Transport 8, Train Da 9 from Wien, Vienna, Austria to Lodz, Ghetto, Poland on 23/10/1941

Transport number 8 left the Aspangbahnhof in Vienna (Wien) on October 23rd, 1941 and arrived at the Radegast train station in Lodz on October 24th at 5:50 PM (instead of the scheduled 11 AM). It was the third in a series of five such transports that left Vienna for Lodz. According to available records the transport consisted of 1,000 people (426 of them older than 61 years), including 67 were “not counted members of the Jewish faith”. These were gentile wives/husbands and children out of “mixed marriages”. The average age of the deportees was 56. Criminal Commissar Fuchs reported to the local commander of the security police (Inspektor der Sipo und des SD) in Posen that the transport included families and that 576 of the deportees were members of families, 103 were unmarried men and 321 unmarried women. He declared about 800 of the deportees as “fit for work”; 143 were sick, elderly or invalid. The deportees were transported in third-class carriages on regular passenger trains. Police Officer Franz Lang and fifteen armed uniformed policemen (Schutzpolizei) were guarding the deportees during the trainride. Immediately after the transport arrived in Lodz, the policemen confiscated all money and documents from the Jewish deportees and handed both over to the Gestapo. The Jews were then led to the ghetto. Many of the Jews from Vienna were murdered between May 4 and May 15, 1942 in the Chelmno extermination camp.