Transport IX/4 from Breslau, Breslau (Breslau), Silesia (Lower), Germany to Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia on 02/04/1943

In the autumn of 1941, Alfred Hampel, Head of the Department of Jewish Affairs in the Breslau State Police Office, traveled to Berlin where he received guidelines and documents concerning the deportation of Jews to the East. In the following year, the great majority of the Jewish population of Lower Silesia was deported to killing sites near Kaunas and Izbica, to Auschwitz-Birkenau and to the Theresienstadt Ghetto. The only Jews remaining in the provincial capital city of Breslau, living in the rapidly-shrinking Jewish area around Wallstrasse, were employees of the Jewish Community and the Jewish Hospital, bed-ridden inmates of hospitals and old-age homes, Jews married to non-Jewish partners, and the children of such unions (the so-called “Mischlinge”).
Transport IX/4 departed from the Odertor train station on April 2 1943, and arrived at Theresienstadt on the same day. It was the fourth of 12 transports consisting of elderly and otherwise privileged Jews from the province of Lower Silesia. The transport included 276 Jews, residents of Breslau, Görlitz, and the Zionist Agricultural School at Gross Breesen. Some of the deportees had been previously deported to the camps at Riebnig (Rybna) and Grüssau (Krzeszów). Among the deportees were also the bed-ridden inmates of the Jewish community’s old-age home, which had been relocated to the building of the dis-used Jewish Theological Seminary at Wallstrasse in 1941.
Prior to the assembly of the transport, the Head of the Department of Jewish Affairs sent notifications to the State Police Branch (“Aussendienststelle”) of Görlitz asking for certain individuals to be brought to the assembly sites in Breslau. The residents of Breslau who were on this transport were arrested and registered at their homes by uniformed police and NSDAP activists, and were then brought by trucks to the assembly sites. If they were not found, a manhunt would be initiated....