Originally Posted by Rincewind View Post
I wasn't going to join in this thread, but...
I think I can help Clayton, so that he doesn’t need to write complicated computer programs - I did the following calculations using Excel! Please check out the following, to see if his theory had been vindicated.... or not.
Around December 1940, Hitler decided to invade Russia - Operation Barbarossa. The date of the invasion was 22 Jun 1941, so it happened around 6 months after the decision.
A few statistics:
Around 3.2-3.5 million German soldiers were moved to the Soviet Frontier. This total included both the Wehrmacht (Army) and Luftwaffe (Air Force).
Something like 98 army divisions were involved in this move, 69 infantry, 19 panzer and 10 motorised. Many of these would have transferred from France, where they had been expecting to invade Britain.
Now full-strength infantry divisions had around 17,000 men, panzer divisions 16,500 and motorised 15,500.
This gives around 1.2 million infantry, 315,000 Panzer troops and 150,000 motorised, totalling 1.65 million divisional troops.
It took about 50 trains to move an infantry division, 80 per panzer division and 70 per motorised.
So - this results in a total requirement of nearly 3,500 trains for infantry divisions, 1,500 for panzer divisions and 700 for motorised divisions.
That gives us a total of around 5,700 trains. That’s an average of around 300 troops per train, plus all of their heavy weapons, transport and equipment.
Now in the 1940’s only around 60% of the strength of the Wehrmacht were in divisions, the reminder being support and service troops. This calculates at around a million additional troops, who themselves needed some 3,800 trains.
This means that in six months the Wehrmacht moved 2.75 million troops, to Poland and Romania, many from France using 9,500 trains in total.
This means that on average 365 trains were used per week (around 50-60 a day), just to transport army soldiers. At the same time, many Luftwaffe ground personnel had to undergo the same journey.
Just using the army numbers, we can now extrapolate some figures for Clayton.
The SS used to pack 50 people into each of the train wagons. This gives a train containing 2,500 people.
The Wehrmacht used 9,500 trains to transport two and three quarter million troops, plus their equipment and weapons, in six months.
9,500 trains, at 2,500 per train, allows 23.75 million to be transported - that’s nearly 50 million per year.
If we use 6,000,000 people and 3 years for the holocaust, then we have:
6 million people at 2,500 per train require 2,400 trains.
2,400 trains over 150 weeks means an average of 16 per week, or 2-3 a day.
Wow! A couple of trains per day is impossible!