Transport XXIV/4 from Westerbork, Camp, The Netherlands to Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia on 25/02/1944

About a month after the second transport to Theresienstadt set out in January, a new instruction arrived from Berlin concerning the organization of an additional transport. Thus the 83rd transport from the Netherlands, the 4th to Theresienstadt, departed on February 25, 1944. This was the second-largest transport to Theresienstadt comprising 805-811 deportees. The largest group consisted of 308 Portuguese Jews and the second-largest was comprised of 197 veteran Jews of Westerbork (Stammliste). Since the last census of Jews in the Netherlands was conducted in October 1941, the Nazi authorities had been wrestling with the question of how to treat the Portuguese Jews who were living in the country. The Portuguese community argued that they should not be treated as fully-fledged Jews because they had been assimilating into the local population for centuries through intermarriage and had nothing to do with the Jewish race apart from religious faith. To defend this argument, they summoned anthropologists, psychologists, and genealogists to refute their Semitic origins and prove a connection, in appearance and behavior, with the West Mediterranean races. They traced their origins to Spanish aristocratic families that boasted a lineage many generations old. In the last months of the campaign against the Jews of the Netherlands, the Germans took matters a step farther by systematically researching the racial history of the Jews of Portuguese origin. Georg Calmeyer, the jurist who headed the Department of the Interior at the German administration headquarters in the Netherlands, faced a challenge. Calmeyer attempted to spare these Jews from deportation on the grounds that they had only 25 percent Jewish blood and should in fact be sent to the Iberian-Celtic area in northern Spain in a swap for German or Dutch nationals....