Transport XXV from Caserne Dossin (Malines-Mechelen), Camp, Belgium to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 19/05/1944

Transport XXV from Mechelen to Auschwitz left on May 19, 1944 and comprised 508 deportees (257 men and 251 women). It was the second to last of all mass transports from Mechelen to Auschwitz. It took the German authorities 45 days to assemble the transport following increased efforts by the Brussels Sipo-SD to intensify the arrest of Jews. Ehlers informed his Departments of Jewish Affairs that the RSHA had ordered the arrest of Jews "with renewed vigour" as stated in a letter to the branch in Liège on March 22. The SiPo-SD forces in Belgium strived to comply. SS-Hauptscharführer Felix Weidman who headed the department in Brussels from October 1943 to March 1944 (former heads Kurt Asche and Fritz Erdmann had been dismissed due to corruption) went on record after the war that in the spring of 1944 most of his men were inundated with field work, trying to arrest Jews even at night. Until August 1944, the Sipo-SD obligated the AJB to constantly provide new rosters in order to facilitate and secure the arrest of those groups who up until then had been widely exempt from deportation. Such groups included Jews who were Belgian citizens who were married to non-Jewish partners....