train

In order to be "relocated to a farming settlement in the East," the passengers were to bring three days' food and enough money to buy tickets at the Reich Travel Office, in the same manner any vacationing German might buy a ticket.

The victims themselves paid for their transportation to their own torment-50RM per adult and half-fare per child under ten.

The train—a normal passenger train—pulled out of the Cologne station at 3 p.m.; after a journey of 84 hours, the passengers arrived in Minsk, after having been transferred to cattle cars in Wolkowzyk, in White Russia, formerly Poland; the train was scheduled to arrive at Minsk at 06:49 hrs. on July 24, 1942, but arrived a few hours late, at twenty two minutes past ten in the morning.

The sealed wagons, with their human cargo, were sidetracked in the Russian July summer heat.