Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel: Richard Lutz is the first DB boss to lay a wreath at Yad Vashem

Enlarge image

Richard Lutz with Kai Diekmann, Chairman of the Friends of Yad Vashem in Germany

Photo: Ilia Yefimovich / dpa

Richard Lutz became the first head of Deutsche Bahn to lay a wreath at the central Holocaust memorial event at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on Thursday.

The red and white wreath bore the name of the Friends of Yad Vashem in Germany, of which Lutz is a member.

The motto of Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day this year is "Train Journeys to Destruction: The Deportation of the Jews During the Holocaust".

The Deutsche Reichsbahn played a crucial role in the extermination of European Jews.

Around three million people in Europe were taken to the Nazi extermination sites by train from 1941 onwards – most of them Jews, but also Sinti and Roma.

"The cattle or railroad car, the most important means of deportation, thus became one of the most well-known symbols of the Holocaust," says Yad Vashem.

more on the subject

• Admonition from Holocaust survivors: »We must remember the past, or it will become our future«

• President of the Bundestag on Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel: "I think of the dead with deep sadness and shame"

It is considered certain that the systematic murder of millions of people would not have been possible without the Reichsbahn.

The "special trains to death" were a profitable business for them.

Often the travel costs had to be paid by the Jews themselves.

"That shames us to this day"

In January last year, the Left, Greens and FDP parliamentary groups in the Bundestag supported demands for compensation payments for the rail transport of Holocaust victims.

However, today's Deutsche Bahn is not the legal successor of the Reichsbahn.

The company emphasizes, however, that it "accepts our historically based and socio-political responsibility" regardless of legal issues.

Therefore, the critical examination of the role of the Reichsbahn in National Socialism is promoted and the memory of the victims of deportation and forced labor is kept alive.

At the laying of the foundation stone for an extension building in Yad Vashem, Bahn boss Lutz had already said in 2019: “Of course, as Deutsche Bahn, we didn’t play a decisive role in how everything was organized directly, but through the Deutsche Reichsbahn at the time.

That shames us to this day.”

dop/dpa