Transport XXIV/6 from Westerbork, Camp, The Netherlands to Theresienstadt, Ghetto, Czechoslovakia on 31/07/1944

On July 31, 1944, two transports departed from Westerbork—one to Theresienstadt with 213 Jews aboard, and another to Bergen-Belsen with 178 Jewish passengers. One may surmise that to save on transport vehicles—it being necessary to move troops and armaments to the various fronts—the two transports were sent out on one train. According to survivor testimonies, this deportation train consisted of both passenger and freight cars. Gertrud Slottke, aide to Wilhelm Zöpf, head of the Jewish Affairs Department (IV B 4) at the BdS in The Hague, sent a letter on August 8 to the commander of Theresienstadt Karl Rahm with guidelines regarding any Honduran and Paraguayan passports found in the possession of deportees on this transport. “Do not attribute any value to these documents,”Slottke wrote; “the countries concerned had issued them to these Jews as a mere gesture.” In a letter to Karl Rahm sent on the same day, Zopf specified the five groups which comprised the deportation list. The largest group consisted of 146 Jews who had “contributed to cleansing the Netherlands of its Jews” ('die sich bei der Entjudung der Niederlande verdient gemacht haben') and their families. The second group included 23 Jews whose intermarriages had become invalid due to death or divorce and who had semi-Aryan offspring. A request to include this group on the transport had been sent on July 18 from Department IV B 4 (e 3) at the BdS in The Hague to the Reichskommissar for the occupied Netherlands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart. The request was issued because on April 4 of that year Seyss-Inquart had added the condition that if Jewish spouses spent three months in the Westerbork camp during which time no request concerning them had been presented or no offspring or other family had appeared to prove that they were in continual contact with them, they should be deported to Theresienstadt. Another group was made up of 19 Jews to whom “special instructions” (Sonderanweisungen) applied....