Transport 33 from Drancy, Camp, France to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 16/09/1942

On September 8, 1942, Jean Leguay, second in Command at the French National Police in the occupied zone, met with Heinz Röthke, Dannecker’s successor as head of the Jewish Affairs Department at the French Sipo-SD, and confirmed that 7,000 arrests had been made in the unoccupied zone. Thus, he added, the French authorities could guarantee enough Jews to meet the transport quotas only until September 14; afterwards, there would not be a sufficient number of Jews to meet the deportation requirements. In response, Röthke said that the original plan — seven transports departing from September 15 to 30 — would proceed in any case; if necessary, there would be additional arrests and the 4,000 Jews interned in camps in the occupied zone would be deported as well. To meet this quota, Röthke advised his superiors on September 12 that 3,000 additional Jews would have to be taken. On September 15, Leguay advised Röthke that a transport from the south, with 650 people aboard, should be reaching Drancy that day. He added that the train scheduled to depart on September 16 to Auschwitz-Birkenau would be carrying the Jews who were to arrive from the unoccupied zone on September 15 as well as foreign Jews who had been arrested in the Paris area in operations that he himself had been asked to carry out. Concurrently, Emile Hennequin, chief of police in Paris, circulated a schedule for the transport out of Drancy: On September 16 at 08:55, a train carrying 1,000 Jews would depart from the Le Bourget–Drancy station. The field commander in charge would be assigned guards to secure the platforms in both directions and the immediate vicinity of the station in order to keep curious onlookers from congregating. At 06:15, he would receive 90 additional guards. The metro company would provide 12 buses, each escorted by at least three guards. An officer and 33 gendarmes would also escort the transport; they would report to the station at 06:45. The commander was to have the railroad cars locked and sealed by employees of the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français (SNCF), the French National Railroad Company....