I have seen this film in large format previously. The "Kriegslok" was a standardized design of locomotive the Reichsbahn (German railroads during the Nazi regime) was designed for the war effort. Hence, the name: Kriegslok = locomotive for war.
The Kriegsloks were produced in huge numbers by a number of different locomotive plants in Germany, and possibly in parts of Poland. I do not know the final number produced, but it fell somewhat short of the optimistic projections at the beginning of WWII. What did happen, as the war continued, was the Nazi government made Russian POW's and concentration camp inmates available as slave labor in some of the industry. They also either shifted some war production to plants in occupied nations, or took citizens of those nations back to Germany for labor. The result is some of the Kriegsloks built during this time period did not have the quality the first ones did. It was a combination of needing to build the locomotives as fast as possible for the war effort, and using labor who were less than willing and forced to work under really bad conditions. The result was some sabotage of war materiel produced by this sort of workforce.
What is somewhat unusual in this particular film is showing women in the machine shops. During WWII, I think the Nazi mindset, in general, was not to bring German women into the heavy industry. Female forced labor or concentration camp inmates were used in heavy industry and considered as an expendable and abundant resource.
After WWII, there was a surplus of the Kriegsloks. Some wound up in active service in countries such as Poland, well into the 1970's or 80's. I have heard some stories as to the quality of some of the welds and even of the steel that turned up in the Kriegsloks built later into the war. The Kriegsloks were a solid design, and had some fairly advanced features. Being a mass produced locomotive, it is likely there was some intention to have interchangeable parts from one works to the next. Whether this happened, I do not know.
A Kriegslok in its original design and paint is an impressive and powerful looking beast. The normal German paint scheme for the Kriegsloks, at least in peacetime use, was to have the boiler and cab painted gloss black, and the wheel "centers" (spokes, hubs, rim but not the tires) painted gloss red. Side rods and motion parts were polished steel.
I got a ride in the cab of working steam locomotive in the yards at Tubingen, Germany, in 1974. Whether it was a Kriegslok or not, I never bothered to find out. I was 24, and when the yardmaster offered me a ride in the cab of one of their engines, I jumped at the chance. I recall several of the locomotives in the yard had brakeman's cabs raised on the back ends of the tenders, and some had "vestibules" so a crew could walk thru the tender from the first passenger coach to effect a crew change on a moving train. The term "sensory overload" had not come into being, but I was likely in the throes of it at that time. I remember quite a number of steam locomotives were sitting on team tracks with banked fires, waiting to go out with trains or to be serviced. The yard was called "Bahnhof Triebwerk Tubingen"- railroad shops at Tubingen. The old yardmaster explained that the German Federal RR's were getting rid of steam and this was one of the last pockets where steam engines were still in regular service. He also said they no longer shopped the engines there, but sent them to Trier (in Belgium, I think) for shopping, or simply scrapped them when shopping was due and replaced them with diesels. The old yardmaster also told us that younger Germans did not want to fire or service steam engines in the yards, so they had to rely on "Gastarbeitern" (guest workers) to do the heavy and dirty work.
My younger brother and a buddy from our old neighborhood- who was studying at the university in Tubingen- were with me. The yardmaster put us up on an engine that had to go out to a wye track to be turned.
It was quite an experience, and after the initial rush of getting up on German steam locomotive passed, the overtones of recent history took over. The fireman was a Turkish "Gastarbeiter" (guest worker). A skinny man, who, sopping wet, probably went about 120 lbs. The engineer- known as a Lokomotivenfuhrer- was a husky older man with a gut on him. The engineer wore a blue uniform with a patch at the breast pocket. The patch had a stylized spread eagle with a circular emblem in its talons. "DB" was in that circle, or "Deutsche Bundesbahn"- the German Federal Railroads. It was not too hard, given the engineer's age and that emblem and the way he conducted himself, to imagine a swastika in the circle rather than DB. That would have been the old Reichsbahn emblem.
The fireman had come aboard first to break the bank and "blow up" steam by opening the blower valve. The engineer came aboard and took his seat and soon enough, we made a light engine move out of the yards. After we cleared the throat of the yards, the engineer looked at me and called me "Herr Ingenieur". In Germany, a degreed engineer is afforded a lot more status than in the USA, is addressed by title as one might address their doctor. The engineer asked if I wanted to run the engine. I got up on his seat, really nothing to do but put my elbow on the windowsill and rest a hand on the throttle. The engine had the big handwheel for the reverser, with the cutoff clearly indicated. It also had airbrakes with much the same valves as US engines would have had. It was evening and the sun was setting as we headed out of the yards. On a parallel track to ours, there was a seemingly endless string of boxcars. Wooden sides on many, all being the four-wheeled kind. At that point, my mind shifted and I starting thinking about recent history. The locomotive was built in 1939, and the boxcars seemed of that same era, as did the engineer. The yardmaster spoke pretty good English, and told us he learned it as a Luftwaffe POW in San Antonio, Texas. It was not too hard to imagine the locomotive had pulled trains of those boxcars to the concentration camps, and that engineer may well have been a railroader at that same time.
The Nazi government made much of their railroaders, and considered them as almost another branch of the military. In propaganda films I have watched, the locomotive crews were being decorated, some with the iron cross, by high ranking military officers. The railroaders had a good idea of what the overall plans were, and by bringing them into a military type of status and decorating them with the iron cross, the railroaders were likely willing participants.
Before we took that trip to Germany in 1974, my mother had pulled me aside. She told me she knew I had a very high regard for the oldtime German machinists who had taken me under their wing, and she knew I was looking forward to visiting their homeland. What mom did say was simple: "6 million ghosts of our people walk that land. Don't forget that." When I rode in that engine cab, I was an excited young engineer of 24, seeing only a chance to catch a ride in a steam engine cab and initially enjoying the recognition the German railroaders afforded me as a mechanical engineer. Sitting in the engineer's seat and speaking German to the engineer and seeing the boxcars and the age of the locomotive were quite powerful. Mom's words came back to me. I knew we had distant relatives who had made the one way trip in the boxcars. Instead of sadness or anger or something like it, a different feeling replaced them. Here I was, a distant relative of some of the people who'd been hauled off to the concentration camps, maybe by this very locomotive and its engineer. I was sitting in the engineer's seat and being addressed with some deference and respect. I had learned the machinist trade from the old German immigrants, learned their language, and become a mechanical engineer. It was a different feeling and a good one. The past was done with, no re-doing it, no forgetting it, but despite the best efforts of the nazi regime, plenty of us had survived and we had triumphed. My sitting in the engineer's seat and all that went with it seemed right. I shook the engineer's hand and thanked him, then thanked the fireman. We thanked the yardmaster, who, to be quite truthful, could have been an uncle or neighbor. The yardmaster was one of those people who are instantly likeable, no formality or pomp (which the engineer had plenty of). We left the yards, went to supper and washed it down with plenty of good German beer.
Over the years, the ride in that engine cab does come back to me. Not in a bad or sad way. There is no re-doing the past, and if people learn from it and succeeding generations move on in a better way, that is all that can be hoped for. The Kriegsloks were built with one purpose in mind- to support the war effort, and then used for pulling endless trains to the concentration camps. After the war, they were just more locomotives, and that is the only way to look at them.
The film is overly optimistic, and no different than the propaganda films made in the USA for the home front. Films showing hundreds of tanks coming out of a Chrysler plant, or Willow Run with endless lines of bombers being built, or films about the US Railroads hauling trainloads of troops and tanks. The Kriegslok are a time proven design. No two ways about it.
