This transport was the 33rd to leave Berlin for the ghettos and killing sites in Eastern Europe and was thus designated “Osttransport 33”. It departed from the city’s Putlitzstrasse Station in the Moabit district on March 3, 1943 and arrived in Auschwitz the following day.
There were 1,726 Jews on this transport. On the day of their deportation they were ordered into a train consisting of closed cattle cars. A guard unit, usually composed of two SS men, was usually posted in the control compartment. The train usually went to Auschwitz via Breslau (Wroclaw) and Kattowitz (Katowice), but the constant strain put on the German railway system might have caused individual transports to take other routes.
Historian Danuta Czech notes in the Auschwitz Chronicles that a transport organized by the RSHA arrived in Auschwitz on March 4. It consisted of approximately 1,750 Jewish men, women and children from Berlin. Upon arrival outside the Auschwitz camp complex, the deportees were subject to a selection process carried out by the SS. 517 men, given Nos. 105571-106087, and 200 women, given Nos. 37296-37495, were sent to forced labour under harsh conditions which they rarely survived. The remaining 1,033 deportees, 115 of them men and 918 women, were sent directly to the gas chambers at Birkenau (Auschwitz II) and murdered....