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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:
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.
"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, received 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>
Notes
<1> Zabecki, Franciszek. "Wspomnienia dawne i nowe",
Warszawa, 1977, p. 45.
<2> Ruckerl, Adalbert. "NS-Vernichtungslager in Spiegel
deutscher Strafprozesse, DTV Dokumente", Munich, 1977, p.147.
<3> Ruckerl, p.147.
Work Cited: Arad, Yitzhak. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka--the Operation
Reinhard Death Camps. Indiana University Press, 1987.
Source: The Nizkor
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