Now their trains could run up to the Soviet border, but they would not be able to cross it.

Operation Barbarossa The German invasion of the Soviet Union was lost.

Soul train was heading West delivery booth nonaggression pact that Hitler had ripped up when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union.

They discovered that their massive superiority in trains counted for little because they had to build new lines in order to operate on the Russian railways and the entire Russian railway.

Rolling stock in lines had been destroyed by the Russians in their retreat, a scorched earth policy, as the Russians called because the Soviet Union and Germany did not share the same railway gauge supplies, munitions and reinforcements had to be loaded on.

German high command decided to convert the Russian lines to the German standard behind their advance Delay off two weeks that would be caused by this trans shipment was catered for by the hire of 15,004 strong cards with their drivers and flow of the German advance followed by retreating facing the Red Army sections of track we're engaged on.

Towards the end of the war, Stalin was able to travel to the Potsdam Conference in Germany, a border Russian train.

Stalin was afraid of flying German attack on Russia.

1941.

Waas held back by the fact that there wasn't sufficient railways to actually support the advance.

It's slow down advanced the idea of getting to Moscow.

By Christmas, Stalin had deliberately allowed to east west roads to fall into disrepair.

Supply to the advancing army would therefore be a problem.

Soviet withdrawal to the east was not compromised on extraordinary response to the invasion followed, which was extraordinarily dependent on trains.

They got the outskirts of Moscow, didn't actually manage to concrete completely and ended up in a stalemate game.

That was because of the lack of railway support for the operation.

Between July and October 1941 more than 1500 factories 496 from Moscow were transported by train.

Out of 75,000 metal cutting blades killed, 50,000 were shipped east by train.

Yakovlev plant in Moscow made fighter aircraft with the Germans less than 250 kilometers from the capital.

It produced its last ship pilots were waiting at the factory ready to find a straight interaction, then work in a factory put on trains, often almost nose to tail as they followed each other into safety.

East of where the factory was reassembled, production resumed within six days of its arrival.

That's what you get with a command economy.

You can just order a factory to move, provide the trains and off.

It goes to the Urals on Duren production game, but at enormous cost sacrifice of the Russian people.

Turning point was the battle for Stalingrad, where fierce fighting at one landmark revealed the importance of the railways.

On the 14th off September, main railway station changed hands five times over the following three days, it will change hands 13 more times on unlikely contribution made by railways for the lifting of the siege of Leningrad.

A trainload of cats to replace those that had been eaten were sent to deal with the rats with when the tide turned in western Europe following the Allied invasion on D Day, June 6 1944 railways were again to play a role.

The Allied Bombing offensive had originally being talked to that civilian around that was a big mistake.

The real breakthrough came when they started actually blowing up all the railways and growing up along the light, and then the German logistics kind of were destroyed.

Though effective and possibly vital, complicating of German reserves by destroying the road and rail sold on French infrastructure that prepared the ground for D Day was costly.

2000 aircraft and 12,000 aircrew were lost in a little more as allies advance from east and west.

They uncovered the evidence of German atrocities in the occupied lands.

And here two trains have played a part.

One of the Nazis, most evil programs in the Second World War was what we now call the Holocaust.

The deliberate elimination off Jews of Europe on dhe, many other minorities Gypsies, homosexuals, intellectuals that they found inconvenient on the royal ways were central to the operation of the whole coast.

Trains to the camps were given the lowest priority.

An average journey time was four days.

The total number, according to the detailed records kept by the railways, was about eight million in 1600 trains.

On the estimates of the number of people involved in the operation.

People who must have known what was happening is equally staggering.

Using this rail network, which they ran with enormous efficiency, they transported Jews from every corner of Europe and they ran those lines to the network of death camps that they operated.

The most horrific journey was the 18 day ordeal of Jews from Corfu.

When the wagons were finally unsealed, there were only corpses.

By the end of 1943 24,000 railway freight cars had been used to transport furniture and other effects taken from Jews from France to the fatherland, the railway systems of all the occupied countries who were pressed into this criminal service.