Transport 67 from Drancy, Camp, France to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 03/02/1944

The transport departed from the Paris-Bobigny train station on the morning of February 3, 1944. There is no official telegram concerning this transport, so the exact time of departure is unknown; however, testimonies indicate that it left around 11 in the morning. "Le Calendrier de la persécution des Juifs de France" edited by Serge Klarsfeld (vol. 3) notes that the train included 1,214 deportees, but the transport list shows only 1,201. Among the deportees were many individuals who had been arrested in Paris during the roundup of January 22, 1944; the revered rabbi René Hirschler and his wife, Simonne, were also on this transport. Before the war Rabbi Hirschler was chief rabbi of Strasbourg, but from the time of the German invasion he served as general chaplain in the internment camps. He was arrested in Marseille on December 22, 1943. The deportees travelled until February 6, 1944, four days after their departure. During the journey, the train made at least two “sanitary” stops. A few testimonies make mention of two or three escapes, but there is no official telegram or Gestapo report to confirm these, nor any direct visual testimony. This could be the result of false information passed on by the German escort to justify the “racketeering” of the prisoners during the train's infamous “sanitary” stops. The transport followed the usual deportation route indicated by the German Reich Railway (Deutsche Reichsbahn) to the Gestapo as of November 1943. Whereas one testimony indicates a stop in the Nuremberg train station approximately 200 kilometres south of the Frankfurt-Erfurt-Dresden line, it is unlikely that this transport would have made such a detour, for it surely followed the usual itinerary: Paris-Bobigny, Noisy-le-Sec, Epernay, Châlons-sur-Marne, Revigny, Bar-le-Duc, Novéant-sur-Moselle, Metz, Saarbrücken, Homburg, Kaiserslautern, Mannheim, Frankfurt/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 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 along the southern border between Germany and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to Görlitz, an entry point into the former province of Silesia. The transport continued to the railway hub in Kohlfurt (Wegliniec) and from there further south via Heydebreck, the former Kandrzin (Kędzierzyn) 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 40 km south of Katowice was part of it and, as Katowice, annexed to the Reich....