Transport 61 from Drancy, Camp, France to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 28/10/1943

The 61st transport was the fifth of the third phase of the deportation of Jews from France and was made up primarily of Jews who were arrested in the southeast of France, in the region of Nice, which until September 1943 had been under the control of the Italians, so that the Jews there had not been arrested and deported earlier. On September 3, 1943, Italy surrendered to the British and American forces in Sicily and signed a secret armistice, which marked the end of its alliance with Nazi Germany. The armistice was not officially announced until September 8, 1943, in order to allow the Italian soldiers and the populations under Italy’s authority, notably the Jews who had found refuge in the Italian zone of France, to retreat to safety in the south of Italy. However, the Nazis were immediately made aware of the signing and began preparing for the arrest of Jews in the Italian zone as early as September 4, 1943. In a September 4 note Heinz Roethke, head of the Jewish Affairs Department at the Paris Sipo-SD, indicated that the arrests of the Jews would be carried out without distinction of their status - foreign, stateless, denaturalized, or French - and that the sorting would be done once the Jews arrived at the Drancy camp. According to a telegram sent by Alois Brunner, the transport from Drancy departed on October 28, 1943, from the Paris-Bobigny train station at 10:30 a.m., with a total of 1,000 Jews. The transport followed the usual deportation route indicated by the Reichsbahn (German National Railway) to the Gestapo: Paris-Bobigny, Noisy-le-Sec, Epernay, Châlons-sur-Marne, Revigny, Bar-le-Duc, Novéant-sur-Moselle, Metz, Saarbrücken, Homburg, Kaiserslautern, Mannheim, Frankfurt am Main, Fulda, Burghaun, Erfurt, Apolda, Weißenfels, Engelsdorf Mitte (Leipzig), Wurzen, Dresden, Görlitz, Kohlfurt, Arnsdorf, Königszelt, Kamenz (Niederschlesien), Neisse, Cosel, Heydebreck, Katowice, Mysłowice, Auschwitz. The train was handled by SNCF engineers and conductors (France's national state-owned railway company) until the new Franco-German border in Novéant-sur-Moselle, which had been renamed Neuburg an der Mosel after Hitler annexed Alsace-Lorraine. In Neuburg, they were replaced by German railway workers from the Reichsbahn. The next stop was Metz, located in the territory annexed by the Germans. The train then ran through the Gau Hesse-Nassau and the Gau Saxony (German states), along the southern border between Germany and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to Görlitz, an entry point into what used to be the province of Silesia at the time. The transport continued to the railway hub in Kohlfurt (since 1945 renamed Węgliniec) to Liegnitz (Legnica), the capital of Lower Silesia and from there further south via Schweidnitz (Swidnica) and Kandrzin (Kędzierzyn), renamed Heydebreck, into the south-eastern end of the Reich until it reached occupied Polish Silesia in Katowice (Kattowitz) which served as the capital of the newly created East Upper Silesia. Auschwitz-Birkenau, just 60 km south of Katowice was part of it and, as Katowice, annexed to the Reich....