Transport from Merano, Bolzano, Venezia Tridentina, Italy to Innsbruck Reichenau, Camp, Austria on 16/09/1943

In 1933, the Jewish community of Meran, South Tyrol, numbered about 600 members. They had a synagogue, but no rabbi.^[1] Meran was the only city in Italy where Jews were subjected to early anti-Semitic riots, including verbal and physical abuse.^[2] Five years later, on August 22, 1938, by means of a racial census,^[3] the Central Demographic Office (Ufficio centrale demografico) of the Fascist regime recorded 771 Jewish citizens in Meran,^[4] "either registered as Jewish or suspected Jewish,"^[5] among them many refugees from the German Reich and from Austria.^[6] On November 17, 1938, the new racial laws came into force, allowing Jews to keep their Italian citizenship only if they had received it before 1919. Since the vast majority of South Tyrol's population had become Italian citizens only in 1922, the local Jews now automatically turned into stateless "alien subjects." The majority of them were therefore forced to leave Meran at once. In 1940, there were some eighty Jews remaining in the city. Some of them were "protected" (by holding legal Italian citizenship^[7] or being married to an "Aryan" spouse); others were tolerated because of their advanced age or frail health.

On September 9, 1943, when German troops entered Meran, the city was home to sixty Jews.^[8] One of them, Heinrich Eisenstädter, was alerted that the SS would soon follow the Wehrmacht troops and replace the local Carabinieri (the national Gendarmerie of Italy): "Once I found out the exact date when the SS would be coming to Meran, I had the opportunity to warn various people. However, I was only able to persuade one other family to flee."^[9] Eisenstädter and this unnamed family escaped on September 12, 1943.

That same day, SS-Brigadeführer Karl Brunner, the special envoy of SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler in the provincial capital of Bozen (Bolzano), ordered every Kreisleiter (district leader) of the AdO (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Optanten für Deutschland, the NSDAP chapter in South Tyrol) to arrest all the Jews in the province. The official in charge of the arrest of the Jews in Meran was SS-Unterscharführer Heinrich Andergassen, the head of the Judenreferat (Department of Jewish Affairs) at the SiPo and SD office in Bozen. He was also the chief of the Außenkommando der SiPo und des SD Meran^[10], the local branch of the Security Police (SiPo; comprising the Kripo (criminal police) and the Gestapo) and the Security Service (SD). ^[11]...