Transport from Westerbork, Camp, The Netherlands to Bergen Belsen, Camp, Germany on 15/03/1944

The transport that set out from Westerbork to Bergen-Belsen on March 15, 1944, carried 210 Jews, including 14 sick persons and 44 children. On March 31, 1944, Slottke advised Department IV-F4 of the RSHA that 47 Jews in the transport were designated for exchange purposes (deutsch-palästinensichen Austausch) and that, if these Jews had passports, they had been transferred to Bergen-Belsen camp headquarters. There were Jews who had received written confirmation that they had been issued with “certificates” (Palestine immigration visas) without their passports being stamped. A letter that Slottke sent on July 27, 1944, to Otto Hunsche, the legal affairs plenipotentiary at Department IV-B4b (Eichmann’s department at the RSHA) specified the names of 286 “exchange Jews,” including the aformentioned 47 deportees. The letter also states that 20 of them held Dutch citizenship and that all the others on the list were stateless (staatenlos) at the time. Slottke noted, however, that 13 of them had once held German citizenship, 12 Polish citizenship, and 2 Romanian citizenship. Testimonies from survivors of this transport show that these deportees hoped to be transferred to a camp controlled by the Red Cross and swapped for German prisoners....