Transport, Train Da 33 from Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt a. Main (Wiesbaden), Hesse-Nassau, Germany to Izbica, Krasnystaw, Lublin, Poland on 08/05/1942

After a winter break of almost half a year, on May 8, 1942 the fourth deportation left 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" as quickly as possible. The deportation train had been ordered by the RSHA in March destined for Trawniki and was registered at the Reichsbahn (the German railroad company) under the designation "Da 33". The Jews were in fact deported to Izbica, a transit ghetto located on the Lublin – Belzec railway line in the General Government. This was the first of three mass deportations from Frankfurt to the Lublin district, all of which took place within only four weeks of each other. 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, headed by Oberregierungsrat and SS-Obersturmbannführer Oswald Poche, ordered Frankfurt's Jewish community to compile a list of names. According to Lina Katz, who worked for 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, they passed copies of the list to their local Department of Jewish Affairs headed 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 communities, suicide attempts among the Jewish community in Frankfurt increased prior to deportation. At least 938 Jews were deported from Frankfurt to Izbica on May 8, 1942. Although no deportation list has been found so far, it is certain that 938 Jews had been removed from the residential register, a fact which was reported by Frankfurt's Chief of Police to Frankfurt's mayor Friedrich Krebs on October 8, 1942. As with previous deportations, the transport of those Jews who were assigned to slave labour in the German armament industry was postponed for the time being to avoid disturbing production. According to a memo by the Chief Finance President from Kassel, concerning the exploitation of the deportees' assets, on average poor Jews were deported. Tilly Cahn, the wife of the Jewish lawyer Max L. Cahn, noted in her diary on May 2, 1942, that 1,100 Jews had received the deportation notice: "Up to the age of 65. The sorrow and misery can't be described. Destination unknown. Only a little luggage is permitted. An exact list of what has been left behind is to be filled out. This is organized murder and robbery. In some cases fifteen year old boys and girls are separated from their parents". According to Historian Monica Kingreen, many children from the Jewish orphanages were probably deported on this transport and on the two that followed. This is supported by the testimony of Helmut Sonneberg from Frankfurt. From February 1941 onwards, he was forced to live in several Jewish orphanages, which were supervised by SS member and city clerk Ernst Holland, who was the welfare department and charitable institutions of the Jewish Community in Frankfurt from 1940 until 1943. In February 1945, Helmut Sonneberg was deported together with his mother to Theresienstadt. Until this date he witnessed how more and more children disappeared from the orphanages without anyone knowing where they had been taken. On the day of departure, with the help of the Kriminalpolizei (criminal police) and Schupo (Schutzpolizei, uniformed regular police), the Gestapo took the deportees from their apartments or from one of the 300 "Judenhäuser" (Jew houses) in Frankfurt, where they had been forced to move earlier. All Jews deported from Germany were automatically subject to expropriation. They were required to hand over their apartment keys to the authorities. The Gestapo searched their homes and luggage, and confiscated all valuables. Subsequently the apartments were sealed. Any other assets became German state property; a bureaucratic procedure which was carried out in close collaboration between the Gestapo and local tax offices, courtesy of the Eleventh Decree of the Reich Citizenship Law dated November 25, 1941. Lina Katz, the employee from Frankfurt's Jewish community recalled in 1961 that the deportees were taken through the city "in broad daylight" to the wholesale market (Grossmarkt) at Hanauer Landstrasse, today's Sonnemannstrasse. This was a large industrial building dating from 1928 and Frankfurt's main assembly site which had already been used for previous deportations. The Jews were concentrated in the cellar of the wholesale market's east wing from where a railway track led directly to the Ostbahnhof, the city's eastern railroad station. At the assembly site, the humiliating registration and expropriation process continued. The train left Frankfurt on the morning of May 8, 1942. Before the deported Jews reached Izbica, the train stopped at Lublin train station. Between 136 and 154 men aged from 15 - 55 were suddenly taken out of the wagons and walked to the Majdanek camp for forced labour. Most of them would die within a few weeks. The other deportees, women, children, teenagers and elderly men, were taken travelled on to Izbica, 80 kilometers south east of Lublin. It is most likely that their last belongings, even food, were taken from them in Lublin and that they arrived in Izbica with literally nothing. In Izbica many of the deportees died of starvation, disease, or were murdered. Most of them, however, were sent to extermination camps shortly after reaching the transit camp, probably to Sobibor which began operating at the beginning of May 1942. Here, they were immediately gassed. None of the 938 Jews aboard this transport from Frankfurt survived.