Transport 24, Train 901-19 from Drancy, Camp, France to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 26/08/1942

The transport that left Drancy for Auschwitz, on August 26, 1942 was made up of 360 Jewish children who had been detained in the Pithiviers camp since their arrest on July 16. They were transferred to the Drancy camp on August 25. Most of their parents had been deported in the previous weeks. An additional 389 Jews were mostly men previously detained in GTEs (Groupes de travailleurs étrangers, Foreign Workers Groups) which had been established by the Vichy government in 1940 in order to intern those whom it referred to as “foreigners who present a burden on the economy”. These men were deported from the unoccupied zone to the Drancy camp on August 24. The remainder of the transport was filled with adults, both male and female, who had either been transferred with the children in the last transport from Pithiviers on August 25 or who were already detained in Drancy. On August 20, Heinz Roethke sent out directives to the Feldgendarmerie (German military police) concerning the next transports to leave the Drancy camp, including the transport of August 26. 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. Ernst Heinrichsohn sent a telex confirming the departure of train D901-19 from the Bourget-Drancy train station to Auschwitz on August 26, at 8:55 with a total of 1,000 Jews. The transport chief was Sergeant Muller. 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 border 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 26, 1942, took the following route once past the Franco–German border: Saarbruecken, Frankfurt/Main, Dresden, Goerlitz, Nysa, Cosel and Katowice before reaching Auschwitz. This was the first transport to make a stop in Cosel not far from Auschwitz where a selection was carried out and able-bodied men were sent to work in the labour camps in the area....