Deportations to Killing Centers

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YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York

Young German soldiers assist in the deportation of Jews from the Zychlin ghetto to the Chelmno camp. The Nazis planned this deportation to fall on the Jewish holiday of Purim. Poland, March 3, 1942.
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DEPORTATIONS TO KILLING CENTERS

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During their quest to conquer Europe and rearrange the ethnic composition of eastern Europe, the Nazis used deportation by train to forcibly remove members of ethnic groups from the territory on which they lived. They intended to remove all Jews from Europe, eventually through systematic mass murder. The Germans used rail systems across the continent to transport Jews to eastern Europe. After they began to methodically kill Jews in specially constructed killing centers, the Nazis deported Jews by train and, when trains were not available and the distances were short, by forced march or truck. Sometime during 1941, the Nazis decided to implement the "Final Solution", the systematic murder of European Jewry.

At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, held near Berlin, German SS and state officials met to coordinate the deportation of European Jews to extermination camps already in operation or under construction in German-occupied Poland. The participants of the conference estimated that the "Final Solution" would involve the deportation and eventual murder of 11 million Jews, including even those Jewish residents of nations outside German control, such as Ireland, Sweden, Turkey, and Great Britain.

Major deportations to extermination camps, 1942-1944
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Deportations on this scale required the coordination of numerous German government agencies including the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), the Main Office of the Order Police, the Ministry of Transportation, and the Foreign Office. The RSHA or regional SS and police leaders coordinated and often directed the deportations. The Order Police, often reinforced by local auxiliaries or collaborators in occupied territories, rounded up and transported the Jews to the extermination camps. The Ministry of Transportation coordinated train schedules. The Foreign Office negotiated with Germany's Axis allies over the transfer of their Jewish citizens to German custody.

The Germans attempted to disguise their intentions. They sought to portray the deportations as a "resettlement" of the Jewish population in labor camps in the "East." In reality, the "resettlement" in the "East" was a euphemism for transport to the extermination camps and mass murder.

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The Germans used both freight and passenger cars for the deportations. The deportees were usually not given food or water for the journey, even when they had to wait for days on railroad spurs for other trains to pass. Those packed in sealed freight cars suffered from overcrowding. They endured intense heat during the summer and freezing temperatures during the winter. Aside from a bucket, there was no sanitary facility. The stench of urine and excrement added to the humiliation and suffering of the deportees. Lacking food and water, many of the deportees died before the trains reached their destinations. The transports were accompanied by armed police guards who had orders to shoot anyone who tried to escape.

Between December 1941 and July 1942, the Nazis established extermination camps in occupied Poland--Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Birkenau was part of the Auschwitz camp complex, which also functioned as a concentration camp deploying forced labor. Another concentration camp, located near Lublin and known as Majdanek, served as a site for murdering targeted groups of Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners by gas and other means. The Germans killed at least three million Jews in the extermination camps.

Deportations to the extermination camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were carried out within the framework of Aktion Reinhard and managed by SS and police authorities in the Lublin district of the Generalgouvernement (territory in the interior of occupied Poland). Jews from southern and southeastern Poland were the principal victims at Belzec. Most Jews deported to Sobibor came from the Lublin district. Jews from the Warsaw and Radom districts were deported to Treblinka and killed there. German authorities deported the Jews in the Lodz ghetto to the Chelmno extermination camp, established in western Poland in December 1941.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp played a significant role in the German plan to kill the European Jews. Trains arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau almost daily with transports of Jews from virtually every German-occupied country of Europe--from as far north as Norway to the island of Rhodes off the coast of Turkey in the south, from the Pyrenees in the west to the easternmost reaches of Poland and the Baltic states.

WESTERN AND NORTHERN EUROPE

German officials and local collaborators deported Jews from western Europe via transit camps such as Drancy in France, Westerbork in the Netherlands, and Mechelen in Belgium. Of the approximately 75,000 Jews deported from France, more than 65,000 were deported from Drancy to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Germans deported over 100,000 Jews from the Netherlands, almost all from Westerbork: about 60,000 to Auschwitz and over 34,000 to Sobibor. Between August 1942 and July 1944, 28 trains transported more than 25,000 Jewish deportees from Belgium to Auschwitz-Birkenau via Mechelen.

In the autumn of 1942, the Germans seized approximately 770 Norwegian Jews and deported them by boat and train to Auschwitz. An effort to deport the Danish Jews in September 1943 failed when the Danish resistance, alerted to the impending roundup, assisted the mass escape of Danish Jews to neutral Sweden.

SOUTHERN EUROPE

The Germans deported Jews from Greece, from Italy, and from Croatia. Between March and August 1943, more than 40,000 Jews were deported from Salonika, in northern Greece, to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most of the deportees were killed by gas on arrival. After the Germans occupied northern Italy in September 1943, they deported about 8,000 Jews, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Based on a German agreement with its Croatian Axis ally, around 7,000 Croatian Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The Bulgarian government refused to permit the deportation of its Jewish residents living within the prewar boundaries of Bulgaria. Bulgarian gendarmes and military units, however, rounded up and deported around 7,000 Jewish residents of Bulgarian-occupied Macedonia, formerly a part of Yugoslavia, via a transit camp at Skopje. From Bulgarian-occupied Thrace, approximately 4,000 Jews were concentrated at two assembly points in Bulgaria and transferred to German custody. In all, Bulgaria deported more than 11,000 Jews to German-controlled territory. Most of them were sent to Treblinka and killed.

CENTRAL EUROPE

German authorities began to deport Jews from Germany, Austria, the Sudetenland, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in the autumn of 1941, even before the extermination camps were established in occupied Poland. Between October and December 1941, nearly 50,000 Jews were deported from Germany to the Lodz and Warsaw ghettos in Poland, the Minsk ghetto in Belorussia, the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania, and the Riga ghetto in Latvia. German, Austrian, and Czech Jews sent to Lodz and Warsaw were later deported with Polish Jews to Chelmno, Treblinka, and, in 1944, to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Some German Jews deported to ghettos in the Baltic states and Belorussia were shot by the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units).

In 1942 and 1943, most of the Jews remaining in Germany were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Germans deported elderly or prominent Jews from Germany, Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and western Europe to the Theresienstadt ghetto, which also served as a transit camp for deportations further east, most often to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Between May and July 1944, Hungarian gendarmes, in cooperation with German security police, deported nearly 440,000 Jews from Hungary. Most of them were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. More than 50,000 Slovak Jews were deported to Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the last major deportation of the war, some 10,000 Slovak Jews were deported to Auschwitz in the autumn of 1944, during the Slovak uprising.