Towards the end of November 1941, the Nazi authorities began to deport the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia (the Protectorate) to the fortress city of Theresienstadt, about 60 km north of Prague. The city’s 18th century fortress now served as a ghetto. Thousands of deportees were housed in the army barracks under terrible conditions. By depicting Theresienstadt as a "model of Jewish settlement" and thus concealing its role as a transit camp for Jewish deportees, the Nazis were able to camouflage their true objectives and policies namely, the mass annihilation of the Jews.
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Commencing in January 1942, transports began to leave Theresienstadt for Riga. Later, some of the transports were sent to extermination camps and murder sites, including Auschwitz, Treblinka and Maly Trostenets.

At the Wannsee Conference on January 20 1942, Head of the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office) Reinhard Heydrich announced that Hitler had authorized the evacuation of the Jewish population in Europe to the East. Heydrich added that the evacuation of the Reich’s Jews would be given priority because of housing problems and other socio-political considerations. Jews over the age of 65, war invalids, or Jews decorated with the Iron Cross would be sent to the newly established “old people’s ghetto” – Theresienstadt.

On 6 March, following Heydrich’s announcement, Adolf Eichmann, Director of the Department of Jewish and Dispossession Affairs (Department IVB4) in the RSHA, convened a meeting of Gestapo delegates from all over the Reich to discuss the measures necessary to carry out the deportation of 55,000 Jews from Germany and the Protectorate. Eichmann stressed not to include elderly Jews in the transports. Jews of this category would be deported to Theresienstadt. Eichmann also warned the Gestapo not to notify the Jews in advance about their deportation in order to prevent attempts to elude the transport.

On 15 May 1942, Department IVB4 issued new guidelines signed by Gestapo Head Heinrich Müller, regarding the deportation of Jews to the “old people’s” ghetto in Theresienstadt: The evacuation of the residents from old age homes was cited as the top priority. Jews of foreign nationality or those enrolled in the war industry were exempt from deportation.

In the month of June 1942 the Gestapo launched ten relatively small transports from Munich, consisting of 500 Jews altogether.

On May 1 1942 Heinrich Himmler sent a note to Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Security police and the Security Service requiring the immediate deportation of 120 patients from the Jewish hospital in Munich. He wanted the building to serve as a nursing school for the “Lebensborn” program, the Nazi breeding program which was established to ensure the continuation and domination of the Aryan race.

Theodor Koronczyk, the representative of the Jewish community towards the Gestapo, received a list with the names of the 150 deportees scheduled to board the first three transports. Nearly all of them were patients and staff of the Jewish hospital. As the Gestapo had already searched the individuals and their luggage in the hospital, the deportees were taken in removal vans directly to the station and did not pass through the Milbertshofen assembly camp.

On the morning of the deportation day, June 4 1942, the patients were herded into the removal vans and were taken from the hospital in Hermann-Schmid-Strasse 5-7 to the southern railway station which was about one kilometer away. Several Gestapo members and members of the uniformed police accompanied the transport.

There, one second-class passenger car awaited them which was shunted to Munich’s central station and then attached to a regular, scheduled passenger train that left the station every day at around 12:00 for Marktredwitz. The car was then attached to several other local passenger trains in succession which travelled via Moosach, Freising, Landshut, Regensburg, Schwandorf, Marktredwitz, Eger, Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad) and Usti nad Labem (Aussig) to Bohusovice (Bauschowitz), where it finally arrived a day later.

The deportees were taken off the train at Bohusovice station and forced by the awaiting SS personnel and Czech gendarmerie to walk the approximate 3 km to Theresienstadt, carrying their backpacks. Only people who were unable to walk were taken in trucks.

That transport consisted of 50 Jews, the majority (31 persons) of whom were elderly women from the Jewish hospital in Hermann-Schmid-Strasse. There were also four Jews on board who had lived in the old-age home in Klenzestrasse 4.

The transport was given the reference II/2 in the Theresienstadt ghetto listings where the Roman numeral II refers to Munich. In Theresienstadt many of the elderly Jewish deportees who had arrived on these transports died of hunger and disease during the summer months. Others were transferred in the following months to extermination camps in the East where they were murdered.

15-year-old Judith Hirsch helped her parents in the Jewish hospital and remembers the clearing of the building:

“[…] it was summer 1942. Suddenly two removal vans stopped in front of the building. They had come to pick up the patients. My father asked the Gestapo for permission to place matresses on the floors. Those who were able, dragged matresses to the truck and covered the loading area. Then the patients who could walk, climbed inside. The infirm were carried by the doctors, nurses and others. My father carried a young man who had no legs. Tears were running down my father’s face […]. It was a terrible day. It was the first time that I saw my father so helpless and desperate. He broke down and he was not able to stop crying for hours.”
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