 200.3 km / h between Hamburg and Berlin, setting a world record . On the ride was attended by Dorpmüller, Transport Minister Eltz-Rübenach, Fritz Todt, Adolf Hühnlein of and other celebrities Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler , the Gestapo boss Reinhard Heydrich and Reichsleiter Martin Bormann part. The guest list shows how Dorpmüller and the Reichsbahn wanted to make clear to the most important people in the regime by demonstrating their technical capabilities. At the annual Nazi party rallies in Nuremberg , in which Dorpmüller also regularly took part, the Reichsbahn handled an enormous volume of traffic and was thus also able to demonstrate its importance. For the 1935 party conference alone, the Reichsbahn provided over 530 special trains for around 850,000 participants. These trips, which are offered at the lowest possible rates, as well as similarly discounted trips for KdF trips and group rates for the various National Socialist organizations, caused considerable deficits in the Reichsbahn. Dorpmüller was unable to achieve a wage increase or other compensatory measures despite repeated efforts at the party chancellery .

General Director and Reich Minister of Transport

Transport Minister Dorpmüller with Rudolf Jordan and Rudolf Heß at the inauguration of the Mittelland Canal (1938)

On January 30, 1937, Hitler announced to the Reichstag that the Reichsbahn would be placed under the sovereignty of the Reich. With the law on the reorganization of relations between the Reichsbank and the Deutsche Reichsbahn of February 7, 1937, the Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft was renamed "Deutsche Reichsbahn" - it had not used the addition "Society" in correspondence since 1936 - and the Board of Directors replaced by a purely advisory advisory board. The Reichsbahn was converted into a special fund of the Reich. With this, Hitler once again broke away from obligations under the Versailles Treaty . Also on January 30th, Hitler awarded several ministers and officials the Golden Party Badge of the NSDAP to mark the occasion . Reich Post and Transport Minister Eltz-Rübenach, who, as a devout Catholic, felt increasingly uneasy about the regime's church policy, set the condition for acceptance of a changed policy towards the church. This led to his swift resignation . On February 2, Hitler appointed Dorpmüller, who was then 68 years old, as the new Reich Minister of Transport, and Post Minister was the “old fighter” Wilhelm Ohnesorge . A day later, Hitler and Dorpmüller jointly announced a "Reichsbahn, free from Versailles" to thousands of Reichsbahners from the balcony of the Reich Chancellery. The French ambassador André François-Poncet , who knew Dorpmüller personally, characterized him on the occasion as follows: "Eltz Rübenach [...] is stepping down to Dorpmüller, a skeptic who loves the good life and picks up the party badge with a light heart". Dorpmüller only became a party member four years later. With the takeover of the direct Reich administration, the Reichsbahn was now able to dispense with the formal legal peculiarities previously necessary in the implementation of the National Socialist Jewish policy. The new Reichsbeamtengesetz (Reichsbeamtengesetz) of January 1937 was applied directly to the Reichsbahn from July of the same year, which means that by the end of that year most officials with “non-Aryan” spouses were dismissed.

The Reichsbahn head office became part of the Reich Ministry of Transport, and the previous Reichsbahn board members became ministerial directors. The main focus in the RVM was clearly the railway traffic, since the road traffic was claimed by Fritz Todt and the air traffic was the domain of the Reich Aviation Ministry of Hermann Göring . Shipping and motor vehicle traffic only played a subordinate role. Dorpmüller continued to entrust State Secretary Gustav Koenigs with this . Dorpmüller's deputy, Wilhelm Kleinmann, became the second state secretary. Not least because of Dorpmüller's new position, the Reichsautobahngesetz (Reichsautobahngesetz) was changed in 1938, as Dorpmüller, as Transport Minister, could no longer be the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Autobahngesellschaft - because his competitor Fritz Todt was authorized to issue instructions. Todt therefore took over the office of the board of directors, the Reich Minister of Transport became the chairman of a new advisory board of the company by law.

Electric locomotive E 19 in the Nuremberg Transport Museum with swastika eagle (replica)

In the following year, the takeover of the BBÖ after the annexation of Austria was a major challenge for the Reichsbahn. Another area of ​​conflict that arose from the connection in the Nazi-typical dispute over competence was the regular bus service, which led to violent disputes between Dorpmüller and Post Minister Ohnesorge - both administrations had outbid each other in acquiring appropriate concessions in what is now the Ostmark . Prior to this, Dorpmüller had ordered the equipment of the Reichsbahn vehicles with the swastika eagle in January 1938 and issued a new "General Instructions for the Reichsbahnbeamten (ADA)" in April, in which the Reichsbahner again on loyalty and obedience to Adolf Hitler and the renunciation of any private contact were committed to Jews. In the area of ​​the former BBÖ, their Jewish employees were simply not taken on. The takeover of the former Czech routes in the Sudetenland followed in autumn of this year .

Even as Minister of Transport, Dorpmüller continued to love traveling. Since 1938, like many other greats of the National Socialist regime, he was able to use his personal saloon car for the relevant trips . In 1938 he visited, among other things, the new construction of the Müglitztalbahn in Saxony, the inauguration ceremonies of the Mittelland Canal and two new Rhine bridges near Speyer and Karlsruhe and other exhibitions and sightseeing appointments. He traveled to Great Britain in November 1938 for the 100th anniversary of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (or its oldest predecessor company) . Almost at the same time, at the end of October, the Reichsbahn provided 20 to 30 special trains for the Poland campaign , with which Polish and stateless Jews were deported to Poland via the border stations Firchau , Kreuz (Ostbahn) , Neu Bentschen and Beuthen OS . The Reichsbahn showed itself to be able to provide the appropriate train services for the security police at very short notice .

In 1939 Hitler celebrated his 50th birthday . As has been customary since 1933, Dorpmüller also assured the Fiihrer of unconditional loyalty and allegiance to the Reichsbahn on this occasion. After the revised law on the Deutsche Reichsbahn passed on July 4, 1939 , Dorpmüller remained as Reich Minister of Transport and General Director of the Deutsche Reichsbahn. He celebrated his 70th birthday on July 24, 1939, when the Reich Ministry of Transport commissioned the sculptor Helene Leven-Intze to create a bronze bust. At that time, Dorpmüller enjoyed a high reputation as a transport specialist, and not only in Germany. However, there was public criticism of various traffic congestion that had occurred in the winter of 1938/39. The fact that this criticism had become public in view of the rigid press co-ordination gave rise to the impression abroad that this was intended to prepare for the long-term replacement of Dorpmüller by Todt. At the Reichsbahn, Dorpmüller responded in March 1939 with the launch of an extraordinarily extensive procurement program for the standard steam locomotives, which had previously been delivered in rather small numbers , after Göring had promised him the steel contingents that had been unsuccessfully requested by the Reichsbahn in previous years in the four-year plan . In response to pressure from Martin Bormann in particular, and ultimately from Hitler , he also had to open the Freight Traffic Act and the Reichskraftwagentarif to other companies and relax the restrictive approval policy he had previously pursued for heavy truck traffic. Two days after Dorpmüller's birthday, a decree of the RVM ordered that Jews were allowed to use the MITROPA sleeping cars with a special permit, after a general ban on the use of dining cars and sleeping cars for German and stateless Jews had been issued in February . The free travel rights for retired Jewish Reichsbahner and their relatives were also abolished. In February 1939, Dorpmüller had already signed a decree which ordered the “confiscation” of driving licenses and vehicle papers from Jews. He thereby legalized and tacitly accepted a police order issued by Himmler in December 1938, the legal validity of which had previously been doubted by subordinate authorities. Dorpmüller, on the other hand, was more critical of Rudolf Hess's requests that only NSDAP members be appointed to senior civil servant positions. The extent to which Dorpmüller judged such questions exclusively from a technical and operational point of view was shown by the suggestion he made after the outbreak of war at the end of 1939 that Jews should be specially labeled, probably to simplify the implementation of various driving bans and restrictions in the transport sector. In previous years, the RVM had even contradicted some measures of the persecution of Jews when they collided with questions about the reliable operation of the business.

Dorpmüller and the Reichsbahn in World War II

At the beginning of the Second World War, Dorpmüller was the oldest minister in Hitler's cabinet at the age of 70 . However, he resolutely tackled the task of preparing the Reichsbahn for war and leading it through the war, clearly acknowledging the goals of Hitler's policy. Due to illness, he did not have to slow down until the second half of 1944 and largely leave the management of the ministry and the Reichsbahn to his employees.

The attack on Poland and the Eastern Railway

Shortly after the attack on Poland began , Dorpmüller made a first appeal to the Reichsbahner. In it he assured Hitler of the railroad workers' "unbreakable loyalty". Since September, Dorpmüller, previously dressed in civilian clothes, has mostly appeared in uniform. In the years that followed, he traveled extensively and visited the railroad workers on most of the fronts of the war.

Julius Dorpmüller visiting the General Government in 1942, here with the Deputy Governor General, Josef Bühler .

The general management of the Eastern Railway (Gedob) was founded in October 1939 . The Ostbahn in the Generalgouvernement (GG) remained legally outside the Reichsbahn, it represented a separate special fund of the Generalgouvernement. Although Dorpmüller was able to achieve in the course of the war that the Ostbahn took over the Reichsbahn organization under Adolf Gerteis , President of Gedob, otherwise it remained Ostbahn, however, is largely independent of the Reichsbahn. Financially and economically it was mainly responsible to the Governor General Hans Frank , the Reichsbahn only had to provide rolling stock and personnel. The technical supervision was also with the Reich Minister of Transport, the economic management was taken over by the GG. In the close everyday cooperation, this repeatedly led to friction and disputes over competence, Dorpmüller was unable to assert himself against Frank with Hitler in the long term, even if operational control was increasingly transferred to the Reichsbahn in the following years. The railways in the German territories of Poland until 1919, however, were organized as new Reich Railroad Directorates in Posen and Danzig and integrated into the Reichsbahn.

The first winter of the war revealed weaknesses in the German transport system. Inland shipping in particular was criticized, which ultimately led to the resignation of the responsible State Secretary Gustav Koenigs at the end of February 1940 . His responsibilities for motor vehicles and shipping were taken over by two new undersecretaries, the inland shipping department was subordinate to the remaining Secretary of State Kleinmann. But the railway was also criticized. Rumors about a replacement of Dorpmüller made the rounds, as a possible successor Rudolf Gercke , the transport chief of the Wehrmacht , was named. Another reaction was the upgrading of the three senior managements of the Reichsbahn to general managements with additional competencies compared to the individual Reichsbahn divisions in order to ensure more uniform operation and planning. The so strongly propagated Reichsautobahn , on the other hand, initially only played a subordinate role.

In the western campaign , however, there was hardly any criticism of the Reichsbahn and the German transport system. On July 18, 1940, Dorpmüller gave a speech of praise to the German railroad workers in the Gare de l'Est in Paris , who were supposed to supervise the operation of the French state railway SNCF , which was now running for German interests after the Compiègne armistice . Dorpmüller had previously participated in Italy's centenary of the Italian railways in May. Dorpmüller also traveled to other allied states such as Slovakia this year. During this visit in December 1940, Dorpmüller, known as a drinking party, appeared visibly drunk at an appointment, which led to a critical letter from Reinhard Heydrich to Martin Bormann . After Dorpmüller had already received the First Class War Merit Cross in September 1940 , Hitler awarded his Minister of Transport the Golden Party Badge of the NSDAP at the beginning of December . As the holder of the party badge, Dorpmüller applied for membership in the NSDAP on January 28, 1941, and on February 1, 1941, he received membership number 7,883,826.

Transport crisis in the war against the Soviet Union

In Operation Barbarossa , which began on June 22, 1941, the Wehrmacht itself initially took on all essential transport tasks, and also organized the field railway operations between the imperial borders and the front. The Reichsbahn railway workers requested for this purpose were initially subject to military orders as members of the Wehrmacht. Since the Soviet railroad workers were largely able to withdraw their rolling stock from German access, the Reichsbahn soon had to sell more and more of its own locomotives and wagons to the east. In addition, the Russian broad gauge of 1,524 mm had to be re-tracked to the European standard gauge. In this situation, Dorpmüller pointed out the lack of reserves in the German transport system, but despite support from Joseph Goebbels , it was hardly able to penetrate the purely military requirements. Even before the war, the steel contingents for the Reichsbahn had always been treated as subordinate to direct armament , so that it went to war with an outdated locomotive park and an inadequately developed network. The standard steam locomotives, which had been designed in 1925, were only available to the Reichsbahn in small numbers; the majority of the locomotive park still consisted of the Länderbahn series . With regard to transport issues, the upgrade had primarily relied on trucks and neglected the railways.

In the late autumn of 1941 there was a serious transport crisis during the Eastern campaign, which in December brought supplies to the front almost completely to a standstill. Heavy frost led to failure of the German locomotives, which were not designed for such temperatures, and road traffic could hardly be maintained. Eventually Hitler subordinated the railways behind the front to the Reich Minister of Transport. Dorpmüller set up an "East Branch" of the RVM in Warsaw, which, with four main railway departments in Kiev , Minsk , Riga and Dnepropetrovsk, took over the organization and operation of the railways behind the Eastern Front. On February 19, 1942, Dorpmüller informed the railway workers in a pithy appeal about the new task and described it as the "duty of honor for every railway worker". Dorpmüller had previously traveled to Minsk and Smolensk in January 1942 to get an idea of ​​the situation for himself, followed by a business trip to Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk in February.

The reorganization could not solve all transport problems, especially since there were still violent disputes over competence between the RVM and General Gercke as head of the Wehrmacht transport system. Hitler openly threatened State Secretary Kleinmann with the Gestapo and finally had two senior Reichsbahn officials arrested at the main railway departments in Kiev and Minsk on February 28, 1942, and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Dorpmüller stood up for his employees, but was initially unable to achieve anything with Hitler despite personal ideas. Ulrich von Hassell noted in his diary that Hitler had replied to Dorpmüller's intercession, "if he had a general and knight's cross-bearer sentenced to death and other generals were disciplined, he would probably be able to lock up some railway presidents." Both officials did not leave until the summer of 1942 released from the concentration camp.

French slave laborers building class 52 war locomotives

Destroyed locomotives of the Reichsbahn in Dresden, on a tender the slogan " Wheels must roll for victory "

Albert Speer, the successor to the fatally injured Fritz Todt in the office of Minister of Armaments, now did everything in his power to replace Dorpmüller, who seemed to him too old and immobile. He did not succeed in doing this, because Hitler wanted to continue to use Dorpmüller's reputation as a respected and recognized expert and "Hindenburg of the railways". However, he managed to remove the responsibility for locomotive procurement and development from the RVM and the Reichsbahn to a large extent. In future, today in the National Railroad central office department heads in charge Richard Paul Wagner took over in March 1942, a newly founded "Main Committee for rail vehicles" under the former Demag Manager Gerhard Degenkolb responsibility for the design and production of the new war locomotives of class 52 . In May 1942, Speer succeeded in replacing the previous State Secretary Kleinmann with Albert Ganzenmüller , a blood medalist who had distinguished himself on the Eastern Front and was considered a recognized expert. Dorpmüller, who had previously explained to Speer that he could “no longer take responsibility for regulated traffic conditions in the Reich” due to a lack of sufficient cars and locomotives, had to accept the change imposed on him by Hitler on May 24, 1942. Hitler warned the Reichsbahn that the war should not be lost because of the transport problems, which should therefore be solved. Presumably it was only his friendship with Hermann Göring that saved Dorpmüller from being replaced. Instead, Hitler commissioned the surprised Dorpmüller with the new project to plan an oversized 3-meter broad-gauge railway to open up the conquered territories in the east.

In the autumn of 1942 Dorpmüller had to go to hospital for the first time for a longer period of time. In the daily management of the Reichsbahn he was more and more replaced by Ganzenmüller without the Reich Minister of Transport allowing the business to be completely taken out of his hands. Both worked well together, as Ganzenmüller respected the older Dorpmüller as an experienced specialist. The Reichsbahn was finally able to resolve the transport crisis of the winter of 1941/42 by adapting its established operational processes and traffic control measures to the circumstances and implementing them by more energetic, younger managers. In the following year, 1943, the Reichsbahn achieved its highest ever freight transport performance with 178.6 billion tonne kilometers , as well as its highest passenger transport performance with 107.3 billion passenger kilometers . It was not until the Allied air raids on the Reichsbahn network, which began increasingly after the invasion of Normandy , that the transport figures finally fell significantly.

Further course of the war

Although Dorpmüller had lost some of his skills, he threw himself all the more intensively into his work. Through sustainable ideas from Hitler in October 1942 he was given sole management of the entire transport system on rails, roads and waterways in the eastern regions. The previous branch of the RVM in Warsaw was upgraded to the "General Traffic Directorate East". In 1937, the Reichsbahn still had around 54,000 km of track, but at the end of 1942 Dorpmüller was subject to a good 150,000 to 160,000 km of railway lines in the Reich and the occupied countries. A good 1.6 million railway workers were active on this network.

After an initial operation at the end of 1942, Dorpmüller initially recovered very quickly. As early as March 1943 he was again on business trips and tried again to gain greater influence on the Eastern Railway in the Generalgouvernement. The Eastern Railway finally introduced an office structure based on the Reichsbahn model. Dorpmüller insisted on introducing three new management presidents himself into their offices in May 1943, but had to back off in the direct conflict with Governor General Frank and accept the economic independence of the Eastern Railway. His attempt to bypass the Ostbahn President Gerteis to obtain the option of direct operational instructions to the Ostbahn directorates also failed.

In the summer of 1943 at the latest, Dorpmüller began to doubt whether the war could still be won. In his will, drawn up in August 1943, he took into account the event of a lost war so that his sister would be taken care of. Nevertheless, he remained active and tried to maintain the traffic in the Reich , which was increasingly impaired by the air war . The minister traveled restlessly through the Reich and the allied states, visited destroyed lines and train stations and appealed to the workforce to persevere. While parts of the ministry were relocated to Groß Köris , around 40 km south of Berlin, from 1943, Dorpmüller remained in the Reich capital. Hitler honored his commitment with the Knight's Cross for the War Merit Cross and the "Pioneer of Labor" badge of honor . In order to recognize the railroad workers, Hitler also designated December 7th (the first German railroad between Nuremberg and Fürth opened on December 7th, 1835) as the “Day of the German Railroader”. At the first celebration of that day in 1943, Joseph Goebbels was the main speaker.

Shortly before D-Day and the invasion of the western allies, Dorpmüller was in Paris for the last time and, among other things, held talks with the local commander-in-chief Erwin Rommel . He was not involved in the conspiracy for the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 , and his name did not appear on Carl Friedrich Goerdeler's cabinet lists . Dorpmüller celebrated his 75th birthday four days after the attack. Albert Speer had tried to use this as an occasion for an honorable farewell to Dorpmüller in retirement, but without success. The synchronized press celebrated the transport minister and Reichsbahn general director as a “faithful Ekkehard of transport” and Hitler added the knight's cross to the war merit cross for swords.

The role of the Reichsbahn in the Holocaust

Reichsbahn telegram of July 14, 1942 on charges for “special Jewish trains” to Auschwitz

Like all other ministries, the RVM had supported all measures for discrimination against Jews and persecution in its area of ​​competence before and at the beginning of the war, most recently with an order from Dorpmüller dated November 18, 1941, which prohibited Jews from using public transport without the permission of the police. During the war I also actively helped with the Holocaust . Almost all deportations of Jews and other victims of the war of extermination and the racial ideology of the National Socialists took place by rail. Motor vehicles were only used on shorter routes and as feeder traffic. The Reichsbahn had already gained initial experience in the "Poland Action" in October 1938. For the Nisko plan , special trains were also provided by the Reichsbahn at the end of 1939. In October 1940, on behalf of Adolf Eichmann, nine special trains ran to the unoccupied part of France as part of the Wagner-Bürckel campaign .

From October 1941, the first deportation trains left the Reich heading east. At first the trains rolled to the ghettos of Litzmannstadt , Minsk and Riga , from autumn 1942 the main destination was the Auschwitz extermination camp . As a rule, these special trains were ordered from the regional security police at the Reichsbahn; the coordination was primarily with Franz Novak from Section IV B 4 of the Reich Security Main Office in close cooperation with the advisor for mass transports in the RVM, Paul Schnell and his employee Otto Stange . In addition, from the summer of 1942 onwards , the Theresienstadt ghetto became a destination for a large number of smaller transports, which were often carried as special wagons in scheduled passenger trains. The trains within the Generalgouvernement to the extermination camps Treblinka , Sobibor and Belzec were carried out and organized by the Ostbahn, where the Reichsbahn official Walter Stier was responsible for organizing the timetable for the trains ordered by the SS.

As Reich Minister of Transport and Reichsbahn General Director, Dorpmüller was jointly responsible for the deportation of Jews by means of the Reichsbahn. In contrast to his State Secretary Albert Ganzenmüller , no correspondence in this regard has come to light, but it can be assumed that he was not unaware of the corresponding letters, including complaints from Himmler. Until shortly before his death, Dorpmüller was an extremely active man who would not let his work be taken out of his hands and who was well informed about most things of the Reichsbahn operation. Dorpmüller was in Auschwitz at least once in October 1944, when he was in Upper Silesia to find out about problems with the evacuation of industrial plants there.

Transport of Soviet prisoners of war in open freight cars

The intensive use of forced labor , especially from the east, in the service of German industry, could also only be accomplished through transports by the Reichsbahn . As early as mid-1940, the Reichsbahn was already employing forced laborers, some of whom were even employed in positions of responsibility such as locomotive drivers due to a lack of staff. As a rule, they were used, especially when they were Soviet prisoners of war, but mainly as track construction workers and in workshops.

End of war and death

Soon after the beginning of the last year of the war, Julius Dorpmüller had to undergo another operation at the beginning of February 1945 due to his cancer , which was carried out by Ferdinand Sauerbruch at the Berlin Charité . Albert Speer took advantage of this to have Hitler transfer the management of a new "Transport Council" to him a few days later, which was given overall responsibility for the Reichsbahn operations. Dorpmüller recovered again from the operation and took over the management of his ministry again. Like many other members of the Reich government, Dorpmüller left Berlin in April 1945 shortly before it was enclosed by the Red Army and went to Schleswig-Holstein with his sister and his staff , where he found accommodation in a railway school in Malente . Hitler had not named a transport minister in his political will . Dorpmüller was still a member of the Dönitz Reich government and the Schwerin von Krosigk cabinet as Reich Transport and Post Minister.

With the Allies, Dorpmüller's reputation as a specialist had not suffered despite the war, and the participation of the Reichsbahn in the Holocaust was hardly discussed at the time. Dorpmüller was regarded as an apolitical expert who was not personally connected to the crimes of the Third Reich, to whom the former Chancellor Brüning attested in a draft for the Allies that he “resisted the pressure of the Nazis to promote prominent party members with great skill”. General Carl R. Gray , responsible for transportation in the US Army , a former railroad manager who knew Dorpmüller from before the war, explicitly suggested to the then General of the Army and military governor of the US zone of occupation in Germany, Dwight D. Eisenhower Julius Dorpmüller for the "reinstatement in the old office" because he was "as confirmed by our secret service neither a Hitlerian nor a Nazi". The British also gave Dorpmüller a comparatively positive assessment. In Malente, Dorpmüller conducted initial negotiations with the Allies, including representatives of the Soviet Union . He saw it as possible to get the German transport system going again within six weeks, but demanded that one should “not talk into him”, not even with regard to his selection of personnel. The Americans finally took Dorpmüller and his State Secretary Ganzenmüller with a few of their employees by plane to Le Chesnay near Paris on May 23, 1945 , making them the only members of the Dönitz government to escape arrest on the same day. In Le Chesnay, Dorpmüller was interned and questioned together with other German business leaders such as Hjalmar Schacht , Albert Speer and Ernst Heinkel . Among other things, he created a list of suitable candidates for positions in a future German traffic administration. General Gray finally gave him the order to rebuild the Reichsbahnverwaltung of the US zone in Frankfurt am Main . It is unclear to what extent this was actually linked to a comprehensive contract to rebuild the German railway system. In the following years, however, the Western Allies repeatedly reverted to his list when managerial positions at the Reichsbahn had to be filled.

After his stay in Le Chesnay, Dorpmüller returned to Malente on June 13, 1945 and began planning the move to Frankfurt. Because of the advanced cancer he had to undergo another operation on June 23, 1945. He did not recover from this operation, although he continued to hold meetings until shortly before his death. Julius Dorpmüller died on July 5, 1945 and was buried in the Malente cemetery.

After death

post war period

In the post-war period, the Allies' interest in Dorpmüller, a specialist in the reconstruction of the Reichsbahn, served many of his former employees as a " clean bill " for Dorpmüller and the Reichsbahn as a whole. The British Railway Gazette had honored him in an obituary in August 1945 as "one of the greatest phenomena in today's transport system" and thus in some ways anticipated the tenor of the post-war years. Accordingly, the late Reichsbahn general director was seen and honored primarily in his role as an apolitical expert and successful railroad worker. Contributing to this was the fact that Dorpmüller was classified in Category V as “exonerated” according to a letter from the Denazification Main Committee for Lübeck to his sister dated October 18, 1949 . This subsequent denazification was initiated by the family for inheritance reasons.

The newly founded Deutsche Bundesbahn , in which many former employees of the Reichsbahn general director held high positions, tried very quickly to gain Dorpmüller's fame. The Hamburg Federal Railway Directorate took on responsibility for tending to his grave in Malente, and representatives of the Federal Railway regularly took part in commemorations and wreath-laying ceremonies. Publications by the Federal Railroad paid tribute to Dorpmüller, for example on his 100th birthday in 1969, when Heinz Maria Oeftering , the First President of the Federal Railroad, described Dorpmüller in the in-house magazine Die Bundesbahn as a “great railroader” and “a role model for doing one's own thing”. Up until 1985, busts of Dorpmüller were in the stairwell of the Nuremberg Transport Museum, which is maintained by the Federal Railroad, and in the "Dorpmüller Hall" of Hanover Central Station . They were removed during preparations for the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of the railways in Germany. One of these bronze busts made for his 70th birthday is in the possession of his Corps Delta in Aachen. There was also a "Dorpmüller room" at the Essen Federal Railway Directorate, which was also renamed the "Small Conference Room" in 1985. The bust that was erected there has disappeared.

There were streets and paths named after Dorpmüller in Wuppertal, Magdeburg , Malente, Mayen, Hameln and Buchholz in the northern heath . For example, while Dorpmüllerstraße in Wuppertal, where the house where he was born, had already received his name before the war, other streets were only named after Dorpmüller in the post-war period, most recently in Buchholz in 1962. The Federal Railroad maintained a training facility for its employees there until around 1980 under the name "Julius-Dorpmüller-Schule". With the increasing interest in the role of the Reichsbahn in the Holocaust, most of the Dorpmüllerstraße were renamed in the run-up to the 150th anniversary of the German railway from the mid-1980s. In Malente and Minden the street name existed until 1995 and 1996.

The maintenance of Dorpmüller's grave site was stopped by the Deutsche Bundesbahn on December 31, 1991 on the instructions of the chairman of the board, Heinz Dürr . It was later taken over by a private citizen.

Historical reception

The investigation of the role of the Reichsbahn and its boss Dorpmüller was neglected by West German and Western historians in the first decades after the war. Much of the work on the history of the Reichsbahn during the war was written by former Reichsbahners and was limited to the appreciation of the fulfillment of duty and work performance of the railway workers and the top management of the Reichsbahn, e.g. the work of Pischel and Kreidler. Dorpmüller was recognized as an undisputed and competent expert who had managed to protect the Reichsbahn from the party. The role of the Reichsbahn as the central instrument of warfare and its role in the transport of Jews was often simply not mentioned or responsibility was assigned to State Secretary Ganzenmüller alone. A study on the history of the railway between 1941 and 1945, published by Hugo Strossenreuther on behalf of the Deutsche Bundesbahn, also hardly said a word about deportations. Some works, even of the more recent times, show a pronounced hagiographic tendency , especially with regard to the person of the Reichsbahn General Director and Reich Minister of Transport . In the GDR, the reappraisal in the first decades after 1945 was limited to emphasizing the anti-fascist resistance of railroad workers and portraying Dorpmüller as an "arch-Nazi".

It was only Raul Hilberg who, with his study on the essential role of the Reichsbahn in the Holocaust, also published in German in 1981, was able to draw a little more attention to the people involved in the Reichsbahn and RVM at the time. In 1985, Heiner Lichtenstein published another work based on the files of the Ganzenmüller proceedings, which aroused renewed interest in the role of the Reichsbahn and its management staff during the Holocaust and which in the first place sparked a more intense debate about the officials of the RVM. A highly acclaimed exhibition in 1995 in the Berlin Museum for Transport and Technology under the title "I only served the technology" illuminated the career of Julius Dorpmüller together with those of other high-ranking engineers and technicians in the Third Reich such as Heinrich Nordhoff and Wernher von Braun . In addition to the work of Hilberg and Lichtenstein, the studies by Alfred Gottwaldt and the American historian Alfred C. Mierzejewski , which deal with the role of the Reichsbahn and its management personnel, should be mentioned. The most comprehensive and scientifically sound work on Dorpmüller has so far been submitted by Alfred Gottwaldt. However, according to the author's own claim, this work is not a comprehensive biography, but a "biographical sketch".

Julius Dorpmüller, according to Gottwaldt and Mierzejewski, was an excellent technician and good organizer, but not the strong leader and "Hindenburg of the Reichsbahn" as he was portrayed many times during the Third Reich and the post-war period. Raised politically during the period of the German Empire and rather nationally conservative, he was not a National Socialist, but made himself available to the goals and wishes of Hitler and his followers without any problems as long as he retained the sole sovereignty and control of the Reichsbahn. His ambition was above all to secure the operation of the Reichsbahn and to defend its position under all circumstances. In the end, he was dependent on his employees to assess financial and economic issues. He saw himself more traditionally as the highest Reichsbahner who viewed the railroad workers subordinate to him caring and paternalistic. As “the devil's general director”, as he was called in a publication, he differs from the model of this designation, General Harras from Carl Zuckmayer's drama Des Teufels General , that von Dorpmüller had no self-doubts about his role and function in the Third Reich.

The increasing emphasis on the role of Dorpmüller and the Reichsbahn in the war and the Holocaust has always been criticized. In particular, Dorpmüller vehemently defended the work by Bock and Garrecht, published in 1996, and emphasized his sense of duty and the international recognition of the railway specialist. In this perspective, partly characterized by “apologetic without distance”, which has been adopted by former Reichsbahn workers since the 1950s, Dorpmüller and the Reichsbahn are judged primarily as “abused by Hitler”. His party membership was repeatedly denied until the 1990s.

To what extent Dorpmüller touched or even interested the fate of the Jews who were transported to their death by the Reichsbahn and other victims of the machinery of persecution of the Third Reich, is uncertain, as is otherwise known of him, especially from the war years, hardly any personal views and expressions of opinion outside of official statements and publications are. In the opinion of Gottwaldt, he was probably not an anti-Semite and he repeatedly campaigned for former Jewish employees and other people who came into conflict with the National Socialists, but no further statements are known. Publications and appeals by Dorpmüller demanded obedience to Hitler from the Reichsbahnern until the last days of the war; their choice of words did not differ significantly from comparable appeals by party leaders. In view of his age, the resignation would probably have been approved without further ado, instead he remained in his offices until the end, as far as his health permitted. Klaus Hildebrand admits to Dorpmüller that he only had little room for maneuver within his office, but criticizes that he did not use this remaining option of resignation. His almost uninterrupted career from the Empire to the Weimar Republic stands for many comparable careers, but it is striking how well Dorpmüller understood how to come to terms with both the democratic governments of the Weimar Republic and with the dictatorship of Hitler, perhaps still with this continuity Compare Otto Meissner .

With his career, Julius Dorpmüller is a prototype of many technicians and engineers in the Third Reich who, neglecting moral concerns, saw it as their duty to implement their technical skills under all circumstances. This sense of duty, especially among members of technical disciplines, the historian Christopher Kopper describes it using the example of Dorpmüller and leading Reichsbahner as a "narrowed sense of responsibility", and its consequences were only recognized late as a research area in history. In addition, there is still a lack of willingness to deal with one's own history in many specialist disciplines; Dorpmüller and the transport sector are also exemplary here. "You went along with everything and sometimes you were against it internally," was Gottwaldt's conclusion.

Memberships, awards and honors

• Character as a building officer with the personal rank of fourth class councilors in 1910
• Order of the Red Eagle 4th class in 1913
• Dr.-Ing. e. H. of the Technical University of Aachen in 1925
• Golden Medal of the Prussian Academy for Building in 1934
• Member of the Academy for German Law
• Grashof commemorative coin of the Association of German Engineers in 1936
• Member of the Reich Chamber of Labor since 1936
• Member of the Prussian State Council since 1937
• Karmarsch commemorative coin of the Hanover University Community on November 12, 1938
• Eagle shield of the German Empire on July 24, 1939
• Honorary Senator of the Technical University of Aachen in 1939
• Golden NSDAP party badge on December 7, 1940
• Badge of Honor Pioneer Labor on May 1, 1944
• Knight's Cross of the War Merit Cross with Swords on July 24, 1944
• Fritz-Todt-Ring on July 24, 1944 (three awards known)

Fonts (selection)

• The Reichsbahn as the client. (Lecture given at the Schinkelfest on March 13, 1926) In: Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung, 46th year 1926, No. 13 (from March 31, 1926), pp. 149–153 and No. 14 (from April 7, 1926 ), Pp. 161-164.
• From railway construction in China . In: Archiv für Eisenbahnwesen, year 1928, No. 51, pp. 1097–1140.
• The economic situation of the Reichsbahn. Speech […] at a reception on January 30, 1929. In: Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung, 49th year 1929, No. 10 (from March 6, 1929), pp. 158–161.

literature

• Dirk Böndel , Alfred Gottwaldt a . a .: I only served technology. Seven careers between 1940 and 1950 , Volume 13 of the series of publications by the Museum of Transport and Technology ( Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin ), Nicolai Verlag, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-87584-549-8 .
• Alfred Gottwaldt: Julius Dorpmüller, the Reichsbahn and the Autobahn. Argon Verlag, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-87024-330-9 .
• Alfred Gottwaldt, Diana Schulle: “Jews are prohibited from using dining cars”. The anti-Jewish policy of the Reich Ministry of Transport between 1933 and 1945. Research report, prepared on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Development. Hentrich & Hentrich, Teetz 2007, ISBN 978-3-938485-64-4 , (series of publications by the Centrum Judaicum 6).
• Alfred Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn - The era of the Reich Minister of Transport Julius Dorpmüller 1920–1945. EK-Verlag, Freiburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-88255-726-8 .
• Alfred Gottwaldt: The Reichsbahn and the Jews 1933–1939. Anti-Semitism on the railways in the pre-war period. Marix Verlag, Wiesbaden 2011, ISBN 978-3-86539-254-1 .
• Raul Hilberg : Special trains to Auschwitz. Dumjahn, Mainz 1981, ISBN 3-921426-18-9 (documents on railway history 18).
• Klaus Hildebrand : The Reichsbahn in the National Socialist dictatorship 1933–1945 . In: Lothar Gall , Manfred Pohl (Hrsg.): The railway in Germany. From the beginning to the present . CH Beck, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-406-45817-3 .
• Eberhard Kolb : The Reichsbahn from the Dawes Plan to the end of the Weimar Republic. In: Lothar Gall, Manfred Pohl (Hrsg.): The railway in Germany. From the beginning to the present. CH Beck, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-406-45817-3 .
• Erwin Massute:  Dorpmüller, Julius. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 4, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1959, ISBN 3-428-00185-0 , p. 84 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Alfred C. Mierzejewski : The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich. A History of the German National Railway, Volume 1, 1920-1932 , The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 1999, ISBN 0-8078-2496-8 .
• Alfred C. Mierzejewski: The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich. A History of the German National Railway, Volume 2, 1933-1945 , The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 2000, ISBN 0-8078-2574-3 .

Web links

Commons : Julius Dorpmüller  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Julius Dorpmüller in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Julius Dorpmüller in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Biography of Julius Dorpmüller in the Rheinische Geschichte portal of the Rhineland Regional Association , created by Joachim Lilla

Individual evidence

1. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 25.
2. ↑ Deutsche Bauzeitung , Volume 31, 1897, No. 104 (December 29, 1897), p. 650.
3. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 12.
4. ↑ Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung , Volume 18, 1898, No. 30 (from July 23, 1898), p. 349.
5. ↑ ^{a b} Herrmann Degener : Who is it. 9th edition, Berlin 1928, p. 314.
6. ↑ Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung, Volume 24, 1904, No. 3 (from January 9, 1904), p. 13.
7. ↑ ^{a b} Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 13.
8. ↑ Max Geitel: Creations of Modern Engineering , The Hoangho Bridge in China. P. 16.
9. ↑ Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung, Volume 30, 1910, No. 33 (from April 23, 1910), p. 221.
10. ↑ Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung, Volume 38, 1918, Nos. 59 and 60 (from July 20, 1918), p. 289.
11. ↑ Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung, Volume 38, 1918, No. 57 (from July 18, 1918), p. 277.
12. ↑ Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung, 39th year 1919, No. 29 (from April 5, 1919), p. 149; Relocation apparently not until April 1, 1919 (?).
13. ↑ Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung, Volume 40, 1920, No. 3 (from January 10, 1920), p. 13.
14. ↑ Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung, Volume 40, 1920, No. 5 (from January 17, 1920), p. 25.
15. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 25.
16. ^ ^{A b} The Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft. In: Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung, Volume 44, 1924, No. 50 (from December 10, 1924), p. 439.
17. ^ Mierzejewski: The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich, 1 ; P. 130.
18. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 28.
19. ↑ ^{a b} Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 41.
20. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 29.
21. ↑ ^{a b} Kolb: The Reichsbahn from the Dawes Plan to the end of the Weimar Republic ; P. 121.
22. ↑ Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung, Volume 44, 1924, No. 41 (from October 8, 1924), p. 354.
23. ^ Alfred C. Mierzejewski: The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich. A History of the German National Railway. Volume 1: 1920-1932 . The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London 1999, p. 113.
24. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 31.
25. ↑ Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung, Volume 45, 1925, No. 51 (from December 23, 1925), p. 624.
26. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 39.
27. ^ ^{A b} Alfred C. Mierzejewski: The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich. A History of the German National Railway. Volume 1: 1920-1932. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London 1999, p. 127.
28. ^ Alfred C. Mierzejewski: The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich. A History of the German National Railway. Volume 1: 1920-1932. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London 1999, p. 128.
29. ^ Alfred C. Mierzejewski: The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich. A History of the German National Railway. Volume 1: 1920-1932. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London 1999, p. 129.
30. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 44.
31. ↑ Gottwaldt: The Reichsbahn and the Jews 1933–1945 ; P. 106.
32. ↑ Harry Graf Kessler reported, for example, on a corresponding evening in October 1928 with Dorpmüller, whom he dubbed "Rauhbein", cf. Harry Graf Kessler: Das Tagebuch 1880–1937: Volume 9, 1926–1937 , Cotta, Stuttgart 2010, ISBN 978-3-7681-9819-6 , p. 217.
33. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 64.
34. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 63.
35. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 60.
36. ↑ Gottwaldt: The Reichsbahn and the Jews 1933–1945 ; P. 26.
37. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 66.
38. ↑ ^{a b} Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 71.
39. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 69.
40. ↑ Eberhard Kolb: The Reichsbahn from the Dawes Plan to the end of the Weimar Republic . In: Lothar Gall, Manfred Pohl (Hrsg.): The railway in Germany. From the beginning to the present. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 1999, p. 141.
41. ^ Eugen Kreidler: The railways in the Second World War. Nikol-Verlag, 2001, ISBN 3-933203-52-X , p. 257.
42. ^ Kolb: The Reichsbahn from the Dawes Plan to the end of the Weimar Republic ; P. 144.
43. ^ Kolb: The Reichsbahn from the Dawes Plan to the end of the Weimar Republic ; P. 156.
44. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 72.
45. ↑ ^{a b c} Kolb: The Reichsbahn from the Dawes Plan to the end of the Weimar Republic ; P. 160.
46. ↑ ^{a b} Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 73.
47. ^ Kolb: The Reichsbahn from the Dawes Plan to the end of the Weimar Republic ; P. 161.
48. ↑ ^{a b c} Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 78.
49. ↑ ^{a b c} Kolb: The Reichsbahn from the Dawes Plan to the end of the Weimar Republic ; P. 171.
50. ^ Alfred Gottwaldt: The Reichsbahn and the Jews 1933–1939 - Anti-Semitism on the railroad in the prewar period . Marix-Verlag, Wiesbaden 2011, p. 71 f.
51. ^ Kolb: The Reichsbahn from the Dawes Plan to the end of the Weimar Republic ; P. 172.
52. ^ Kolb: The Reichsbahn from the Dawes Plan to the end of the Weimar Republic ; P. 168.
53. ↑ ^{a b} Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 79.
54. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 80.
55. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 96.
56. ^ Mierzejewski: The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich, 2 ; P. 13.
57. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 82.
58. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 81.
59. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 83.
60. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 85.
61. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 88.
62. ↑ Hildebrand: The Reichsbahn in the National Socialist dictatorship 1933–1945 ; P. 168.
63. ↑ Hildebrand: The Reichsbahn in the National Socialist dictatorship 1933–1945 ; P. 169.
64. ^ Kolb: The Reichsbahn from the Dawes Plan to the end of the Weimar Republic ; P. 175.
65. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 98.
66. ↑ ^{a b} Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 106.
67. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 100.
68. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 102.
69. ^ Kolb: The Reichsbahn from the Dawes Plan to the end of the Weimar Republic ; P. 179.
70. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 105.
71. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 103.
72. ↑ Gottwaldt, Schulle: "Jews are prohibited from using dining cars" ; P. 44.
73. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 115.
74. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 116.
75. ↑ Gottwaldt, Schulle: "Jews are prohibited from using dining cars" ; P. 45.
76. ↑ Gottwaldt, Schulle: "Jews are prohibited from using dining cars" ; P. 47.
77. ↑ Gottwaldt: The Reichsbahn and the Jews 1933–1939 ; P. 375 ff.
78. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 151.
79. ↑ Alfred Gottwaldt: Wagner's standard locomotives. The steam locomotives of the Reichsbahn and their creators . EK-Verlag, Freiburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-88255-738-1 , p. 141.
80. ^ Richard Vahrenkamp : The logistic revolution: The rise of logistics in the mass consumer society , contributions to the historical traffic research of the Deutsches Museum, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011, ISBN 978-3-593-39215-8 , p. 113.
81. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 145.
82. ↑ Gottwaldt, Schulle: "Jews are prohibited from using dining cars" ; P. 46.
83. ↑ Gottwaldt, Schulle: "Jews are prohibited from using dining cars" ; P. 55.
84. ↑ Gottwaldt, Schulle: "Jews are prohibited from using dining cars" ; P. 48.
85. ^ Michael Mayer: States as perpetrators: ministerial bureaucracy and "Jewish policy" in Nazi Germany and Vichy France. A comparison, Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-486-58945-0 , p. 263.
86. ↑ Gottwaldt, Schulle: "Jews are prohibited from using dining cars" ; P. 50.
87. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 157.
88. ↑ Gottwaldt, Schulle: "Jews are prohibited from using dining cars" ; P. 67.
89. ↑ ^{a b} Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 168.
90. ↑ Gottwaldt, Schulle: "Jews are prohibited from using dining cars" ; P. 60.
91. ↑ ^{a b} Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 170.
92. ↑ ^{a b} Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 176.
93. ↑ ^{a b} Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 187.
94. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 189.
95. ↑ quoted from: Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 190.
96. ↑ Alfred Gottwaldt: Wagner's standard locomotives. The steam locomotives of the Reichsbahn and their creators . EK-Verlag, Freiburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-88255-738-1 , p. 153 f.
97. ↑ quoted from: Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 192.
98. ^ Mierzejewski: The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich, 2 ; P. 105.
99. ↑ ^{a b} Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 195.
100. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 201.
101. ^ Mierzejewski: The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich, 2 ; P. 106.
102. ^ Mierzejewski: The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich, 2 ; P. 138.
103. ^ Mierzejewski: The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich, 2 ; Pp. 144, 146.
104. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 200.
105. ↑ Michael Reimer, Volkmar Kubitzki: Railway in Poland 1939-1945: The history of the general management of the Eastern Railway , Transpress, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-613-71213-X , p. 35.
106. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 206.
107. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 209.
108. ↑ ^{a b} Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 213.
109. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 214.
110. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 181.
111. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 182.
112. ↑ ^{a b} Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. 2nd updated edition. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 117.
113. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 197.
114. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 215.
115. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 198.
116. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 219.
117. ↑ ^{a b} Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 222.
118. ↑ ^{a b} Anthony James Nicholls: Collapse and Reconstruction: The Reichsbahn during the Occupation . In: Lothar Gall, Manfred Pohl (Hrsg.): The railway in Germany. From the beginning to the present. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 1999, p. 246.
119. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 223.
120. ↑ knerger.de: The grave of Julius Dorpmüller
121. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 225.
122. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 232.
123. ↑ ^{a b} Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 234.
124. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 233.
125. ^ Alfred Gottwaldt: Reich Minister of Transport Julius Dorpmüller - an idol? In: Werner Lorenz, Torsten Meyer (Hrsg.): Technology and responsibility in National Socialism (= Cottbus studies on the history of technology, work and the environment, 25). Waxmann, Münster 2004, pp. 143–158, here p. 157.
126. ↑ Werner Pischel: The General Direction of the Eastern Railway in Krakow: 1939-1945, a contribution to the history d. German railways in World War II.
127. ↑ Eugen Kreidler: The railways in the sphere of influence of the Axis powers during the Second World War. Commitment and performance for the armed forces and the war economy. (Studies and documents on the history of the Second World War, 15), Musterschmidt Verlag, Göttingen 1975.
128. ^ Review of Kreidler's study by A. Gottwaldt.
129. ^ Alfred Gottwaldt: Reich Minister of Transport Julius Dorpmüller - an idol? In: Werner Lorenz, Torsten Meyer (Hrsg.): Technology and responsibility in National Socialism (= Cottbus studies on the history of technology, work and the environment, 25). Waxmann, Münster 2004, pp. 143–158, here p. 154.
130. ↑ Documentation Service of the Deutsche Bundesbahn and Hugo Strossenreuther (ed.): Railways and Railway Workers between 1941 and 1945 (Documentary Encyclopedia, Vol. 5), Frankfurt am Main 1973.
131. ↑ ^{a b} Gottwaldt, Schulle: "Jews are prohibited from using dining cars" ; P. 15.
132. ^ ^{A b} Mierzejewski: The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich, 2 ; Preface, p. XIV.
133. ↑ For example in the commemorative publication of the Ministry of Transport of the GDR on the 125th anniversary of the first German railway, cf. We own the railways , Festschrift d. Ministry f. Transportation d. German Democrat. Republic for 125 years Anniversary d. Railways in Germany, Transpress Verlag, Berlin 1960, DNB 455171955 , p. 191.
134. ↑ Gottwaldt: The Reichsbahn and the Jews 1933–1939 ; P. 13.
135. ^ Review of the exhibition catalog in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of April 10, 1996.
136. ↑ Ulrich Schnabel: From parachute to nylon stocking . Die Zeit, May 12, 1995.
137. ^ Mierzejewski: The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich , 2 volumes.
138. ↑ ^{a b} Christopher Kopper: Commerce and Transport in the 20th Century , Encyclopedia of German History Volume 63, Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 2002, ISBN 978-3-486-55076-4 , p. 97 (accessed via De Gruyter Online)
139. ↑ ^{a b} Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 6.
140. ↑ Daniel Terner: The devil's general manager? In: Dumjahn's Jahrbuch für Eisenbahnliteratur, Mainz 1996, ISBN 978-3-921426-43-2 , pp. 92–110, here p. 92.
141. ^ Alfred Gottwaldt: Reich Minister of Transport Julius Dorpmüller - an idol? In: Werner Lorenz, Torsten Meyer (Hrsg.): Technology and responsibility in National Socialism (= Cottbus studies on the history of technology, work and the environment, 25). Waxmann, Münster 2004, pp. 143–158, here p. 143.
142. ^ Hans Bock, Franz Garrecht: Julius Dorpmüller - A life for the railroad: Biography - Memories - Zeittendenzen , Verlag Ritzau, Pürgen 1996, ISBN 978-3-921304-39-6 .
143. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 177.
144. ^ Alfred Gottwaldt: Reich Minister of Transport Julius Dorpmüller - an idol? In: Werner Lorenz, Torsten Meyer (Hrsg.): Technology and responsibility in National Socialism (= Cottbus studies on the history of technology, work and the environment, 25). Waxmann, Münster 2004, pp. 143–158, here p. 154.
145. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 236.
146. ↑ Klaus Hildebrand, verbal contribution in a panel discussion, in: Lothar Gall, Manfred Pohl (Ed.): Enterprises in National Socialism , Verlag CH Beck, Munich 1998, pp. 125-138, here p. 131.
147. ↑ Christopher Kopper: Commerce and Transport in the 20th Century , Encyclopedia of German History Volume 63, Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 2002, ISBN 978-3-486-55076-4 , p. 98, (accessed via De Gruyter Online)
148. ↑ Werner Lorenz, Torsten Meyer (Ed.): Technology and Responsibility in National Socialism (= Cottbus studies on the history of technology, work and the environment, 25). Waxmann, Münster 2004, introduction, p. 9 f.
149. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 136.
150. ↑ Official notices . In: Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung, Volume 33, No. 15 (February 22, 1913), p. 105.
151. ^ Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn ; P. 139.
152. ^ Gottwaldt: Julius Dorpmüller ; P. 87.
153. ↑ Klaus D. Patzwall : The golden party badge and its honorary awards 1934–1944, Studies of the History of Awards Volume 4. Verlag Klaus D. Patzwall, Norderstedt 2004, ISBN 3-931533-50-6 , p. 67.

This article was added to the list of excellent articles on November 30, 2014 in this version .