Transport from Lodz, Ghetto, Poland to Chelmno, Extermination Camp, Poland on 12/09/1942

Between January and mid May 1942, the Germans had removed 54,990 Jews from the Łódź ghetto and murdered them in Chełmno extermination camp. At the end of August 1942, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office –RSHA) ordered the resumption of the deportations. All ghetto residents under the age of ten and over 65 years, the sick and the unemployed were to be deported. The ghetto was to become a forced labor camp. SS-Hauptsturmführer Günther Fuchs, head of Referat IV B 4, the Department of 'Jewish Affairs' in Łódź who was leading the activities of the Gestapo in the ghetto reported during his trial in Hannover in 1966 that he was informed about the RSHA order approximately three weeks before the actual resumption of the mass deportations. As a prelude for the new deportation wave, the Germans decided to empty the hospitals and clinics in the ghetto and to convert them into factories. They deported with utmost brutality roughly 1,500 patients from six hospitals together with some prisoners from the Central Prison (Zentralgefängnis) on 14/16 Czarnieckiego St. (Schneidergasse) during the first two days in September 1942. ...