Transport VII/5 from Krefeld, Krefeld Uerdingen a. Rh. (Düsseldorf), Rhine Province, Germany to Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia on 10/01/1944

According to the historian Alfred Gottwaldt, the train set out from Aachen or Düsseldorf. According to the records, it carried fourteen Jews from Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Krefeld, and Kohlscheid and reached Theresienstadt on January 13, 1944. Although ten of the deportees survived, we know very little about this transport. For example, the personal files of two women survivors show first- or second-degree kinship with Wehrmacht soldiers or Schupo police. One may also hypothesize that the train departed from Düsseldorf on January 11 or January 12, 1944. At 10:45 a.m. on January 5, 1944, Illig of Gestapo headquarters in Düsseldorf conferred by telephone with an official named Schmitz, a staffer with the Jewish Affairs Department of the Gestapo office in Krefeld, about an additional deportation of Jews to Theresienstadt. The conversation revolved around Himmler’s directive, which again was defined as extraordinary: “Jews in mixed marriages,...