Modern historians suggest that without the mass transportation of the railways, the scale of the "Final Solution" would not have been possible.[4] The extermination of people targeted in the "Final Solution" was dependent on two factors: the capacity of the death camps to gas the victims and quickly dispose of their bodies, as well as the capacity of the railways to transport the victims from the ghettos to extermination camps. The most modern accurate numbers on the scale of the "Final Solution" still rely partly on shipping records of the German railways.[5][6]
The first mass deportation of Jews from Nazi Germany occurred in less than a year before the outbreak of war. It was the forcible eviction of German Jews with Polish citizenship fuelled by the Kristallnacht. Approximately 30,000 Jews were rounded up and sent via rail to refugee camps. In July 1938, both the United States and Britain at the Évian Conference in France refused to accept any more Jewish immigrants.[7] The British Government agreed to take in the shipment of children arranged by the Kindertransport scheme, some 10,000 eventually arriving in the UK. All European Jews trapped under the Nazi regime became the target of Hitler's "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".[8]
