The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

But rounding up the slave workers was only the first step.* The condition of their transport to Germany left something to be desired. A certain Dr. Gutkelch described one instance in a report to Rosenberg’s ministry on September 30, 1942. Recounting how a train packed with returning worked-out Eastern laborers met a train at a siding near Brest Litovsk full of “newly recruited” Russian workers bound for Germany, he wrote: Because of the corpses in the trainload of returning laborers a catastrophe might have occurred… In this train women gave birth to babies who were thrown out of the windows during the journey. Persons having tuberculosis and venereal diseases rode in the same car. Dying people lay in freight cars without straw, and one of the dead was thrown on the railway embankment. The same must have occurred in other returning transports.25