Since 2007 the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem has been studying the transports as an extensive phenomenon that transcended individual states, rather than in the context of a study of the Holocaust in a specific country or a single community. The transports are being studied as an historic event, one that is significant in its own right and not as a merely a technical stage during which Jews were transported from one place to another. Indeed, the transports were of considerable value in translating the grim theory of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem” into reality and the ability to spread its tentacles to the very edges of the Third Reich’s areas of control.
The resulting database will reconstruct all the transports that took place during the Holocaust from territories of the Third Reich, from countries under German occupation, from the Axis states and from the satellite states. The database has been constructed from a wide variety of current documents, research, legal material, survivors’ testimonies and memoirs.
In this project, the term “Transport” refers to the organized deportation of Jews from their homes to locations beyond the borders of the countries in which they lived, or to camps inside the country, in accordance with the Final Solution plan. With regard to their extent, it is worth noting that although most of the transports consisted of around one thousand deportees, there were others that carried much smaller numbers. The account of the transports relates to them all and not only the larger ones.
The site is periodically updated. It provides information about transports from various locations in Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to destinations in Eastern Europe and to Theresienstadt Ghetto between 1939 and 1945.
The database provides an overview of all aspects of the transports, while focusing on four main issues:
- Reconstruction of the transport’s route
- Information on persons involved in organizing the transport
- Socio-economic characteristics of the Jewish deportees
- Recollections of the survivors of the transports
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