Transport from Westerbork, Camp, The Netherlands to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 31/08/1942

In or around the middle of August 1942, Wilhelm Zöpf, head of the Department for Jewish Affairs (Referat IVb4) in the Netherlands, summoned the regional Commander of the Security Police and Security Service (Kommandeure der Sicherheitspolizei und des Sicherheitsdienstes, KdS) in Amsterdam, Willy Lages, and the head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung) in Amsterdam, Ferdinand Aus der Fünten, and ordered them in the name of Wilhelm Harster, to enable SIPO and Central Office personnel to remove Jews from their homes and place them under arrest. In 1947, Louis Waterman (b. 1899), testifying before the NIOD (Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie—the Dutch Institute for War Documentation), stated that he had been deported on this transport along with his wife and his youngest son, aged fourteen, on August 16, 1942. This was just six days after his two older sons had been deported. Another survivor, Siegbert Weisz (b. 1923) also testified in 1947 that he crossed into Belgium on July 5, 1942, and was arrested in Achterbroek by the police. The police, he added, had handed him over to a Wehrmacht company which, several days later, transferred him to the SIPO with several other Jews from Tilburg. On July 9, Weisz was taken to a prison in Haaren, and on August 28 he was turned over to the Joodse Raad in den Bosch where he was fed and sent on to Westerbork by the SIPO. The exact number of Jews on this transport is not known. One copy of the deportation manifest was found in a letter sent by the LIRO-Bank on September 25, 1942, to the General Commissioner for Financial Affairs (Generalkommissar für Finanz und Wirtschaft) in The Hague. When the deportees reached Westerbork, employees of the bank regularly dispossessed them of their remaining money. The list indicates that there were approximately 560 deportees including 117 who had joined it voluntarily and 40 who were added to it at the last moment. Although this figure is identical to the number of deportees shown in a record produced in Auschwitz when the deportees reached the camp, survivors’ testimonies indicate that the train stopped in Koźle/Kosel, where 200–300 men were removed for slave labour. All survivors of the transport belonged to that group....