Transport, Train Da 60 from Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt a. Main (Wiesbaden), Hesse-Nassau, Germany to Izbica, Krasnystaw, Lublin, Poland on 24/05/1942

The deportation on May 24, 1942 to Izbica, a transit ghetto located on the Lublin – Belzec railway line in the General Government, was the fifth transport to leave Frankfurt. Jakob Sprenger, Gauleiter (district party leader) of Hesse-Nassau, had set himself the task to make his Gau (the Nazi equivalent to province or state) and especially Frankfurt “judenfrei” (Free of Jews) as quickly as possible. The transport set off within three weeks of the first deportation from the city to Izbica and was registered at the Deutsche Reichsbahn (the German railroad company) under the designation "Da 60". It was the second of three mass deportations from Frankfurt to the Lublin district, all of which took place within only four weeks of each other. Preparations for this transport began just a few days after the previous deportation had left Frankfurt. The local Gestapo, headed by Oberregierungsrat and SS-Obersturmbannführer Oswald Poche, now wanted to deport those Jews assigned to slave labor who had been exempt so far. For this purpose, the Gestapo held a meeting on May 16 with representatives of the regional armament industry, the regional employment agency and the municipality. As a result of the meeting, SS member and city clerk Ernst Holland, who functioned as the Gestapo overseer of the welfare department and charitable institutions of the Jewish Community in Frankfurt between 1940 until 1943, informed several companies to substitute 200 Jews with slave workers from the Soviet Union. The RSHA’s deportation guidelines recommended that Gestapo branches force the "Reichsvereingung der Juden in Deutschland" (Association of Jews in Germany), as well as local Jewish communities to assist in preparing the transports. The Gestapo ordered Frankfurt's Jewish community to compile a list of names. According to Lina Katz, who worked in the Jewish Community from May 1937 until she was deported to Theresienstadt in August 1942, they received an order to provide the names of 1,200 people. As soon as the Gestapo obtained the names and addresses of the deportees, they passed copies of the list to their local Department of Jewish Affairs which was headed in Frankfurt by Kriminalrat (police detective) Ernst Grosse. Those Jews selected for deportation were notified in writing three days prior to the transport but they were not informed of their destination. As in other cities, suicide attempts among the Jewish community in Frankfurt increased prior to deportation. As the historian Monica Kingreen has noted, the New York-based magazine "Aufbau" reported 68 suicide attempts prior to this deportation....