Transport from Kreising, Camp, Poland to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 12/08/1943

On August 12, 1943, ninety-one Jews were deported from the Kreising (Krzesiny) forced labor camp, located in the airport outside Poznań (Posen), in western Poland, to the Auschwitz death camp. On August 17, Heinrich Exner, Tiefbauunternehmen, the firm that exploited the forced laborers, sent a letter to the Gettoverwaltung (German administration of the Łódź ghetto) headed “Official Record of Change” (Veränderungsnachweis) stating that the Jews had been “[taken away] at the behest of Posen Gestapo” (abtransportiert worden, auf Veranlassung der Geheimen Staatspolizei, Posen). The letter contains the names of the 91 deported Jews. According to historian Anna Ziolkowska, this was the first transport in the wake of Himmler’s order from the beginning of August 1943 to liquidate all the forced labor camps for Jews in the Warthegau (known also as the Wartheland) within one month. Most likely the transport consisted of hundreds of deportees or more from different places, in line with the policy for the Warthegau’s forced labor camps in the summer of 1943. Research by Yad Vashem suggests that 30 kilometers north of Auschwitz this transport may have been added to another transport, which had set out from the Sosnowitz (Sosnowiec) ghetto. On August 12, approximately 1,000 Jews – among them women and children, arrived at the town of Oświęcim (Auschwitz), from where they were probably forced to march to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, a distance of about a kilometer. ...