Transport XII/1, Train Da 503 from Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt a. Main (Wiesbaden), Hesse-Nassau, Germany to Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia on 18/08/1942

The first transport departed on Tuesday August 18, 1942, on Train Da 503. There were 1,009-1,013 Jews in this transport, including 678 residents of Jewish old-age homes in Frankfurt. The welfare department of the Jewish community financed many of the town’s old-age homes and its activity was under the constant inspection and surveillance of Ernst Holland, the official in charge of the Welfare Department of the Frankfurt Jewish community, who operated on behalf of both the Gestapo and the municipality. He was the most influential person in applying the anti-Jewish policy in Frankfurt am Main. With the deportation of the residents of the old-age homes, Holland was able to save the money that had financed the subsistence of the elderly and to report an increase in net profits. Lina Katz, who worked for the Jewish community from May 1937 until the deportation to Theresienstadt in August 1942, reported: The administration [of the Jewish community] was increasingly subject to the orders of the Gestapo on Lindenstraße, that sent us instructions each day through a liaison. Here’s how it worked: every morning, Mr. Rothschild had to report to the Gestapo and announce: “The Jew Sigmund Israel Rothschild is reporting for duty.” Then the clerks would give him directives. In the spring of 1941, we were instructed to rewrite the catalog of members of the community in triplicate. On each card, we had to mark those family members who belonged to the head of the household […]. One day, via Rothschild, we received a list on which 1,200 people were marked. The list had three columns. In the first, a name was noted, and in the other two we had to fill in previous occupation and current occupation. We sent the list back to the Gestapo […]. In August 1942, we received a list of people who had been evicted from the old-age homes and from the hospital on Gagernstraße. Since my husband was bedridden at the hospital on the Gagernstraße, I wished to have myself added to the list. We reached Theresienstadt. I survived. Mrs. Hedwig Krakauer the widow of Prof. Isidor Krakauer, historian of the Jews of Frankfurt, and her sister, the mother of Dr. Siegfried Kracauer, editor-in-chief of the Frankfurter Zeitung newspaper, were also with me on that transport. The deportees in the transport departed from two assembly points, one at the old-age home at 18–20 Rechneigrabenstraße and the other at Hermesweg 5–7, where the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich's Association of the Jews in Germany) had its offices. Before the transport set out, the elderly Jews signed a contract (Heimeinkaufsvertrag) for the ostensible purchase of an apartment in the Theresienstadt “elders’ ghetto.” They were lured into believing that by making this purchase they would ensure that their care and needs would be met during their stay in the ghetto. They were told that some of the dwellings opened onto a public park and that others had a view of a lake. To complete the purchase, the Jews signed all their property over to the Reichsvereinigung. In fact, this was part of a deception: the money was forwarded to the Gestapo and thence to the RSHA. When the deportees reached Theresienstadt, the elderly Jews were held under the harsh conditions that were imposed upon all inhabitants of the ghetto. Thus the victims financed their deportation and, in fact, their own murder. Tilly Cahn, the wife of the lawyer Max L. Cahn, wrote the following in her diary on August 15, 1942, several days before the first transport to Theresienstadt: All the Jews from the old-age homes are being sent to Theresienstadt, and the other elderly people as well […]. All their property has been transferred to the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland. But behind this institution stands the Gestapo which is eager to lay its hands on property that until now the state had been looting via the Ministry of Finance. We were told, of course, that this money will be used for our sustenance in Theresienstadt. But for how long? The money is running out with each passing day. It’s shocking how calm and optimistic the deportees are [...] The deportees spent a day or more at the assembly points in severe overcrowded conditions, and slept on the straw-covered floor. The Jewish community met their basic needs, moved their luggage to the collection points, and helped them to fill in their asset-declarations, sign contracts for the purchase of “apartments” in Theresienstadt, and the like. Thus the Gestapo turned the Jewish community and the Reichsvereinigung into its subcontractors for processing the deportations. On August 16, 1942, after visiting the old-age home on Feuerbachstraße, Tilly Cahn wrote the following in her diary: A heart-rending tragedy - all the elderly, nearly all in poor health, wearing three layers of clothing, a suitcase, a bag of food in hand. On Sunday afternoon from 16:00 onward, the people were placed aboard trucks or carts, one after another. Some were taken to the collection point on Hermesweg and some to the one on Rechneigrabenstraße with their luggage […] where they spent two nights in severe overcrowded conditions on mattresses. The transport was carried out by Gestapo headquarters. We were not allowed to visit them anymore, even though I tried yesterday and spoke with the Schupo at the gate. However, Mrs. Popper is helping [us] and so we were able to give our best wishes once more through her. Now it is Tuesday, August 18, between 17:00-18:00 and the train appears to be departing for Theresienstadt. I feel terrible; this feeling will not leave me. The transport also includes very ill people […] from the hospital. On the afternoon of Tuesday August 18, the elderly were taken in trucks to the eastern wing of the Frankfurt Grossmarkthalle (wholesale market) on Hanauer Landstraße, a large industrial building dating from 1928. A railway track led from the eastern wing of the building directly to the Ostbahnhof, the eastern railroad station. It was this rail connection that had prompted the Gestapo to choose the Grossmarkthalle as a collection point because there, following a series of humiliating bureaucratic procedures that included personal searches, the Jews could be placed aboard the deportation trains directly from Platform 40. The next day, August 19, the deportation train reached Bohusovice, not far from Theresienstadt. Eleven people aboard had died. From Bohusovice, the elderly Jews had to walk some three kilometers with their luggage, to Theresienstadt. Those unable to do so were driven to the ghetto in a truck. In the Theresienstadt ghetto records, the transport is referred to as XII/1, the Roman numeral XII denoting Frankfurt am Main. By September–October 1942, 286 Jews from this transport had already been sent to Treblinka. Nine additional Jews were sent to the east in early 1943 and 48 members of the transport were sent to Auschwitz in 1944. Egon (Gonda) Redlich, a 23 year-old teacher at a Jewish school in Prague and head of the Youth Department in the Theresienstadt ghetto administration, wrote the following in his diary on August 20, 1942: Very hot. Yesterday, they [the Nazis] stripped the clothes from women that came from Germany and checked them naked. Maybe they wanted to find gold or silver. They thoroughly checked the transport which will leave the ghetto, until few retained anything but the clothes on their backs. On July 21, 1944, Rabbi Leopold Neuhaus — a Jewish spiritual leader who had arrived from Frankfurt am Main — drew up a list of deportees from Frankfurt and noted that 44 Jews from the first transport were still alive in Theresienstadt. In the two years that had elapsed, 588 people from this transport had died of starvation or illness and 328 had been deported to the Treblinka and Auschwitz extermination camps. Only seventeen members of this transport survived the war.