Deportation to Extermination Camps by Rail in Western and Central Europe – 1942Deportation to Extermination Camps by Rail in Western and Central Europe – 1942

By: Jasper Lemberg

By 1942, the European rail system was a dense forest of lines that reached just about everywhere in the continent. Germany was well aware of this and used it as often as possible during World War II, including during the Holocaust. To do this, they set up the concentration camps so that smaller ghettos and internment camps that housed Jews from surrounding areas fed the larger extermination camps. Furthermore, there ended up being a large split in terms of where the Jews were deported to. Auschwitz, the largest of the extermination camps, took in Jews from across Europe, whereas the other camps mostly stuck to the denser Jewish populations within Poland. This map illustrates these lines, the ghettos and camps they connected, and the split between the Auschwitz lines and the domestic lines to the other extermination camps.