Transport XII/3, Train Da 515 from Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt a. Main (Wiesbaden), Hesse-Nassau, Germany to Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia on 15/09/1942

The third Alterstransport (transport of elderly Jews) from Frankfurt am Main set out on September 15, 1942 on a train marked Da 515, and reached the Theresienstadt ghetto the next day, September 16. There were 1,369-1,378 Jews on the transport, including 42 orphans aged 1–14 from the orphanage on 24 Hans-Thoma Straße who were escorted by six adults. The Gestapo chose the old-age home at 18–20 Rechneigrabenstraße as the deportees’ collection point. The Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich's Association of the Jews in Germany) was charged with meeting their basic needs, moving their luggage to the collection points, helping them to fill in their asset- declarations, and so on. Before the transport left, 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. The deportees were driven in trucks from the collection point 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 bureaucratic and humiliating procedures that included personal searches, the Jews could be placed aboard the deportation trains directly from Platform 40....