German Railways in the East

[GregSingh]

I uploaded this one and three more into the documents section.

[GregSingh]

And here is the Soviet map of the area showing stations in-between BW's and distances. We already provided source for these maps earlier in this topic somewhere...

I marked stations of interest on the map.

[recidivist]

Could you send me the original as I cannot read all of this image. PM me. Also what is the source? We could do a map for those sections of the line and mark on the Bw, etc.

The documents were passed on to me from a friend who may have found them at the Drehscheibe forum and website. They are identical to the docs that Gregsingh has uploaded to the other thread although I haven't seen docs #3 and #4 before.

The Bw for non railway visitors to the thread was an Operating Deport for a group of locomotives providing the motive power for a particular stretch of line. It contained an engine shed, turntable (or Y) a water point, coaling station and a reapir shop for minor repairs. Steam locomotives needed coal, water grease and sand loading (usually when they returned at night) and took around 3-5 hours in the morning to get ready for operation. Given the infrastructure needed to run these locomotives they usually hauled between Bw and then did a return run back to home. Roughly.

Presumably the locomotives would be pulling trains in both directions in order to maximise on their usefulness, rather than doing an empty return run back home? Note BTW that the crew ('Zub') aren't exchanged with the same regularity as the train engines.

[Der Alte Fritz]

The link for any newcomers for the Atlas of Soviet Railways is at http://www.soldat.ru/files/4/10/137/. You are looking for the over view map or if looking at the more detailed maps you want the Southern Railway or South Western Railway.

GregSingh - spent a bit of time trying to place these Germanised names onto this very map or a Google map but was defeated as I could not quite read them sufficiently to identify all the places. (You then need to put them into their Soviet name to find them on the map.) Your German is better than mine, could you do this please. Place names in the document are:
Kriwei Rog
Tscherwena
Dolinskaya
Snamenka
Apostelowo
Nikopol
Ingule
Marganez
Dolginouau?

Addenda : Greg Have now read your post on the other thread and can read these much better. Thank you for posting them, they are very interesting indeed. I saw the mention of G.55.15 engines - old Bavarian ones built for hilly terrain - a curious choice but they were very efficient steamers and had an axle load of 16 tonnes.

[Der Alte Fritz]

The operating practices of locomotives vary a bit from country to country.
So in the United States where capital is cheap and labour expensive (due to restrictive Union practices in the 1930s) so they tended to just run the engines from operating depot to operating depot and back again, each way pulling a load.

In the Soviet Union, where capital items are expensive and labour is cheap in the mid 1930s they switched to multi-crewed engines which meant that the engines could run for as long as they were able usually around 300 km a day or up to 500 km a day if the expendables such as grease were topped up as they went along. This meant several crews operating the engines in the course of a day. The problem with this idea is that the crews change shifts too often and so no one takes any responsibility for the regular maintenance of the engine and the failure rate rose alarmingly. So to get the best of both worlds, they used fixed multiple crews on the same engine and it had the added advantage that the NKVD could identify 'wreckers' this being the time of the 1937 Purges. The railways were as heavily purged as the Army.

I do not know which method the Germans used in Russia as it was a balance between their shortage of motive power and the limited number of German crews. I think we posted the German/Russian railway workers ratios before and there were very few Hiwi engine drivers.

[Der Alte Fritz]

As an aside, I found in "Ring of Steel" by Alexander Watson the following statistics on the German effort in the Great War in the Ost:

Hasburg trains 49 wagons 100 axles 500 tons 11 km ph single track 18 km ph double track
German trains 110 axles 600 tons 30 km ph
Bialystock province in Ober Ost 434 bridges built in 1915

[Der Alte Fritz]

Also in "Imperial German Army 1914-18, Organisation, Structure and Orders-of-battle" by Hermann Cron Berlin 1936
Military railways in the Great War:
military personnel 108,000
civilian personnel 70,000
length of track Spring 1918 ----- stock of engines ------ stock of wagons ------
total ----- ------------19,658 km ----- 6,627 ----- 178,046
Western -------------- 7,943 km ----- 3,938 ----- 127,223
Eastern --------------- 8,076 km ----- 1,786 ------- 30,386
South-eastern -------3,639 km ----- 903 ------- 19,987

as a comparison from Pottgeisser for Jan 1943
GVD Osten
German military civilian ----- 104,899
Hiwi ----- ----- ---- ----- ----- --- 510,556
RVDen + FEKdos ----- 34,797 ----- 4,671 -----???????

so the 1943 effort was:
personnel x 6
Germans x1.1
track x4
engines x2.6

GVD Osten cf Eastern

[Der Alte Fritz]

Similarly this page gives the details of the RAW for the DRB in 1932:
http://web.hs-merseburg.de/~nosske/Epoc ... _3702.html

useful as a comparison with the Russia ones.

[recidivist]

I do not know which method the Germans used in Russia as it was a balance between their shortage of motive power and the limited number of German crews.

But can we estimate how the Germans ran their rail lines in occupied USSR along simple economic lines? Yes, running a railway is an economic activity, but running a rail net in an occupied territory whilst also supporting the needs of a very large army falls somewhat beyond the scope of straightforward capital:labour calculations.

The German railway authorites in the east seem to have been quite willing to hire local labour in great quantities - but were they called Hiwis like the Wehrmacht's supporting troops? - but they also had to instigate a crash program to build the BR.52 war locomotive in large numbers.

I think we posted the German/Russian railway workers ratios before and there were very few Hiwi engine drivers.

Perhaps few Hiwi drivers, but given the rough 5:1 German: Hiwi figure, we can safely assume that many natives were employed as shunting hands, station porters etc. and maybe also as firemen, a physically more demanding job than driving the engine, on board locomotives.

I saw the mention of G.55.15 engines - old Bavarian ones built for hilly terrain - a curious choice but they were very efficient steamers and had an axle load of 16 tonnes.

I guess that they just had to make do with whatever was available? But note that the plan is from late July 1943 - just about the time when construction of the BR.52 war locomotives peaked. Maybe a replacement for the old Bavarian locomotive was just around the corner.

[Der Alte Fritz]

Hi Recidivist
Evidence of operations is key in our understanding of how the German railways performed in Russia. You can accept the current orthodoxy as given by von Bork and Pottgeisser which is that the Soviet railways were badly made and could not support modern rail operations. But there are a number of problems with this view, this poor railway combined with extensive German destruction did not seem to hamper the Soviets advance and they maintained an army twice as large. Secondly the economy run the Germans in their area was tiny compared with the pre-war Soviet economy so there should have been plenty of capacity available. Thirdly agriculture in Russia is based upon a southern producer region shipping food to a northern consumer region but again the Germans did not do this and let the northern cities starve and instead shipped the food to the Ostheer or back to the Reich.

I would advocate a more critical view which is that the railways were never run to full capacity because of outside factors:
1) No planning for railways in Operation Barbarossa as it was suppose to produce victory in 9 weeks. Just as in France the Germans planned to sort out the railways after victory on the Dneipr.
2) Army Transport Officers did not have the skills needed to run a railway like their fathers had done. The Chef des Transportwesen in 1939 was a Colonel, his opposite number in the Great War was a Lt General. It took the Transport Officer of HG Sud until September to work out that he could not meet his target of 24 a trains a day for the HG unless he unloaded them and sent them back. But he had no troops to do the work and had to use POWs. The change of gauge is given a reason for these delays but we have notes in Halder's diarly that he expected them to change the gauge at a rate of 20km a day (which they exceeded) which was faster than the rate of advance of the Infantry Divisions. von Bork himself gives tables showing that on average in the area of HG Nord the first standard gauge train arrived 6 days after the troops captured a town. Also by May 1942 they have converted 21,000 of track, which is two thirds of the networks that they control.
3) In Sept 1941 the RVM is asked to resolve the railway issue but has to do this from existing DRB resources and so set up the RVD but these operate in the Rearward Army Areas, 201, 202, 203 and are under military control. But Army interference makes it very hard to run an efficient railway and we have evidence of this by the arrest of senior RVD officials by the Gestapo and their imprisonment in a concentration camp.
4) Technical matters, by May 1942 Dorpmuller tells Hitler we cannot guarantee railway services in the Reich or in Russia due to shortage of rolling stock (winter losses, unexpected demands for stock to be sent into Russia from the Reich, etc.) so Speer takes a hand.But he has the steel allocations and can immediately order a new locomotive programme. But the earlier DRB efforts pay off by the summer and the situtation gets better. Modern German locomotives were too heavy for Russian rails while Prussian and Bavarian ones could not steam between water stations which were set at far longer distances than they were used to. Similarly the DRB cannot balance the European locomotive and rolling stock until 1942 because the Army runs the railways in France.

When Halder writes in his diary complaining that the DRB has sent him railwaymen that were too old and inflexible and rigid - he is simply showing his own lack of knowledge and railways, that are working to carry the maximum load, are inflexible and rigid. If you start adding flexibility, you lose capacity very rapidly. That was the lesson of the American Civil War and it took Hermann Haupt to impose discipline on the military men and get the railways to be the potent force they were for the Union in that conflict.


The Russian working for the RVD were mainly NKPS employees and their principal numbers were used as linesmen.

I do not think that the G.05-15 would be replaced - there was a shortage of motive power so that the BR.52 just added additional capacity.

[recidivist]

Hello again, Alter Fritz.

I don't strictly recall making any earlier claims contrary to your post, above, but there are some points of it that I would like to engage anyway.

this poor railway combined with extensive German destruction did not seem to hamper the Soviets advance and they maintained an army twice as large

I guess there are benefits of having a partisan army operating in what is essentially your own territory that you are taking back - probably there were not that many German-supported partisans operating in the Red Army rear. And as I understand it, the Soviets did reach the end of their logistical tether around the Wistula in 1944.

Secondly the economy run the Germans in their area was tiny compared with the pre-war Soviet economy so there should have been plenty of capacity available

This assumes that the Germans took over a more or less undamaged economy (similar to, say, France in 1940) with accompanying railway system, which wasn't the case. The economy of the German-occupied areas of the USSR was just one part of a top-to-bottom planned economy, so even if they had intended to let things continue as undisturbedly as possible (which they evidently weren't), the Germans in some senses had to start from scratch not just with the railways.

On the economy part, I would think that it is easier to plunder a kolkhos-based agrarian sector rather than an economy based on individual farmsteads spread all over the place, but I am not sure if that really was the case, or how to prove/disprove it.

Thirdly agriculture in Russia is based upon a southern producer region shipping food to a northern consumer region but again the Germans did not do this and let the northern cities starve and instead shipped the food to the Ostheer or back to the Reich.

1) You seem to be assuming that the Soviets were mainly using their railways for this south-north flow of agricultural produce. I am sure the Volga and other rivers were playing a part, too. And
2) When the Germans decided to alter the course of this flow of goods from south-north to east-west, that should logically mean *less* free capacity as compared to what the Soviets used their railways for, and more headaches for the DR railway staff on the German-run rail network since we can safely expect the Germans to have been much more interested in building and maintaining the east-west running parts of the Soviet rail network than they would be in operating the lateral north-south parts of it.

No planning for railways in Operation Barbarossa as it was suppose to produce victory in 9 weeks.

I am sure there is truth to that. The Germans intended O.B. to be a short campaign. The transition from short war to long war was an exercise in improvisation also for the railways.

Army Transport Officers did not have the skills needed to run a railway like their fathers had done. The Chef des Transportwesen in 1939 was a Colonel, his opposite number in the Great War was a Lt General

Rank does not necessarliy reflect skill. The relative importance assigned to railways in WW1 relative to WW2 cannot automatically be read into the rank of the commanding officer. Rather, I would suggest that the modest rank of the c-in-c of the Wehrmacht transport sector at the outbreak of war reflects that the Wehrmacht had been expanding very rapidly since 1935, and that promotions did not always follow suit with increased responsibilites. What rank did the pre-Nazi Reichswehr Chef des Transportwesens have?

The rest of your point 2) rather seems to invalidate your point about lack of skill in the Wehrmacht railway branch.

But Army interference makes it very hard to run an efficient railway and we have evidence of this by the arrest of senior RVD officials by the Gestapo and their imprisonment in a concentration camp.

Indeed, but that condition is not WW2-specific. Well, the arrest and imprisonment of RVD officials may be an interesting analogue to the purges enacted on the Soviet railways in the 1930s, but administrative difficulties and feuds with other government bodies are I think as old as war itself.

Modern German locomotives were too heavy for Russian rails while Prussian and Bavarian ones could not steam between water stations which were set at far longer distances than they were used to.

Indeed, but the overriding problem seems to have been related to climate - the sub-zero temperatures froze up water for steam engines, burst locomotive boilers, froze turnouts solid, and generally made running railways a very difficult exercise.

Similarly the DRB cannot balance the European locomotive and rolling stock until 1942 because the Army runs the railways in France.

Just how deeply was the Wehrmacht involved in running the civilian parts of the French economy in 1942? Right down to operating all trains in the occupied zone? Remember, a large part of France was unoccupied until November. Also, the Germans contracted French and Belgian companies to build rolling stock for them from quite early on. I would maintain that also by 1942 France, her railways and her industry were all assets and not liabilities to the German war effort.

I do not think that the G.05-15 would be replaced - there was a shortage of motive power so that the BR.52 just added additional capacity.

The BR.52 programme was ramped down again rather quickly after it had peaked in the summer and early autumn of 1943. It wasn't a sustained effort, like building tanks and assault guns for the army was, but it seems to have alleviated to shortage of locomotives - a shortage that presumably also became less acute because the occupied areas which the Germans were lording over were becoming smaller by the time the BR.52 programme peaked.

[Der Alte Fritz]

Hi
Please do not think I was countering any of your discussions, far from it, I was just laying out the case for this detailed examination of operating practices that we are doing at the moment. The idea is to apply some new thinking to the current orthodoxy to see if leads anywhere.

Good point about the French Belgian engine production but the French engines that ended up in the Russian winter fared just as badly as their German counter parts and for many of the same reasons. That is why the 'Russianised' engines were so important. Have you got the monthly production figures for the BR.52 and other Kriegslok types?

[recidivist]

Hi
Please do not think I was countering any of your discussions, far from it, I was just laying out the case for this detailed examination of operating practices that we are doing at the moment. The idea is to apply some new thinking to the current orthodoxy to see if leads anywhere.

Okay

Good point about the French Belgian engine production but the French engines that ended up in the Russian winter fared just as badly as their German counter parts and for many of the same reasons.

Right, but French locomotive builders would have had to be truly prescient if they were to know that the engines they were building in the 1930s and earler would end up in the middle of a Russian winter.

That is why the 'Russianised' engines were so important. Have you got the monthly production figures for the BR.52 and other Kriegslok types?

Yes. See the attached image.

...on the far left-hand side of the diagram you can see monthly production. You can see that BR.52 production peaked in Sept. 1943 with just over 500 units, and quickly fell to c. 60-70% of that total after that. French and Belgian contractors were mainly tasked with building smaller locomotive types so that just a few Grossgerman locomotive builders could concentrate on the BR.52 and a few other war engine types. I surmise that is why monthly BR.52 deliveries drop rather sharply from May '44 to June '44 - i.e. German/Grossraum contractors had to revert to also building other, smaller types again.

On the other side of the gauge on the left hand side you can see total locomotive inventory by type over time. The BR.52 inventory keeps climbing past the 6,000 mark in 1944. I am sure there would have been a BR.52 replacement for the ageing G. 55.15 toiling around in the Ukraine at that time - except, of course, that the Germans were out of the Ukraine by the time BR.52 stocks peaked.

[Der Alte Fritz]

That is a useful illustration for engine production.

To put it into some sort of context here are the number of engines used in Russia for 1943 and 1944 and you can see the small numbers involved.

The German network was between 30,000 and 40,000 km at its peak ie around 40% of the German network of 78,000 km and 35% of the pre-1941 Soviet network. The NKPS used around 11,000 locomotives in this area pre-war and the wartime DRB used 29,000 locomotives on their 78,000 km. Yet GVD Osten used only 4,671 engines on their 30,000 + km which was less than half the density of locomotives that either the DRB or NKPS would have used on this length of track. In 1944 when the GVD Osten track has shrunk to under 10,000, the density of locomotives is still lower.

From Pottgiesser "Die Reichsbahn im Ostfeldzug

Lokomotivbestand 1.1.1943 -------Strecken km-------------------- 1.5.1944 -------Strecken km
RVD Total ------------- 3,450 ---------22,964 ----------------------------- 1,590 -------7,517
FEDko total ------------1,221 ---------- 7,940 ----------------------------- 119 --------- 506
GVD Osten -------------4,671 ----------30,904 ----------------------------- 1,709 ------8,023
Gedob ------------------ 2,088 -----------6,484 ------------------------------ 2,103 ------5,789
Reich ------------------28,630 ----------76,198 ---------------------------- 30,860 ------76,403

[Jonathan Harrison]

Holocaust deniers claim that Jews were being 'resettled' in the USSR during this period. In what ways would the bottlenecks have prevented such transfers, leaving aside such other logistics as guarding the trains and feeding the deportees?

For example, death camp Belzec was on the old demarcation line alongside the Lemberg-Kiev rail line.

Bella Gutermann claims the line was restricted to 8 trains per day in February 1942:

http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Micro ... 202023.pdf