The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich: A History of the German National Railway, vol. 2, 1933-1945 (review)

In an episode worthy of The Producers, the Broadway show satirizing the production of a musical about Nazi Germany, Alfred Mierzejewski describes a new greeting etiquette among the employees of the Reichsbahn, the German national railway. During the summer of 1933, the administration decreed that railway workers had to greet each other by shouting "Heil Hitler" and using a military salute when wearing uniforms—even when not on duty. When not wearing a hat, however, the Reichsbahner were expected to use the Hitler salute with the outstretched right arm. This salutation technique created a great deal of confusion in the marshaling yards, where operators repeatedly mistook it for a train signal. Sacrificing Nazi symbols for operating efficiency, the railway abandoned the Hitler salute in the proximity of trains in the fall of 1933.

While that story is peripheral to this well-researched and well-argued account, it bears some larger meaning. Mierzejewski argues that the Reichsbahn was able to achieve a degree of relative autonomy remarkable for a company whose product—transportation—was indispensable to the Nazi project of economic resurgence, armament buildup, and war. People and goods circulated overwhelmingly on the rails, despite Hitler's inconsistent flirtations with roads and cars. In many ways, the Reichsbahn was one of the central tools of Nazi Germany and, simultaneously, one of the least appealing to its leadership.

This is also true for the historiography of this enterprise, which has made major progress with Mierzejewski's publication. It is remarkable that the Reichsbahn attracted so little scholarly attention before the 1990s. A panel of historians commissioned by the railway published a comprehensive volume in 1999 covering the years from 1835 to the present (Lothar Gall and Manfred Pohl, eds., Die Eisenbahn in Deutschland: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart). But Mierzejewski's book, which was finished before the German publication, is more detailed and also establishes him as a major scholar of the administrative and political history of the Reichsbahn before and during World War II. As was the case with volume 1 of this work, on the German railway during the Weimar Republic (reviewed in the January 2001 issue of T&C), Mierzejewski has exhausted the archival sources and assembled an impressive volume analyzing the interrelations between politics and the railway. He also incorporates the disparate findings of the vast literature written by railway enthusiasts.

Mierzejewski's central theme concerns the political travails of the Reichsbahn's management. He paints a picture of bureaucratic rivalries, personal cabals, and short-term decision making. While all this sounds familiar to scholars of Nazi Germany, Mierzejewski stresses the institutional inertia of the vast Reichsbahn, whose culture was personified in the technocratic general director, Julius Dorpmüller. Unlike other scholarly treatments, such as Alfred Gottwaldt's 1995 biography, this book portrays Dorpmüller as a weak leader with "narrow vision" (p. 164) who was overwhelmed by the erratic style of governance after 1933.

Yet Mierzejewski concedes that, after rapidly forcing out its Jewish employees, the Reichsbahn was by and large able to withstand Nazi party pressure and also resisted the encroachment of the military. Dorpmüller's technocratic stance assured Hitler's government that the inner workings of the Reichsbahn should best be left alone in order to allow smooth and reliable service, thus ensuring a relative degree of autonomy for a state-owned company.

Before the war, the Reichsbahn successfully introduced high-speed interurban train services planned previously but virtually abandoned its somewhat transparent accounting practices. Blocked from access to capital markets, the railway was forced to contribute to the financing of the
economically pointless autobahn. In 1939, the Reichsbahn proved to be inadequately prepared for the invasion of Poland, mainly due to lack of information. After keeping...