Transport from Gelsenkirchen, Gelsenkirchen (Muenster), Westphalia, Germany to Riga, Ghetto, Latvia on 27/01/1942

On November 3, 1941, the RSHA issued an order that brought the Gestapo in Münster up to date about the planned deportation. The deportation is also mentioned in a circular from December 20, 1941. The circular, which has been preserved, was written by a clerk named Schäfer from Department IIB3 at Gestapo-Münster headquarters and was sent to the county commissioners of Ahaus, Beckum, Borken, Bergsteinfurt, Cösfeld, Lüdinghausen, and Tecklenburg. The circular determined the date and place of the departure of the transport: January 22, 1942, at Dortmund. On January 10, 1942, the Gestapo Münster conveyed a decree to the administrative district office in Lüdinghausen. According to this decree the director of the Foreign Workers Department at Münster headquarters, Franz Zimmerman required from the subordinate authority (the administrative district office in Lüdinghausen) to round up the Jews who had been designated for deportation by 12:00 on January 21 in the building of the police administration Lüdinghausen. Later that day, Heinrich Brodesser, head of the Jewish Affairs Desk at Gestapo-Münster, had to deliver these Jews to Gelsenkirchen in buses that were obtained from the August Peters transport company. The deportees were allowed to bring up to 25 kilograms of luggage but were not permitted to bring valuables. Zimmermann’s instructions required the Bielefeld branch of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (National Association of Jews in Germany) to have the deportees fill out an inventory of their property and to charge each of them 50 Reichsmarks. The transport was to accommodate 1,000 Jews from the areas controlled by the Münster and Dortmund Gestapo offices. In fact, 938 Jews were deported: 377 from Gelsenkirchen, 70 from Recklinghausen, 293 from Dortmund, 64 from Bochum, and others from Münster and twenty localities near Gelsenkirchen. The difference between these figures and the number listed can probably be traced to those who managed to elude the transport and go into hiding such as Henriette Hertz of Münster, and the Spiegel family from Ahlen, or to suicides....