Transport VI/2 from Hamburg, Hansestadt Hamburg (Hamburg), Hansa City of Hamburg, Germany to Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia on 19/07/1942

Three transports were sent from Hamburg during that month, one destined for Auschwitz and two for Theresienstadt. On board these two trains were many members of the Jewish community, which had been dissolved and incorporated into the "Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland" (Reich Association of Jews in Germany) on August 1, 1942. Among the deportees were legal advisor Dr. Nathan Max Nathan, the head of welfare department in the Reich Association for German Jews in the Northwest, Dr. Berthold Simonsohn and the secretary of the Association Ida Hagenow. Ida Hagenow died in Theresienstadt in May 1944. Dr. Nathan Max Nathan and Dr. Berthold Simonsohn were re-deported to Auschwitz in autumn 1944 where Dr. Nathan was murdered. Dr. Simonsohn survived the concentration camps Auschwitz and Kauffering. With just seven transports between autumn 1941 and summer 1942, the Jewish community of Hamburg was stripped of more than 75% of its members, including most of its leadership. The second Transport from Hamburg to Theresienstadt left the Hannoversche Bahnhof on July 19, 1942, it arrived on July 20. There were 801 deportees on board, among them Jews from Lübeck (at least 18 deportees), Kiel (7), Uelzen (5), and Rendsburg (2). The deportees were brought to the building of the elementary school in Schanzenstrasse, which served as an assembly site. The luggage was limited 50 kilograms, and everything else had to be left behind. At the assembly site the deportees had to fill out an inventory of their property and sign a document transferring ownership of all their remaining assets to the German Reich. The transports were not a secret. In her autobiographical novel, Berthie Philipp describes the reactions of the local populace when she and others were transported from a Jewish residential home:...