Göring’s Model Trains

In the early 1980’s while my wife made yet another trip to look at a cathedral (seen one, you’ve seen them all) I took a trip to a really great museum/hobby house that featured an incredible model train layout near Paddington Station.  The London Toy and Model Museum occupied five floors and visitors were led into a working pithead and coal mine model, with lifts, miners, pit ponies, and Davy lamps.  The museum also had large, landscaped working models in which trains whizzed in and out of tunnels and over viaducts.

Sadly, the museum closed in 1999, which only goes to show that I was right, and my wife was wrong—I can still go see Saint Nigel’s Buddhist Bar and Tabernacle or whatever it was, but The Doc has lost her only chance to see a great museum.  (There are rumors that most of the layouts were sold to a museum in Tokyo, but don’t tell my wife.)

There was once another great model train layout—perhaps the largest in the world at that time—but none of us are ever going to see any of it because it was owned by a madman who deliberately destroyed it.  It belonged to Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man, Hermann Göring.

There is something almost too perfectly awful about Hermann Göring’s having a gigantic model railroad at Carinhall, his forest palace retreat.  Of course he did.  Of course, the man with the uniforms, the titles, the pets, the loot, the hunting lodge inflated into a palace, and the incurable need to perform magnificence for visitors also wanted a miniature kingdom in which everything ran on time because he said so. 

The historical record is clear that he really did have a substantial model railway at Carinhall, that he showed it off to important guests, and that it was part of the estate’s larger function as a theater of ego.  The Library of Congress has a 1937 photograph explicitly titled “Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler watching model trains at Carinhall, Templin, Germany,” and another LOC album for 1938 includes views of Göring’s model railroad.  Remaining insurance papers show that Göring insured the layout for $254,000, the equivalent of more than a million dollars today.  Carinhall itself was not some cozy private retreat: it was an ostentatious estate where Göring displayed stolen art, his pet bison, and entertained dignitaries.

So why did he build it?  We do not, so far as I know, have a neat little memo from Göring saying, “I require a vast train layout because I am a vain overgrown child with a passion for theatrical domination.”  But the surrounding evidence makes the motive fairly obvious.  Carinhall was a stage set for self-glorification, a place where Göring curated an image of himself as hunter-prince, art connoisseur, host, strongman, tastemaker, and second-or-third-most-important man in the Reich depending on which week you asked.  The Jewish Museum Berlin describes Carinhall as his “ostentatious” hunting lodge, where he displayed stolen treasures seized from Jewish owners across Europe.  Add to that the photographic evidence that he was showing the trains to Hitler and other guests and the model train layout starts to look less like a simple hobby table and more like one more prop in a power pageant.  It let him be emperor not merely of a forest estate, but of a tiny obedient world under glass and rafters.  One suspects the attraction was obvious: in the model kingdom, unlike in the Luftwaffe, the scheduling problems were manageable.

As for how large it was, the safest answer is: astonishingly large, though not with the kind of museum-grade precision that lets one draw a blueprint today.  The strongest widely repeated figure is that Göring had two train sets at Carinhall totaling about 400 square meters, roughly 4,305 square feet.  That is not a toy on a table.  That is a hobby expanding until it begins to resemble a municipal planning department.  The archival photographs support the existence of multiple substantial installations over time, even if they do not, by themselves, settle every technical detail.  The attic images especially suggest a sweeping layout under steep rafters, while later reporting points to more than one major setup.

There is also the deliciously absurd matter of brand and scale.  Model-train devotees have argued for years about exactly which parts were Märklin and which were Trix (the two prominent German manufacturers of model trains), because even the dictator’s playroom cannot escape specialist debate.  What can be said confidently is that the German Federal Archives catalog a photograph from January 12, 1943, at Carinhall as “Vorführung Trix-Eisenbahn” — a demonstration of a Trix railway — during Göring’s 50th-birthday festivities.  That means at least one documented Carinhall installation was definitely Trix-Express. 

The train layout was important enough to be part of the performance for invited guests, which tells you a great deal about its role in the ecosystem of Göringian vanity.  Even on his birthday, on the very day that the Russian Army launched the counteroffensive at Leningrad, there he was, ushering people over to admire the little trains.  Nero fiddled; Göring seems to have preferred careful track alignment.

Was it the largest model railway in the world at the time?  That is a tempting line, because it sounds exactly like the sort of thing Göring himself would have wanted repeated.  But the evidence I found does not prove a world record.  The 400-square-meter figure certainly makes it enormous and arguably one of the largest known private layouts of its era, but I would stop there.  It is big enough without historical embroidery.  There is no need to gild the lily when the lily already occupies the attic, the basement, and a nontrivial fraction of Brandenburg.  The important point is not that it was definitively number one on some global leaderboard of grown men with soldering irons: it is that it matched the scale and psychology of the estate that housed it—conspicuous, curated, expensive, theatrical, and meant to impress.

And then, of course, he destroyed it.  Or rather, he destroyed the whole world that contained it.  In April 1945, with Soviet forces closing in, Göring ordered Carinhall blown up so it would not fall into Soviet hands.  The Reichsmarschall ordered Captain Frankenberg to destroy the estate, thus,  petrol and explosives were spread through the interior, and the place was blown up as Soviet troops approached.  In one sense the reason was practical: to deny the enemy a trophy, to conceal the scale of the loot, and to prevent capture of the estate as an intact symbol.  In another sense, it was grimly fitting, since regimes built on plunder often prefer arson to accountability.  If he could not keep the stage set, no one else was to inherit the scenery.

That tells us why the train layout vanished too. The trains were not singled out for destruction because Göring suddenly developed a principled objection to excessive toy railroading. They disappeared because they were embedded in the larger destruction of Carinhall itself.  Some model houses that may have belonged to the railway later turned up in a Berlin government depot, but no intact working layout is known to survive on public display.  So, the vast miniature empire died the same way the larger counterfeit empire was dying around it: by collapse, by denial, by frantic evacuation, and by demolition.  The final irony is almost literary.  A man obsessed with arranging the world to flatter himself ended by blowing up even the tiny one.

The Carinhall railway was not just a hobby.  It was a scale model of Göring’s tastes and delusions: lavish, childish, domineering, meticulously staged, and impossible to separate from the machinery of theft and violence that financed the setting around it.  He built it because he liked trains, certainly, but also because he liked the display, the control, and the adoring gaze of guests being shown yet another marvel in the palace of a man who mistook accumulation for grandeur.  It was huge and by the late 1930s and early 1940s it was famous enough to be photographed with Hitler and other visitors.  He destroyed it, or at least doomed it, for the same reason he destroyed Carinhall: because the real world was closing in, and men who make a religion of possession rarely meet loss with dignity.  Sometimes they just blow up the train room.