Alfred C. Mierzejewski

Already reviewed the first volume and finally worked up enough energy to read the second. Like the first volume and despite the subtitle, this is not a complete “history of the German national railway”; there is next to nothing about rolling stock or track maintenance and only cursory discussion of the problem of converting Soviet broad gauge to European standard gauge or response to Allied bombing. The only pictures are of railway officials; this is solely an economic history.


The author still has the eccentric vocabulary used in the first volume, with the words “caesura” and “dirigiste” appearing the very first paragraph. Who would think a railroad history would help with Scrabble?


Nevertheless, I found this somewhat more interesting than the first volume. After fighting the Weimar government tooth and nail, the DRG rolled over and played dead for Hitler, firing all its Jewish employees, forbidding Jews from using waiting rooms, and, of course, building the lines to the death camps. It was chilling to read that the railroad charged the SS a standard fare of 20.20 RM to transport a victim. A few DRG employees resisted slightly; the stationmaster at Auschwitz requested a transfer and a some managers grumbled about the loss of Jewish employees, but it was business as usual otherwise.


There’s considerable discussion of how the Third Reich shot itself in the foot regarding its “most valuable asset”. The Wehrmacht kept stealing freight cars to use for storage, resulting in a critical shortage. The Nazis insisted on treating Poles as subhumans, resulting in vital Polish railways always being short of personnel. The DRG cannibalized locomotives and freight cars from the conquered French and Belgian railways, resulting in disruptions in production for industries in those countries with Wehrmacht contracts.


There’s also some good material on the economic effects of the Allied bombing campaign. When the railroads and marshaling yards were finally targeted in late 1944, the DRG quickly ran out of coal. In an accelerating feedback cycle, yards didn’t have enough coal to fuel locomotives to send trains to the mines to pick up coal. The author theorizes that if coal trains had been targeted instead of fighter plants and U-boat pens the war could have ended 6 months earlier.


There’s some interesting stuff here but I wouldn’t buy this book unless you have a pressing interest in economic histories. I’m still waiting for a wartime history of the DRG that talks about maintenance problems and the technical aspects of the situation on the Russian front.… (más)

Found on the remainder table, this book takes a potentially intriguing topic and reduces it to almost stupefying boredom. Although advertising itself as “A History of the German National Railway”, it is actually only a business and economic history, and a boring one at that. Did I mention it was boring? There are no pictures of trains, only one map, precious little discussion of technical factors (except how they related to economics), and what charts and tables there are usually relate to things like “Summary of Cash Flow” and have all financial figures in Reichsmarks. (I don’t think I have to tell anybody that giving figures in Reichsmarks for, say, the year 1922 isn’t really much use assuming you even want to try to figure out what the numbers mean).


As near as I can tell, the author is not a native English speaker. The language is always grammatically correct, but is full of unusual word usages and undefined terms. (For example, we don’t find out until well into the book what a “tenured official” is, or what “cameralistic accounting” is, or what “particularism” is). And this isn’t the author’s fault, but it doesn’t help readability: the ease of forming compound nouns in German results in numerous abbreviations like “RAW” for Reichsbahnausbesserrungswerke (National Railway Repair Works).


Well, it’s not quite a total loss; hidden in the obscuring verbiage there are a few things worth learning about. I am now a little more interested in reading more about Weimar Germany, which I had previously thought of only as a short smooth section of road between The Great War and The Even Greater War. What technical discussion there is has some items of interest: the Germans acted like Germans. After pioneering container shipment, they proceeded to design containers that weren’t compatible with anybody else’s. They spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling around with mechanical drives for Diesel locomotives, because somebody else had developed the Diesel-electric system. And, in the endless pursuit of technical perfection, DRG (now I’m doing it) engineers developed a class of steam locomotive (the P-10) that was “technically sweet”, highly efficient, and four tons too heavy to run on existing track.


And I have to say that some of the economic history is interesting. The Weimar government saw the national railway system as a extension of domestic (the author is meticulous at using the word “Socialism” sparingly; instead preferring “commonweal system”) and foreign policy. The temptation to mess around with railroad operations to implement the policy of the moment was irresistible, and nobody even tried to resist anyway. The DRG was repeatedly forced to buy new engines and cars it didn’t need “to give work to factories”, at the expense of things like track and bridge maintenance. Unused branch line service couldn’t be discontinued and inefficient and unneeded repair shops couldn’t be shut down. Fares had to be kept high in First Class and low in Third Class. Some of the things that were done are amazing; when the DRG board of directors rebelled and refused to implement yet another “request” from the Transportation Ministry, the government got even by financing a canal that competed directly with a main rail line, despite the fact that both the canal and the rail line were semipublic enterprises.


Of course, it would be too much to expect the railway administration to be pure-of-heart capitalists through all this; when they were blindsided by business lost to the increasingly popular bus and highway truck industry, the first thing they tried was to get the government to intervene and either put prohibitive taxes on motor fuel or regulate the truckers out of existence.


To give the author some credit, although he adopts an academically dispassionate tone for most of the book on those few occasions when he breaks out of it he’s procapitalist, at one point saying (I’m paraphrasing; I’m not going to go back through this thing for an exact quote) that the Weimar government never considered the possibility that a capitalist railroad might actually be more in the public interest than a “commonwheal” one. Some of the online reviews apparently missed this (presumably because they couldn’t stay awake through the whole volume) and praised the book as a justification of socialist economics.


This volume stops at the ominous year 1933. There’s a second volume covering 1933 to 1945.… (más)