Julius Dorpmüller


Julius Heinrich Dorpmueller was general manager of Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft from 1926 to 1945, a Nazi politician and the Reich Minister for Transport from 1937 to 1945.

Life

Dorpmueller was the son of a railway engineer, and studied railway and road construction from 1889 to 1893. After graduating in 1898, Dorpmueller was active in the Prussian state railway administration. In 1907 he stepped down as an executive of the technical office and went into the service of the Schantung railway in Tsingtao. In 1908 he was appointed chief engineer for the German section of the new Chinese Imperial state Tianjin-Pukou railway. Due to the declaration of war by China against the German Reich, he returned as a refugee in 1918, passing through Manchuria, Siberia and Russia to Germany. In the light railway service he was active in the management of the Transcaucasian SFSR railways. In 1919 he became departmental head with German Reich Railways in the Stettin district. From 1922 to 30 September 1924 he was a president in the Deutsche Reichseisenbahnen in the Oppeln district, and from 1 October 1924 to 1925 he was president in the Ruhr district; due to his comprehensive experience in light railways, Dorpmueller was consulted as part of the Dawes plan.
After 1925 the board of directors of the German Reich Railway created a position entitled Permanent Representative of the general manager, as general manager Rudolf Oeser was seriously ill; Dorpmueller was appointed to this post on 3 July 1925. In December 1925 RWTH Aachen, in acknowledgment of his services to railways awarded him a doctorate in engineering. On 3 June 1926, the day of Rudolf Oeser's death he was selected by the board of directors to become the German railway's general manager. Due to political considerations it was only confirmed on 18 October 1926 by the President of Germany.

Nazi career

After the Nazi seizure of power Dorpmüller replaced nearly all "non-Aryan" workers with National Socialists. Dorpmüller became Reich Transport Minister on 2 February 1937 after the resignation of his predecessor Paul Freiherr von Eltz-Rübenach. In April 1938, when a Berlin train stopped in Passau, Dorpmüller was ceremonially welcomed and escorted to the Danube, where he continued his trip to Linz and Vienna on board the Austrian Wotan.
smen force Slovak Jews onto Holocaust trains, 1942
On 11 July 1939 the "law concerning the Deutsche Reichsbahn" was issued and Dorpmüller was confirmed as transport minister and also General Manager of the Deutsche Reichsbahn.
According to Albert Speer, Dorpmüller confessed that "The Reichsbahn has so few cars and locomotives available for the German area that it can no longer assume responsibility for meeting the most urgent transportation needs." Speer then convinced Hitler to name Albert Ganzenmüller state secretary under Dorpmüller.

Holocaust trains

Dorpmuller was in overall charge of arranging holocaust trains for transporting Jews and other minorities to Nazi concentration camps and death camps from across Germany as well as occupied Europe at the request of Adolf Eichmann. The victims were carried in closed and windowless cattle cars, and provided with no sanitary arrangements and little or no water or food. Journeys could often take days without any relief from encarceration, and many died en route to their destination. Sometimes trains would be stopped briefly to remove the corpses.The Reichsbahn charged the victims for the privilege of being carried to their deaths, although infants under four years of age travelled free to their deaths.
During the liquidation of the ghettos starting in 1942, the trains were used to transport the condemned populations to death camps. To implement the "Final Solution", the Nazis made their own Deutsche Reichsbahn an indispensable element of the mass extermination machine, wrote historian Raul Hilberg. Although the prisoner trains took away valuable track space, they allowed for the mass scale and shortened duration over which the extermination needed to take place. The fully enclosed nature of the locked and windowless cattle wagons greatly reduced the number and skill of troops required to transport the condemned Jews to their destinations. The use of railroads enabled the Nazis to lie about the "resettlement program" and, at the same time, build and operate more efficient gas chambers which required limited supervision.
The Nazis disguised their "Final Solution" as the mass "resettlement to the east". The victims were told they were being taken to labour camps in Ukraine. In reality, from 1942 on, for most Jews, deportations meant only death at either Bełżec, Chełmno, Sobibór, Majdanek, Treblinka, or Auschwitz-Birkenau. Some trains that had already transported goods to the Eastern front on their return carried human cargo bound for extermination camps. The plan was being realized in secrecy, although there were many eye witnesses of the trains being loaded openly at many stations, passengers in passing trains and railwaymen working in the vicinity. In late 1942, during a telephone conversation, Hitler's private secretary Martin Bormann admonished Heinrich Himmler, who was informing him about 50,000 Jews already exterminated in a concentration camp in Poland. "They were not exterminated – Bormann screamed – only evacuated, evacuated, evacuated!", and slammed down the phone, wrote Enghelberg.

Post war career

Dorpmüller stayed in post until the formation of the 1945 Flensburg government. The British then asked Dorpmueller to take over reconstruction of the German railways: Dorpmueller and his representative Albert Ganzenmüller were brought by air, by the United States, to Chesnay in Paris, in order to meet for negotiations over the reorganization of German transport. The American General Carl R Gray Jr had expressly recommended Dorpmueller to General Dwight D Eisenhower for "re-instatement to his old office", because he – as also "our secret service confirms" – had been neither a "Nazi sympathizer nor activist". With difficulty, as he was suffering from cancer, Dorpmueller returned on 13 June 1945 to Malente and from there, gave advice on reconstruction. On 23 June 1945 he was operated on – again – but his digestive system no longer functioned, so his health deteriorated rapidly. Despite this, he led official discussions, in full coherence, until two days before his death.
Dorpmueller died on 5 July 1945 and was buried in Malente.

After his death

In accordance with an October 1949 letter from Lübeck's denazification main committee to Maria Dorpmueller, Julius's sister, he was said to have obtained "relief" under category V classification. In the honours lists of the Aachen university 1995 anniversary publication, he was listed as an honorary doctor and an honorary senator, with no further details. In the Nuremberg transport museum and in the "Dorpmueller Hall" of the main station of Hanover there were busts of Dorpmueller, until 1985, when they were removed during preparations for celebration of the sesquicentenary of the introduction of railways to Germany. In the Essen railway's head office there was once a "Dorpmueller room", which was renamed in 1985 to "Small meeting room"; the bust there also disappeared. Roads in the cities Wuppertal, Minden and Hameln, were originally named after Dorpmuller and have also been renamed.
In September 1994, someone from Ratingen complained to German railways about Dorpmüller's "badly maintained" grave. In a letter from them in response in January 1995, they said that the former BD Hamburg had maintained the grave until the end of 1991, a decision by the former executive committee of the German Federal Railroads meant there was no more provision for maintenance thereafter. In the middle of 1995, someone from Hamburg tidied up the grave and took over care at their own expense.

Honors and medals