Holocaust: The Deportation of Austrian and German Jews
"Tens of thousands of Jews from Germany and Austria were deported to
the Lublin district at the end of 1939/beginning of 1940, and, on a
smaller scale, in the years following. After the
Wannsee Conference,
Eichmann's office, early in March, 1942, ordered that most of the
deportation trains from the Third Reich be rerouted from the ghettos
of Minsk and Riga in Ostland to ghettos and camps in the Lublin
district. <1> This change coincided with the opening of the death
camp of
Belzec in mid-March 1942, and the building of
Sobibor and
Treblinka. Tens of thousands of Jews from the Third Reich arrived in
the Lublin district from April 1942, and from there they were later
sent to the death camps of Operation Reinhard.
"On March 27,
Goebbels wrote in his diary about these deportations:
"According to the evidence given at the Sobibor/Bolender trial, at
least 10,000 Jews from Germany and Austria found their death in
Sobibor in the months of April, May, and June, 1942. <2> Some of
these transports were sent directly to the death camp. A report
dated June 20, 1942, from the commander of the Nr. 152 police
precinct of Vienna, describes the deportation of a transport of
Austrian Jews directly to Sobibor:
"The transport commando consisted of Lieutenant Fischman as
commander, two sergeants and thirteen policemen of the `First
Police Reserve Company East ...' The embarkation of the Jews to
the freight cars of the allocated `Special Train' at the station
of Aspang started at 12:00 hours under the command of SS
Hauptsturmführer Brunner and SS Hauptscharführer Girzik from the
[local] `Main Office for the Deportation of Jews' and went
smoothly.
"At that time the transport commando assumed the guard duty. All
together, 1,000 Jews were deported.
"The DA-38 train left Vienna on June 14, 1942, at 19:08 and
crossed Brno, Neisse, Oppeln, Czestochowa, Kielce, Radom, Deblin,
Lublin, Chelm to Sobibor and not, as expected, to Izbica. The
arrival at Sobibor was on June 17, 1942, at 8:15. At the station
of Lublin, where we arrived on June 16, 1942 at 19:00 hours, SS
Obersturmführer Pohl was waiting, and he ordered that fifty-one
able Jews between the ages of fifteen and fifty disembark and be
brought to a labor camp.... At that time he gave an order that
the remaining 949 Jews were to be taken to Sobibor. The [list of
people], three freight cars [with food], and 100,000 zloty were
handed over to the SS Obersturmführer Pohl in Lublin. At 23:00 we
left Lublin for Sobibor. In the Jewish camp of Trawniki, 30km
before Lublin, we handed over the three freight cars with food
and luggage to SS Scharführer Mayerhofer.
"The train arrived at 8:15 on June 17 at the labor camp, which was
close to the Sobibor station, where the camp commander,
Overleutnant Stangl, recived the 949 Jews. The disembarkation
began immediately and was completed at 9:15. The departure from
Sobibor to Lublin with the `special train' followed immediately
after the unloading of the Jews, at 10:00.'<3>
<1> Zabecki, Franciszek. "Wspomnienia dawne i nowe", Warszawa, 1977, p. 45
Work Cited
Arad, Yitzhak. BELZEC, SOBIBOR, TREBLINKA - the Operation Reinhard
Death Camps. Indiana University Press, 1987. ISBN 0-253-3429-7
The
original plaintext version
of this file is available via
ftp.
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`The ghettos which will be emptied in the cities of the General
Government will now be refilled with Jews thrown out of the Reich.
This process is to be repeated from time to time.'
<2> Ruckerl, Adalbert. "NS-Vernichtungslager in Spiegel deutscher
Strafprozesse, DTV Dokumente", Munich, 1977, p.147
<3> Ruckerl, p.147"