Reichsbahn: Where the Rails Go
In order to meet their mass deportation goals, the Trump regime will need to take control of the railways—which has begun.
On August 27th, the Secretary of Transportation, former Real World co-star Sean Duffy, announced the federal takeover of two of the primary choke points of East Coast travel. Penn Station in New York City for a “transformation project,” and Union Station in Washington DC, under direct federal management.
In a normal administration, this might not even bear attention. But we are not dealing with a normal, or even an abnormal government. We are in a unique historical moment. The United States federal government is a budding dictatorship plagiarizing the Third Reich note by note. So we should have the benefit of history to guide us.
Federalizing Railways
In 1917, during WWI, Woodrow Wilson federalized state railways, creating the United States Railroad Administration. Federal control ended in 1920, but decades later the government created Amtrak, a quasi-public rail company that still operates nationwide.
In 1920, Germany made a similar move by nationalizing a patchwork of state rail systems to create the Deutsche Reichsbahn. By 1930, the Reichsbahn had evolved into a massive bureaucracy representing the primary form of transportation throughout the country, and a major employer.
When Hitler took power, he focused on the Reichsbahn which took the lead from the German Labour Front and in August 1933 banned Jewish workers and prohibited intermarriage among employees, signaling its compliance with the Reich in its antisemitic policies.
The Reichsbahn was used to transport supplies and human cargo throughout Hitler’s dictatorship, and became a primary artery of the Holocaust, especially during its deadliest phase. In a chilling example of the banality of evil, the Reichsbahn continued to charge the German government for a third-class ticket for every Jew transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Hungarian Holocaust
Hungary was an ally of Hitler and a member of the Axis Powers during WWII. It had a population of 825,000 Jews, who were systematically persecuted throughout the war. Despite the fact that it was a compliant de facto satellite state of Nazi Germany, Hitler decided to invade Hungary in March 1944 anyway, and integrated Hungary’s state railway, MÁV, into the Reichsbahn network.
This began one of the most brutal and rapid mass deportations in history.
Between May 15 and July 9, 1944, approximately 437,000 Jews were deported from Hungary on 147 trains. About 420,000 of them were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center. When they arrived there, they underwent the selection process. About 100,000 Jews from Hungary were selected for forced labor at Auschwitz. The remainder—approximately 330,000 Jews (about 75 percent)—were murdered in the gas chambers upon arrival. The victims included men, women, and children. This was the deadliest period at Auschwitz-Birkenau. —USHMM
By the end of the war, out of the 825,000 Jews under Hungarian control, 550,000 were murdered by the Nazis. The only way such a mass deportation was possible was trains.
Why Trump Needs the Trains
To hit the numbers of immigrants that the Trump regime says it wants to deport, at least one million per year, requires expensive components, largely funded by the nearly $200 billion added for DHS, including ICE and CBP. However, the current mode of transportation to detention centers for process and removal is primarily by van/bus which will not scale to these numbers.
The current outflow of deportations is approximately 200,000-250,000 per year. To scale 4-5x, the regime needs to grow its army of paramilitary agents, currently targeted at hiring 10,000 more by early next year. It needs to greatly expand its detention centers, which has already begun with a $45 billion budget to achieve a population of 100,000 detainees. And it needs a way to move all those people from the urban collection points to a detention center.
The regime has learned from history that the only way you can put that many people into concentration camps is by rail.
Trump, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan and others have used the language of the Nazis in describing “infestation,” “invasion,” “Democrat crime” and attacking “sanctuary cities.” Phrases like “clean out,” “beautification,” and “take over” were applied to cities like Los Angeles and DC before federal troops were sent in against the wishes of the residents and mayors—despite lowering rates of crime and no actual emergency.
Assuming the regime plans to follow through on its stated plans to attack numerous sanctuary cities and perform mass deportations in rapid succession, having control over railways would be a critical piece of the logistics chain. As each city is “cleared out,” you would need control of the train station and other infrastructure—which could be accomplished by a few hundred National Guard.
JB Pritzker and other media have reported that Texas National Guard are staged in Chicago to move out into the city as ICE, CBP and other federal agencies begin terrorizing communities and locations where they might find immigrants. This is a barely concealed act of civil war.
A tyrannical federal government has ordered a southern state’s militia to invade a northern city against the wishes of its mayor and residents.
The only way this could happen is if the military has been compromised.
Old World Order
In the White House today, Pete Hegseth gave a little speech next to Donald Trump as Trump signed an executive order authorizing the Department of Defense to use the “secondary name” Department of War while Hegseth figures out how to make the name permanent. In the speech, Hegseth essentially admits that he believes he is above the law.
“It's going to fight to win, not to lose. We're going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality, violent effect, not politically correct. We're going to raise up warriors, not just defenders.“ —Pete Hegseth
This name change is extremely symbolic. In 1947, Harry Truman, who dropped nuclear bombs on Japan to end a world war, established the first Secretary of Defense, a civilian position over the entire Armed Forces, managing a newly created National Military Establishment (NME). Two years later NME was renamed the Department of Defense, overseeing new Departments of the Army, Navy and Air Force. This was all part of the global effort to establish a global security state that would prevent another world war.
The change to “defense” did not mean that the military would be passive. To the contrary it meant the military had to be always prepared, always ready. As UK think tank RUSI said today:
“In 1949, the United States… projected the image of a country prepared to defend the peace of the post-war order, not merely to wage war.“
Department of Wag the Dog
Hegseth’s gleeful compliance to any order given by Trump, and his open lawlessness, makes this scenario all the more dangerous. The US military is being corrupted to become a personal weapon of the president, and a plaything of white male grievance.
After unnecessarily killing 11 alleged Venezuelan “narco-terrorists” in a “drug boat” Hegseth was asked by what legal authority he committed this act of murder. His answer was essentially “because I said so.”
“We have the absolute and complete authority to conduct that. First of all, just the defense of the American people alone.”
At the same time, the Pentagon is clearly trying to escalate with Maduro, claiming that “regime military aircraft” flew near a Navy ship. This is highly reminiscent of the lead up to the war in Vietnam, specifically the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, where the military invented an attack on American ships to give Lyndon Johnson a rationale for entering the Vietnam War.
This is a blatant provocation by the US military, designed to escalate with Maduro. Trump responded by deploying 10 stealth fighter jets in Puerto Rico which could be used against Venezuela. Trump said: "If they do put us in a dangerous position, they'll be shot down."
Elections Are the Target
As Trump’s desperate gerrymandering in Texas and other states proves, he is terrified of losing control in the midterm elections, while simultaneously implementing policies that seemingly ensure a wave election for Democrats. The unemployment numbers today are grim, inflation is spiking, and Robert Kennedy Jr. is trying to destroy access to vaccines. Trump is underwater on every major issue, politically.
If the Democrats take either the Senate or the House, Trump’s dreams of dictatorship would be very difficult to pull off—which is why, in my view, it remains a near-certainty that Trump will try to cancel or “postpone” the 2026 elections based on some kind of manufactured “emergency.”
In that case, Trump could take over city’s train stations without legal ramifications using military assets with no argument from leadership, and use the railways, as the Nazis did, to ramp up arrests and detentions.
Detention Centers → Concentration Camps
The one missing component of Trump’s mass deportation plan is a way to fly millions of people out of America to other countries. It is not clear at all that it’s possible yet. At a minimum, it can be expected that at these volumes the detention centers will become more of a long-term solution than the projected 30-day turnover.
This is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany. At first, the concentration camps were supposed to be temporary detention centers for “deportation” of Jews and other undesirables from Germany. Quickly however, the prisoners became a valuable source of labor, and as the psychopathy of the regime worsened, prisoners became expendable and disposable.
This potential is worsened by the use of military installations like Fort Bliss.
Fort Bliss, in El Paso, will hold up to 5,000 people in the base’s new tent camp. The military base is home to 90,000 service members and their families. Opened at the height of the Texas summer, where temperatures regularly soar above 100 degrees and sandstorms are frequent, detainees are at serious risk of heat-related illness and other harsh conditions. —ACLU
Fort Bliss is where most of the Nazi scientists who came to America in Operation Paperclip after WWII were housed, including Werner von Braun, who invented the V2 Rocket for Hitler, the Apollo program for the U.S., and, inadvertently, the richest man in the world.
Will It Work?
I have spent a lot of time and effort reporting on the historical parallels to this regime because the people running the federal government are not creative people, nor are they terribly subtle. Donald Trump and the operators around him know what they want—a Fourth Reich in America, or as Peter Thiel’s “Dark Enlightenment” propagandist Curtis Yarvin calls it: a “Dictator CEO.”
The question of whether the most prosperous democracy in the history of the world will be permanently captured by a group of Nazi plagiarists is not about whether it will work. The question is whether we will let it.
Also I can say for sure is this: not if I have anything to do with it.
Long Live a Free America.
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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson
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Thanks for another brilliant post. As always, you are ahead of the curve. Understanding what’s going on is key to fighting it. Thanks for your continued courage, grit and leadership.
Jim, I appreciate that you get to the root of what’s happening. There’s so much noise right now and you funnel down to the pertinent issues. I wonder if people in the military are conflicted about what they’re being asked to do. I have to imagine that many are. We need to be prepared and join together in a massive movement. I don’t want to look back and regret not doing more.