PRESERVED BY COMMUNISM -
HITLER'S LOCOMOTIVES

A Moment Frozen in Time
As the Iron Curtain was lifted a fascinating time-warp of Europe in the forties was revealed especially on the railways. Local steam trains and horse-drawn road traffic were the norm everywhere, and we rushed in with our cameras to capture these unique scenes before modern economics swept them all away. Two of the lines featured were closed a month after we filmed them. We ride on the Sroda narrow gauge lines, still providing passenger service with steam. Relics of World War II abounded, including German wartime ‘Kriegsloks' as left by the retreating German army in 1945, and the closing feature of the programme shows one of these steaming past Hitler's "Wolf's Lair", his abandoned Eastern Bunker in the Polish forests.An archive section filmed privately in 1979 at risk of imminent arrest by the secret police shows many locomotive types long since vanished, including USA Liberations.