General Directorate of the Eastern Railway
The General Directorate of the Eastern Railway (official abbreviation: Gedob ) was the highest administrative level of the non-private railways in the General Government from 1939 to 1945.
The railway managed by the General Directorate of the Eastern Railway was initially the part of the Polish State Railways (PKP) located in the General Government, and from November 1939 the Eastern Railway .
history
After the German invasion of Poland
After the attack on Poland by the German Reich , which began on September 1, 1939 , the Wehrmacht immediately used the Polish railroad network in the occupied territories with the help of the Reichsbahn to transport supplies. On September 27, 1939, the formal establishment of a railway directorate for the Polish territory in Łódź (renamed Litzmannstadt in 1940), which fell under German rule in violation of international law . As early as September 1, 1939, a provisionally set up preparatory staff had been set up for this purpose in Berlin , the purpose of which was to take over the routes in the future Generalgouvernement ( German-occupied part of Poland ). A department store in Łódź was emptied as an office.
On October 26, 1939, a formal General Directorate of the Eastern Railway (Gedob) was founded, which took over the duties of the Łódź Railway Directorate, and at the same time moved its headquarters to Krakow , the capital of the newly created General Government under German administration. The Gedob were subordinated to the Ostbahnbetriebsdirectors (OBD) Krakow, Lublin , Radom and Warsaw , which were created at the same time . Her tasks included the financial administration of the railways, the setting of tariffs, the determination of the treatment of local staff, general railway law and cooperation in general legislation in the Generalgouvernement. The settlement center of the former Łódź Railway Directorate was closed on December 9, 1939.
After the German invasion of the Soviet Union
After the start of the German-Soviet War on June 22, 1941, the Gedob was also placed under the control of the former Polish and, before the First World War, Austro-Hungarian routes, which fell to the Soviet Union after the partition of Poland in 1939, on August 1, 1941 . At the same time, another Eastern Railway District Headquarters was set up in Lviv . In the wake of increasing German territorial losses during the course of the war from 1943 to Gedob was born on 7 August 1944 an official train to the station Gogolin moved (Upper Silesia) as the official residence. Another consequence was the amalgamation with the Eastern Railway Operations Directorate in Krakow when taking over the management and overall administration on November 1, 1944. On November 4, 1944, Gedob Gogolin also took over the dissolved processing center of the Lemberg Eastern Railway Operations Directorate.
After 1941, the Ostbahn provided the essential logistical prerequisites for the murder of millions of European Jews , provided that the deportation trains to the extermination camps in the east of the Generalgouvernement were organized and carried out by its staff and on its route network.
Settlement and end
In January 1945 the remains of the Gedob were moved from Cracow to Opole, on January 23, 1945 the Gedob in Cracow was dissolved. The settlement center took its seat in Liebau (Silesia). But already on February 9, 1945, this processing center was closed, merged with the processing center from Waren (Müritz) and relocated to Laube (today part of Tetschen ).
In March 1945 another relocation to Bayreuth took place, in April 1945 the remaining administrative officials of the Eastern Railway split up to different stations in the Bavarian Forest north of Pilsen . The story of Gedob ends with the occupation of the service train by US forces on April 29, 1945.
staff
Like the Deutsche Reichsbahn, the general management of the Eastern Railway was subordinate to the Ministry of Transport of the German Reich. The general director of Gedob was Emil Beck from November 9, 1939 to February 28, 1940 (then President of the Reichsbahndirektion Berlin ) and from April 1, 1940 to January 23, 1945, Adolf Gerteis .
See also
literature
- Michael Reimer, Volkmar Kubitzki: Railway in Poland 1939–1945 - The history of the general management of the Eastern Railway ; transpress Verlag, Stuttgart 2004. ISBN 3-613-71213-X
- Alfred Mierzejewski: The most valuable asset of the Reich - A history of the German national railway ; UNCP 2000, p. 123ff.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ See: Andreas Engwert / Susanne Kill (Ed.): Special trains in the death. The deportations with the Deutsche Reichsbahn. Documentation from Deutsche Bahn AG. Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, Böhlau Verlag 2009, ISBN 978-3-412-20337-5 .