Transport 25, Train 901-20 from Drancy, Camp, France to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 28/08/1942

The transport that left the Drancy camp for Auschwitz on August 28, 1942, included 280 children who had been transferred from the Pithiviers camp to Drancy on August 25. An additional 589 Jews were deported, mostly men who had been 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 to whom it referred to as “foreigners who present a burden on the economy”. This was in fact part of a plan to detain all foreign Jews in the unoccupied zone. These men were deported from the unoccupied zone 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, Roethke sent out directives to the Feldgendarmerie concerning the next transports to leave the Drancy camp, including the transport of August 28. He requested that the Feldgendarmerie 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, Roethke’s assistant at the Jewish Affairs Department in Paris, sent a telex confirming the departure of train 901-20 from the Bourget-Drancy train station on August 28 at 08:55 with a total of 1,000 Jews. The transport chief was Sergent Kropp. 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 Ordnungspolizei (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 28, 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 second 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....