Transport, Train Da 53 from Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt a. Main (Wiesbaden), Hesse-Nassau, Germany to Minsk, Ghetto, Belorussia (USSR) on 11/11/1941

The deportation from Frankfurt/Main to Minsk in occupied Belarus was the second transport to leave the city. 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” (Free of Jews) as quickly as possible. The train set off less than a month after the first Jews from Frankfurt had been deported to occupied Poland. The deportation train had been ordered by the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) for November 3, 1941 and was registered at the Deutsche Reichsbahn (German national train) under the designation "Da 53". Its postponement might have been due to objections by the German armament industry against the withdrawal of its Jewish slave laborers, as historians like Monica Kingreen and Alfred Gottwaldt have suggested. Finally, the empty train "LpDa 125" arrived in Frankfurt on November 11, 1941 from Lodz, probably following the transfer of Roma from Burgenland (eastern Austria). It was then used on the morning of November 12, 1941 for the deportation of over 1,000 Jews from Frankfurt to Minsk. After 1945, the US military government prepared a deportation list based on records found at Frankfurt's police headquarters. This document lists 1,052 Jews from Frankfurt (another copy states 1,042 deportees), mainly families and several children, but also a few elderly people. Some of the deported teenagers had even been ordered back from "Hachshara" camps (Zionist vocational training camps) or work assignments outside the city to be deported together with their families. According to historian Monica Kingreen, an unknown number of Jews from the Westerwald area, and from the small town of Hachenburg, as well as from the area around Koblenz were deported on this train too....