Transport 30 from Drancy, Camp, France to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 09/09/1942

The transport of September 9, 1942 was mostly made mostly of foreign Jews who had been deported from the unoccupied zone in two transports. One departed on September 1 from Rivesaltes with a total of 749 Jews taken from the Montpellier and Marseilles regions and a second departed from Saint-Sulpice with a total of 899 Jews taken from the Toulouse region. Most of these Jews had been arrested during the mass round up in the unoccupied zone on August 26. On September 9, Heinz Roethke head of the Jewish Affairs Department at the Paris Sipo-SD, confirmed the departure of the transport from the Bourget-Drancy train station to Auschwitz-Birkenau with a total of 1,000 Jews. Based on the schedule for the first deportation from Drancy in June 1942, the train presumably took the following route: From Drancy the train travelled through Bobingy, Noisy-le-Sec, Epernay, Châlons-sur-Marne, Revigny, Bar le Duc, Lérouville, and Novéant (Neuburg), the last stop before the German border. The transport chief was Sergent Roesler. The French Gendarmerie and a small contingent of the Feldgendarmerie guarded the train until the border at Noveant. At that point the Ordnungspolizei took over its supervision. In November 1943, The German National Railway Company (Reichsbahn) set up a schedule for the transports from France. We do not have any documentation relating to transport schedules from the Franco-German border before that date, but in all likelihood they were very similar. Thus the earlier transports, including the one that departed from Drancy on September 9, 1942, presumably took the following route once it passed the Franco–German border: Saarbruecken, Frankfurt/Main, Dresden, Goerlitz, Nysa, Cosel, and Katowice before reaching Auschwitz. At the stop in Cosel, 80 km from Auschwitz, most of the able-bodied young men were taken off the trains and sent to work in different camps in the surrounding areas. On July 28, 1942, Roethke sent out directives to the Senior Commander of the Sipo-SD in France, Helmut Knochen, and to his deputy Kurt Lischka, with the schedule for the next 13 transports from France that would depart in the month of August. He stated that: “German merchandise wagons are to be used for the deportations, as has been the case until now.” There is no official document after this date relating to a change in policy and thus the transports after August 1942 were most likely organized in the same way. Although the wagons were German, the train’s engine and its personnel were provided by the SNCF (Société nationale des chemins de fer français, French National Railway Company) up to the Franco-German border. This was confirmed by SNCF historian Christian Bachelier. At the border, a German engine and personnel replaced the French ones. Upon arrival at Auschwitz on September 11, 23 men were selected for slave labour and were tattooed with the numbers ranging from 63471-63493. An unknown number of men were selected in Cosel. In addition, 68 women were also selected in Auschwitz and received the numbers 19414- 19481. The remainder of the transport was gassed immediately upon arrival. According to historian Serge Klarsfeld, there were 43 survivors from this transport in 1945