Re: New ferry connection Finland-Estonia

In article <x7udnX2tWt_6GFveRVn-sA@xxxxxxxxxxx>, "henry alminas"
<halminas@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<deletions>
>
> I just looove it - so they bought it
> from:
> "the Deutsche Reichsbahn (GDR railways)"
>
> Huh, huh - and come again??

Good grief, Henry, you can't be that dense. I thought that you had some
experience traveling in central Europe.

> So tell me, my boy, just where the hell
> is the krautoid "German Empire"?

Before WWII the state-run German railway network was called *Deutsche
Reichsbahn* (DR).

With the post-war division of Germany, East Germany ("die deutsche
demokratische Republik"/DDR) got to keep the by then discredited (due to
some rather genocidal coordination between Adolf Eichmann of the RSHA,
whose job was to draw up deportation schedules for Jews, country by
country, province by province, town by town, and neighborhood by
neighborhood) and the Deutsche Reichsbahn, which supplied the rolling
stock and charged the deportees or the RSHA for their trips to the
concentration camps and extermination centers).

Legend has it, that this unusual decision came about in the following
manner. The East Germans painted an extra D on the old DR rolling stock
that the acquired after the collapse of Nazi German, thus converting DR to
DDR. Since the DDR was not recognized as a legitimate country by West
Germany, its rolling stock could not enter the country with the DDR logo.
The East German authorities could not afford to allow this situation to
become established, so they scratched the extra D off, thus reverting DDR
to the familiar, albeit discredited DR.

The West German railway network was named Deutsche Bundesbahn, German
Federal Railways), DB

In re-united Germany, the Deutsche Reichsbahn was merged with the Deutsche
Bundesbahn, the only state-owned railway in the country.

> That is, of course, if you can speak
> German - as you claim that you can!
>
> Just curious.

On my first trip to Scandinavia in 1964 I traveled on a ship of the kind
that John was writing about. It was a western-made DDR-operated ship that
plied the route between Sassnitz in the DDR and Trelleborg in Sweden. As
you know, it was almost impossible for citizens of the DDR to travel to
Western countries as tourists back then because of the danger of
Republikflucht, but they were allowed to make the sea voyage to Sweden,
even if they were not allowed to disembark under any circumstances.
Occasionally, I am told, a GDR citizen with better than average swimming
skills would ­ literally ­ jump ship and swim a few dozen meters to
freedom when the ship was in the harbor at Trelleborg.

Best,
Eugene Holman
.

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