Transport 23, Train 901-18 from Drancy, Camp, France to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 24/08/1942

The transport that left Drancy for Auschwitz, on August 24, 1942 was made up of 553 Jewish children who had been detained in the Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers camps since their arrest on July 16. They were transferred to the Drancy camp on August 19 and 22. Most of their parents had been deported in the previous weeks. The majority of these children were French nationals; 135 were between the ages of two and five years old. An additional 287 Jewish adults detained in Drancy were included in the transport. On August 20, Roethke sent out directives to the Feldgendarmerie (German military police) concerning the next transports to leave the Drancy camp, including the transport of August 24. He requested that they provide one officer and eight men to guard the train and indicated that this security team was to be ready at the Drancy camp at 6:00 am. Roethke confirmed the departure of train 901/18 on August 24, from the Bourget-Drancy station at 8:55 that morning with a total of 1000 deportees. The transport chief was Sergeant Rossler. Based on the schedule of the first deportation from Drancy in June 1942, the train presumably took the following route: from Drancy it continued through Bobigny, Noisy-le-Sec, Épernay, Châlons-sur-Marne, Revigny, Bar le Duc, Lérouville, and Novéant, the last stop before the German border. The train was guarded by a detail from the French Gendarmerie made up of one officer and 30 men and a small contingent of Feldgendarmerie until it reached the border at Novéant. There the guard was taken over by the Ordungspolizei (German order police). In November 1943, The German National Railway Company (Reichsbahn) set up a schedule for the transports from France. We do not have any documentation in connection with transport schedules from the Franco-German border to Auschwitz-Birkenau before that date, but in all likelihood they were very similar. Thus presumably the earlier transports to Auschwitz, including the one that departed from Drancy on August 24, 1942, took the following route once past the Franco–German border: Saarbruecken, Frankfurt-Main, Dresden, Goerlitz, Nysa, and Katowice before reaching Auschwitz....