Transport XIII/6 from Mannheim, Mannheim (Mannheim), Baden, Germany to Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia in February 1945

Following the large transports from Stuttgart in 1942, the number of Jews in Germany’s south-western provinces remained very low. After January 1944 only 150 – 200 Jews lived in the area around Stuttgart. This transport departed from Mannheim and arrived in Theresienstadt on February 17, 1945. There were 144 Jews on board, most of them from Mannheim, as well as from a large area around the city including Flehingen, Untergrombach, Karlsruhe, Käfertal, Baden-Baden, Heidelberg, and Pforzheim. The oldest deportee was 71 years old and the youngest 12. The majority of people in the last transports from the provinces of Württemberg and Hohenzollern to Theresienstadt were Jews from ‘mixed marriages’ who were scheduled for deportation because their non-Jewish partner had either died or divorced. In February 1943 the RSHA had sent out new deportation guidelines to the local State Police offices. From then on, working in forced labour did not protect anyone from deportation. However, Jewish partners in existing mixed marriages and “Geltungsjuden” (people of mixed ancestry) were still exempt. In May 1943 the guidelines for deportation intensified as Heinrich Himmler ordered that all Jews defined as such according to the Nuremberg laws and still living in Germany had to be deported and on December 18, 1943, Chief of Gestapo Heinrich Müller authorized the deportation of Jews who had previously been partners in a so-called “mixed marriage”. In February 1945 it was decided that all persons of mixed ancestry (Mischlinge, Geltungsjuden) and Jewish partners in existing “mixed marriages” had to be deported. As the end of the war was foreseeable, many Jews scheduled for deportation went into hiding. Others were not registered or deported because the ongong air raids had destroyed so much governmental infrastructure that a certain amount of documentation had been lost....