Transport from Baerwalde, Neustettin (Koeslin), Pomerania, Germany to Schneidemuehl, Schneidemühl (Grenzmark Posen-Westpreussen), Pomerania, Germany on 21/02/1940

With the occupation of Poland in September 1939, several Nazi institutions, among them the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt - Reich Security Main Office), in conjunction with Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler (“Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums,” Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood) started putting the racist ideals of the National Socialist state into practice. They planned mass population movements, which would include deportations of Jews and Poles from various regions of occupied Poland, the German Reich and the Protectorate, with the stated objective of settling Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) in their stead. In a high-level meeting on January 30, 1940, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, head of the RSHA, announced that the deportation agencies would be consolidated into Department IV D4 (Referat für Auswanderung und Räumung, Department for Emigration and Evacuation), headed by SS-Hauptsturmführer Adolf Eichmann. Heydrich set the deportations of Poles and Jews from the newly annexed district of Poland as the top priority, and proclaimed that deportations of Jews from the Reich would follow at a later date. As a side note, he remarked that, in the middle of February, 1,000 Jews from Stettin (Szczecin), “whose apartments are direly needed for reasons pertaining to the war economy,” would be deported to the Generalgouvernement (General Government, the zone of Nazi-occupied central Poland not formally annexed to the Reich)....