Transport 40 from Berlin, Berlin (Berlin), City of Berlin, Germany to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 04/08/1943

This transport, the 40th to leave Berlin to the ghettos and killing sites in Eastern Europe (and thus designated Osttransport 40), departed on 4 August 1943, and arrived in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp on the following day. On board were 100 deportees.
The deportees included in the late transports from Berlin to Auschwitz were often Jewish spouses in so-called “mixed marriages” that were suspected of violating the anti-Jewish regulations. Another group of deportees was Jews who lived illegally in hiding and were caught, often due to a denunciation of German civilians or Jewish collaborators. Occasionally, Jewish prisoners were transferred from civilian prisons and put on such a transport. Prior to their deportation, the deportees were held at the Gestapo interment facility at Iranische Strasse or at Grosse Hamburger-Strasse.
There is little available information on this transport. Presumably, the deportees were ordered into two closed cattle cars, were attached to a regular train.A guard unit, usually composed of two SS men, was located at 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 during the later stages of the war might have caused individual transports to take other routes....