Transport 26, Train Da 206 from Wien, Vienna, Austria to Blagovshchina (Maly Trostenets Area), forest, Murder Site, Belorussia (USSR) on 09/06/1942

Transport No. 26, labeled Da206, departed from Vienna on June 9th, 1942, and arrived at the freight station in Minsk on June 15th. The transport consisted of 1,000 Jews, 244 of them were older than 61 years. The average age of the deportees was 49. The SS paid the railroad company 20.20 Reichsmark for transporting each deported Jew. On arrival, a group of SD (Sicherheitsdienst) and Sipo (Sicherheitspolizei) men took charge of offloading the deportees and their baggage. The German security forces plundered anything of value that the Jews still had in their possession before selecting 20 to 50 men for forced labor. Most of these men were murdered at the end of July 1944. The remaining Jews were transported in trucks to freshly dug pits in Blagovshchina forest, near Maly Trostenets, where they were shot by men of the Waffen SS and Schutzpolizei. A part of the deportees was loaded on gas vans, which were put into operation that month, and murdered with engine exhaust gases. In his operational report dated June 16th, Waffen-SS Unterscharführer Arlt, whose unit was stationed in the Minsk area during the summer of 1942, provided a laconic description of the murder of the deported Viennese Jews:...