Transport, Train Da 31 from Berlin, Berlin (Berlin), City of Berlin, Germany to Riga, Rigas, Vidzeme, Latvia on 27/11/1941

On November 27 all deportees were taken from the assembly camp to Grunewald station. Those unable to walk were taken there by truck while the others were made to walk about seven kilometres across the city. At the station third-class passenger cars ordered by the Gestapo and supplied by the Reichsbahn awaited them and the deportees were ordered to board the train which was designated Da 31. This transport departed on the same day. It was the seventh out of over 60 transports to the East (Osttransporte) which took more than 35.000 Jews from Berlin to ghettos and extermination sites in Eastern Europe. It consisted of 1,053 men, women and children who mostly came from the city itself. The average age of the deportees was 46 and there were 89 children under 15 on the transport. During the journey the Jews were guarded by a guard detail from the Schupo police. Their destination was not disclosed and after three days in overcrowded cars, they arrived on November 30 in severe frost at Skirotava station on the outskirts of Riga. Prior to the arrival of these transports, the Nazis had established a ghetto in Riga that was used to imprison nearly 30,000 Jews from the immediate vicinity in crowded conditions. In anticipation of the incoming deportations from Germany, the local SS command carried out a large-scale murder operation to “make room” for the new arrivals. On November 30 and December 8, more than 27,500 Jews were shot in the forest of Rumbula. The people on this first transport from Berlin were the first victims of this massacre; even though no one had ordered the killing, they were shot before the Jews from Riga. Shortly after, in a letter to the local commander, Heinrich Himmler voiced his discontent with this “unauthorized action” declaring that he would punish such autonomous actions. As the Jews on the next four transports from the Reich arrived while the killing was still underway, they were not transferred to the ghetto, but to a run-down farming compound called Jungfernhof. The deportees on the following five transports as well as those on the ten transports that left at the beginning of 1942 were transferred to the Riga ghetto. The first arrivals were confronted with a gruesome sight. The snow was reddened with blood and in some of the houses food left by the former inhabitants was still standing on the tables, frozen....