The photo directly below show German soldiers as they embark for the Front in 1914.  These innocent, patriotic young men, were embarking on a journey, hardly able to conceive what their fate might be. In Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War, 1914-1939 (1984), Robert Whalen writes of an image from the first weeks of the war: “A locomotive rushing across Germany. Aboard the train, hundreds of young men gaily singing.” Princess Evelyn Blücher wrote similar in An English Wife in Berlin (1920): “Every day troops pass by my window on their way to the station, and as they march along to this refrain, people rush to the windows and doors of the houses and take up the song so that it rings through the streets—almost like a solemn vow sung by these men on their way to death.”

German soldiers in a railroad car on the way to the front during early World War I, taken in 1914

Several months later, these German soldiers returned on the same trains, sick and wounded. Whalen writes:

The first major transports of wounded reached Germany in the fall and winter of 1914; subsequently, trainloads of sick and wounded arrived daily. In the winter of 1914/15, the trains that had carried singing heroes to battle the summer before, returned home bearing a cargo of broken men. The longer the war went on, the longer the trains became; the hospital train was the central metaphor of the war.

Whalen reports that after four years of battle, 2,037,000 German soldiers had died; 4,300,000 were wounded; and 974,977 reported missing or wounded. Total casualties were: 7,311,977. What’s more, according to the official Army Medical Report, the estimated numbers of cases treated by doctors during the war (1914-1918) were: 27,185,240.

In Adolf Hitler: The Making of a Fuhrer, Walter Smoter Frank says that the chances that a volunteer in Hitler’s regiment would be killed or maimed was “almost guaranteed.” Because of replacements, Hitler’s Regiment, which consisted of 3600 men in 1914, suffered 3754 killed before the war ended. Mass burials of whole and partial corpses became commonplace. Straw was placed over the dead, and another layer of bodies was placed over the first until the grave held over 100 bodies. Thousands of other recruits, Franks says, “lost limbs, parts of torsos, sight, hearing and also their minds.”

These prisoners are packed into trains for their journey to Chelmno; little do they know that it will be their final journey.

In his study of the First World War, Denis Winter (1985) draws a parallel between the freight trains that transported German soldiers and those that transported Jews:

After the stint at base, the railway took the men toward the front line. To a generation with visual memories of the railway lines running into Hitler’s death camps, tense faces peering from cattle trucks, there is something disconcerting about the imagery of this journey from base camp. The soldiers went in waggons of the same type, forty of them in each waggon, kit hanging from hoods in the roof. Death was a high probability for both generations of travelers in these cattle trucks.

We may hypothesize that Hitler created the Final Solution as the re-enactment of the trauma of the First World War. As he and his innocent comrades were sent to be slaughtered by Germany, so Jews would be slaughtered by Germany.