Escapees

The History of Jews Who Fled Nazi Deportation Trains in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands

Tanja von Fransecky

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781785338878
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

Of the countless stories of resistance, ingenuity, and personal risk to emerge in the years following the Holocaust, among the most remarkable, yet largely overlooked, are those of the hundreds of Jewish deportees who escaped from moving trains bound for the extermination camps. In France, Belgium, and the Netherlands alone over 750 men, women and children undertook such dramatic escape attempts, despite the extraordinary uncertainty and physical danger they often faced. Drawing upon extensive interviews and a wealth of new historical evidence, Escapees gives a fascinating collective account of this hitherto neglected form of resistance to Nazi persecution.

Europe in 1942

CHAPTER 1

Deportations from Western Europe

Organization and Procedure of Deportations from Western Europe

There are a number of similarities between the organization and procedure of deportations from France, Belgium and the Netherlands. It was not only the deportation bureaucracy and processes that were similar; in all three countries, deception strategies were staged to conceal the actual goal of the deportations. Nevertheless, information did manage to trickle through regarding the deportees’ planned extermination at their destination.

The RSHA began deporting Jews from Western Europe immediately after the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942. In all three countries, the Jewish population had already been defined, identified and registered by the end of 1941.¹ The National Socialist persecutors applied their worldview of ‘racial biology’ in classifying people as members of the Jewish ‘race’.

The Reich’s Transport Ministry provided trains following a request by the Jewish Department of the RSHA.² For capacity reasons, freight wagons were mostly used in Western Europe. At the time, it was not uncommon for such wagons to transport people and they were standard means of transport for prisoners of war and German army soldiers. Generally, the freight wagons were equipped with simple wooden benches for forty people per wagon. The key difference lies in the conditions during transportation.

The historian Harm-Hinrich Brandt writes:

In fact the conditions were worse than for mass livestock transportation, since the deportees were not only living beings degraded to the status of mere material assets, but living beings without any value, whose death was readily accepted. In such conditions, widespread sickness and death actually occurred during the transportation.³

Fifty to sixty people were planned for each wagon, with a total of one thousand per deportation train.⁴ The otherwise completely empty freight wagons contained just two buckets, of which one was filled with water and the other was intended for excreta. Straw was sometimes spread out on the floor. After their arrival in Auschwitz, the wagons were usually cleaned in a ‘decontamination unit’ since they were heavily soiled by human faeces.⁵

During the deportations, there were frequent forced stoppages, for instance because other trains were given priority or because personnel or locomotives were replaced. Generally, the wagon doors were not opened during these periods, although some deportation survivors from the Netherlands report open wagon doors during stoppages in stations.

Between August and November 1942, numerous deportation trains from the Netherlands, Belgium and France stopped in Cosel, Upper Silesia (today’s Koźle), about 80 km from Auschwitz. There was an enormous camp complex there known as the Schmelt Camps, which exclusively used Jews as forced labourers. Due to increasing labour demands in 1942, Albrecht Schmelt, who was responsible for the camp’s organization, had received permission from Himmler to select able-bodied, deported Jews from Western Europe for forced labour. Between eight and ten thousand were taken to the Schmelt Camps as a result.⁶

Before boarding the deportation trains, prisoners were warned that if anyone was found to be missing at their destination, all others would be shot dead as punishment. The threat often led to conflicts between prisoners in the wagons. Collective punishment was a typical method of control used by the National Socialists: the victims were pitted against each other by making an entire group responsible for the actions of individuals.⁷ Deportees could not have known that the threatened shootings were never carried out.

The Function of the Jewish Transport Leaders

Another strategy used to burden the prisoners themselves with responsibility for the smooth organization of the deportations was to appoint a Jewish ‘Transportleiter’ who had to ensure order, calm and cleanliness.⁸ The first concrete evidence of using Jewish Transportleiter is provided in a note written in November 1939 by Theodor Dannecker, an employee of the Jewish Department of the SD headquarters, on the deportation of male Jews from Ostrau (today’s Ostrava) in Moravia to Lublin.⁹ The function of such a wagon elder was described by Dannecker in detail in 1942: ‘One Jew should be appointed in every wagon to ensure order during the journey and clean the wagon after arrival. That Jew must also carry sanitary material with him’.¹⁰

H. G. Adler, a historian and survivor of Nazi persecution, describes the selection of the transport wardens for deportations as follows: ‘A “Transportleiter” and several “wardens” were chosen from among the victims to ensure calm and order during roll calls, boarding and the journey itself. These people usually received yellow armbands’.¹¹ The wagon elders are also mentioned in many survivors’ reports. Some reports state that those selected had to speak German, so that they could understand the orders of their German guards.¹² The wagon elders often played a key role in conflicts that arose when people intended to escape. They often attempted to prevent prisoners from fleeing, mostly due to the responsibility they had been given and also out of a sense of duty towards the welfare of prisoners left behind.¹³

In addition to wagon elders, further prisoners, Jewish doctors and nurses, were forced to assume functional responsibility for the period of the deportation (as so-called ‘Funktionshäftlinge’ or ‘functional prisoners’). Like the wagon elders, they too received armbands.¹⁴ Early orders required the deployment of Jewish ‘Krankenbehandler’ (the Nazi term for Jewish doctors who were only authorized to treat other Jewish patients, literally ‘treaters of the sick’), who were permitted to take instruments and medicine on board with them.¹⁵ Responsible doctors were named as a formality for deportations from Western Europe, but they received no medicine or medical equipment to fulfil their tasks.

Deportation Bureaucracy

The deportation bureaucracy was developed in stages and continually optimized. It is likely that Franz Novak, the RSHA expert for transportation, developed the procedure for the train’s departure and arrival reports in January 1942, the month in which the systematic organization of the genocide of European Jews, which had already begun, was discussed at the Wannsee Conference. Directly after the departure, the following data had to be telegraphed to the RSHA Department IV B 4 for Jewish affairs, the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps (Inspektion der Konzentrationslager, IKL) and the Camp Commander of the camp receiving the deportees: date and time, transport number, number of deportees, name and rank of the transport’s commanding officer (Transportführer), distributed provisions, and total means of payment carried by the Transportführer. The arrival was also standardized, requiring the following information: place of departure, train number, time, any delay, place of arrival, number of persons, provisions on board, means of payment, incidents and problems.¹⁶ The Transportführer received two copies of the transport list.¹⁷ It generally contained data on the deportees: surname, first name and occupation; in France, it appears that in some cases these were listed by wagon.¹⁸

Pery Broad, a member of the Auschwitz concentration camp’s Political Department, which was responsible, among other tasks, for registering prisoners in a central file, wrote that in Auschwitz, the Transportführer always presented the lists to the ‘Reception’ Department. According to Broad, only those who were intended for labour were recorded by the Political Department. As a result, the total number of prisoners in the relevant transport train was subtracted to calculate the number of those who were murdered immediately after arriving. Older transport lists were destroyed.¹⁹

Concealment of the Destination and Purpose of Deportations: Note on the Language

Officially, it was forbidden to speak of ‘deportation’ and euphemisms were used instead, such as ‘evacuation’ (‘Evakuierung’), ‘labour assignment’ (‘Arbeitseinsatz’), ‘migration’ (‘Abwanderung’) and, in the case of deportations to Theresienstadt, ‘change of residence’ (‘Wohnsitzverlegung’).²⁰ There were several reasons for such deception tactics, including the need for deportations to be carried out smoothly. For instance, it was necessary for as many Jews as possible to obey their induction orders for forced labour and arrive at the collection camps by themselves (albeit involuntarily), board the wagons without resistance and behave calmly during the journey.

If foreign diplomats enquired, they were to be told that Jews from occupied France were being taken to southern Poland.²¹ It was also prohibited to use the words ‘to the East’ and ‘deportation’ in official statements in the Netherlands. Instead, the term ‘consignment to forced labour’ was to be used.²² Apparently, the camp and deportation train guards did not always use the defined vocabulary, as the following RSHA behavioural reprimand shows. To ensure the smooth reception of arriving deportees, the Auschwitz camp made the following request:

to make no disconcerting revelations to the evacuated Jews of any kind prior to the transportation with respect to their destination and imminent use. … Above all, I ask you to regularly instruct the accompanying guards to ensure that during the journey, they do not make any implied comments to the Jews or speak of assumptions on the type of their accommodation etc. that could lead to particular resistance.²³

Deportees’ Level of Awareness of the Destination and Purpose of the Deportations

It is difficult to determine what was known regarding the extermination that took place at the transports’ destination and how plausible the constantly arriving news of the destruction of the Jewish population in Western Europe would have seemed.²⁴ The fact that underground newspapers wrote about it and the BBC reported on it is not an indication of how widespread the news was. Furthermore, to hear or read about the unthinkable does not mean one believes it. Countless deportees were convinced that they were about to be forced into a labour assignment.²⁵ Perhaps some people’s unawareness was based on a form of denial that served as self-protection. Optimism and hope are powerful survival resources. Others presumed that the National Socialists intended to displace Jews from Europe once and for all and therefore deported them eastwards in families on the premise of a limited spell of forced labour.²⁶

From the autumn of 1942 onwards, underground newspapers and radio broadcasts reported on the extermination of Jews. In late 1942, the clandestine newspaper En Avant reported that two million Jews had been murdered by the National Socialists in Eastern Europe up to that point.²⁷ The term ‘gas chamber’ is first used in J’accuse dated 25 December 1942.²⁸ From then on, the Jewish underground press attempted above all to receive and spread valid information so that as many persecuted people as possible wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Deportations from Western Europe
• 2. Escapes by Jews from Deportation Trains in France
• 3. Escapes by Jews from Deportation Trains in Belgium
• 4. Escapes by Jews from Deportation Trains in the Netherlands
• 5. Summary
• Concluding Observations
• Sources and Bibliography
• Indexes