Alfred B. Gottwaldt Collection

With a Kriegslock behind him, Albert Speer addresses locomotive builders and Reichsbahn officials at a locomotive factory outside of Berlin in July 1943.

"The war cannot be lost due to the transportation problem, it must be solved."

Gottwaldt Collection

Two out of every three German locomotives dispatched behind the Eastern Front were disabled in the bitter winter of 1941-42. Above, a worker climbs a Class 55 freight engine coated with ice.

T his declaration made by Adolf Hitler, Führer and Chancellor of the Third Reich, in a letter to Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and Munitions, underscored the severity of the railway emergency that faced Nazi Germany in the winter of 1941-42.

Thousands of German locomotives and hundreds of military supply trains were stranded in the snowy wastes of western Russia. The German Wehrmacht, locked in a life-and-death struggle with the Red Army, desperately needed the food, ammunition, and winter clothing carried on the trains.

A major part of the effort to overcome this emergency was a crash program to build a standardized war locomotive—the Kriegslokomotive, or Kriegslok for short. Between 1942 and 1945, an astonishing 7,666 of these engines rolled out of Nazi-controlled factories, making the Kriegslok the largest concentrated locomotive-building program in history. Also the least known.

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This article, pieced together from formerly classified records, is the first of two parts about Hitler's wartime engine.