Deportations from Cologne during the Nazi era

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The Nazi deportations of people from Cologne who were mainly persecuted as Jews began in 1938 with the group of around 600 alleged "Eastern Jews" who could not show German citizenship, who were suddenly brought from Cologne to the Polish border in October 1938 and there across the border had been driven. The same applies to the temporary imprisonment of persecuted people after the NS November pogrom , which they were supposed to blackmail them in the concentration camp to transfer property rights and promise to emigrate soon. From 1939 the authorities were forced to use Aryanised buildings as Jewish houses . There were many such buildings in Cologne, in which the rulers at the time “concentrated” the persecuted Jews in preparation for their deportation .

Of the 16,000 or so Cologne residents who declared themselves Jewish in the census, around half were able to save their lives by fleeing / emigrating by 1939. Almost everyone else, including many of those who fled to later German-occupied countries, were deported and murdered.

The massive Nazi deportations without return and with a small number of survivors began in Cologne in May 1940 with the group of victims of the Sinti and Roma . In retrospect it gives the impression that the regime carried out a test run of its further course of action. In addition to Müngersdorf and Deutz, there were also prisoner and concentration camps (in German collective camps) on a factory site in Porz Hochkreuz and in the nearby town of Brauweiler .

Chronological sequence of the measures from 1940

May 1940; Victim group: Sinti and Roma

During the maiden deportations , at the insistence of the Wehrmacht leadership, “a ban on the stay of gypsies in the border zone [to] be issued as soon as possible”, Himmler sent an express letter for mid-May 1940 to “transport gypsies ... 2500 people - in closed clans” from the western part Arranged border area into the occupied Polish territory of the Generalgouvernement . Hamburg (port) and Cologne ( exhibition halls ) and the Württemberg prison Hohenasperg near Ludwigsburg / Stuttgart were intended as collection points for 1000 persons to be deported .

Concentration and other forced camps in the Cologne Exhibition Center

The Cologne exhibition center was a warehouse complex that existed from 1939 to 1945 on the grounds of the Cologne exhibition center in the Deutz district of Cologne on the right bank of the Rhine .

This included a satellite camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp , which was later housed there as SS Building Brigade III from September 1942 to May 1944. The inmates were forced to clean up, remove debris and recover corpses after bombing attacks, and to clear duds in bomb detonators.

There were also prisoner-of-war camps on the site.

A so-called police prison ( labor education camp ) of the Gestapo served to suppress the " foreign workers ". Various “civil” forced laborers, especially so-called Eastern workers , were also in the camp here.

Immediately before the deportation transports, the exhibition halls were also used as collection camps. From the lower level of the Deutz train station , the transports left "to the east".

Fall / Winter 1941

From the autumn of 1941 to the summer of 1942, the Cologne Gestapo organized the deportation of almost all of the Jewish population still living in Cologne and the region at that time, with rail transports comprising around 1,000 people each.

In the autumn of 1941 the Cologne authorities set up a collection camp in Cologne-Müngersdorf near the buildings of Fort V in newly built barracks, in which they imprisoned Jews from Cologne and the Cologne region until they were finally assigned to one of the transports by the Gestapo were.

On October 22, 1941, the first transport left Cologne with 1,018 people persecuted as Jews, which was followed shortly afterwards by a second train. On October 30th, around 3,000 Jews were deported from Cologne to Litzmannstadt on a third transport. Of the approximately 2,000 women, men and children who were deported from Cologne to Litzmannstadt on October 22 and 30, 1941, according to the latest research, 25 women and men survived.

On December 7, 1941, a deportation train with 1,011 Cologne Jews drove from platform 5 of the Deutz-Tief train station to Riga. They were the first German Jews to come to the “cleared” Riga Ghetto after the massacres of more than 25,000 Latvian Jews . Three days later the male youths were deported to Salaspils . Of the entire transport, 87 people survived.

At this point in time around 6,200 Jews lived in Cologne and 1,400 in the rest of Cologne's administrative district. Almost all Jewish institutions and organizations had been forcibly reorganized or dissolved, and even the only religious association "Synagogen-Gemeinde Köln eV" and the local branch of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland) barely had any means of helping or acting.

The last official representatives of the Jewish community were also imprisoned in the Müngersdorf camp, as were the last patients in the Jewish hospital and the residents of the Jewish old people's home in Cologne.

Summer 1942

Trains followed on June 15 and July 27, 1942 with older Jews to the Theresienstadt ghetto . Before that, after the bombing raid on May 30th, Gauleiter Josef Grohe requested that the evacuations of Jews be accelerated because of the shortage of housing.

Citizens of Cologne were also in a collective transport, on June 15, 1942 Koblenz drove over Aachen, Cologne and Dusseldorf to Lublin, where around 100 men for the Majdanek selected were. The train continued via Izbica to the Sobibor extermination camp .

During the deportation to Minsk on July 20, 1942, in addition to Jews from Cologne, about half of the women, men and children from the Rhineland were also brought to places of mass murder .

From the summer of 1942, further deportations with a total of over 3,500 people led from Cologne to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and directly to the Nazi extermination camps in Trostinez near Minsk, Belzec , Sobibor , Treblinka or to Auschwitz-Birkenau .

Other deportation locations for former Cologne residents

Jewish citizens of Cologne were also in the great deportation trains from Westerbork (occupied Netherlands), Mechelen (occupied Belgium) or Drancy (occupied France), by the Nazis to murder in the East, they cynically called "final solution" referred to, brought were.

From autumn 1944 to March 1945

On October 1, 1944, the Cologne Gestapo sent another deportation transport to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, the last one again in March 1945. Now all Jews from mixed marriages who were fit for work and valid Jews were to be transferred to Theresienstadt for private work.

Casualty numbers

The fate of the 2514 people deported from Cologne and the region to the Theresienstadt concentration camp is best documented : 231 survived the end of the war, over 90 percent died in the concentration camp (the euphemistically so-called ghetto) or were transported from there to the Treblinka or Auschwitz extermination camps murdered there.

As far as we know, only about 80 of those deported to Riga were liberated in 1945. Nobody, however, survived the deportation to Minsk: The 1164 deportees, including the pupils and teachers of the “ Jawne School ”, were murdered after their arrival in the nearby Maly Trostinez.

Memorial book of the Jewish victims from Cologne

The memorial book of the Jewish victims from Cologne is dedicated to the memory of the Jewish people from Cologne who were murdered during National Socialism. It is an online project on the Internet and is an excerpt from the extensive documentation of the NS-DOK. Above all, the data that have been reworked within the framework of research projects since 2004 are displayed.

The online version of the memorial book contains the names of the victims and the most important information about themselves and their fate of persecution: surname, first name, maiden name, date of birth and place of birth, the stations of the deportation and, if known, date of death and place of death.

The work on the memorial book is not a finished project, but is being continued continuously. The annual reports of the NS-DOK, Cologne, regularly report on the respective priorities in this work area of ​​the center. The data was last updated on October 11, 2019.

A search mask is available online for a full text search or a search for name, place of birth, place of departure of the deportation, destination of deportation or place of death.

literature

  • Barbara Becker-Jákli: The Jewish Cologne. History and present. A city guide , Emons Verlag Cologne, Cologne 2012. ISBN 978-3-89705-873-6 .
  • Karola Fings , Frank Sparing : The gypsy camp in Cologne-Bickendorf 1935–1958. In: 1999. Journal for Social History of the 20th and 21st Century. 1991, No. 3, pp. 11-40.
  • Karola Fings: Cologne Exhibition Center. A satellite concentration camp in the center of the city. Emons Verlag, Cologne 1996. ISBN 3-924491-78-X .
  • Liesel Franzheim: Jews in Cologne from Roman times to the 20th century . Cologne 1984.
  • Kurt Schlechtriemen: Victims of National Socialism in Cologne-Müngersdorf. Cologne 2017. ISBN 978-3-00-057778-9 .

See also

proof

  1. ↑ The house of beer. At www.stadt-koeln.de, accessed on February 14, 2020.
  2. ↑ ns-dokumentationszentrum der museenkoeln.de (accessed on February 14, 2020).
  3. ↑ Alfred Gottwaldt, Diana Schulle: The "Deportations of Jews" from the German Reich 1941–1945 - A commented chronology. Marix, Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-86539-059-5 , pp. 74, 75 and 80.
  4. ^ Alfred Gottwaldt, Diana Schulle: The "Deportations of Jews" from the German Reich 1941–1945. Marix, Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-86539-059-5 , p. 126.
  5. ^ Alfred Gottwaldt, Diana Schulle: The "Deportations of Jews" from the German Reich 1941–1945. Marix, Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-86539-059-5 , p. 291.
  6. ^ Alfred Gottwaldt, Diana Schulle: The "Deportations of Jews" from the German Reich 1941–1945. Marix, Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-86539-059-5 , pp. 217-219.
  7. ↑ The Reichsbahn timetable for July 22, 1942 at www.statistik-des-holocaust.de, accessed on February 14, 2020.
  8. ↑ Dieter Corbach: 6.00 a.m. from Cologne-Deutz exhibition center - Deportations 1938-1945. Cologne 1999
  9. ↑ Joseph Walk (ed.): The special right for the Jews in the Nazi state. 2nd edition Heidelberg 1996, ISBN 3-8252-1889-9 , p. 406.
  10. ^ Dieter Corbach: The jaws of Cologne. On the history of the first Jewish high school in the Rhineland and in memory of Erich Klibansky. Commemorative book for the exhibition in the historical town hall of Cologne from November 12th to 26th, 1990 . Scriba Verlag, Cologne 1990. ISBN 3-921232-42-2 .
  11. ^ NS-DOK
  12. ↑ The search mask for queries at museenkoeln.de/ns-dokumentationszentrum
  13. ↑ The EL-DE house at Appellhofplatz 23-25 ​​in Cologne was the seat of the Cologne Gestapo from 1935 to 1945 . ("LD" is the abbreviation of the previous owner's name, built 1934 ff)