On December 18 1943, a memo was sent by Chief of the Gestapo Heinrich Müller to the regional police offices requiring that Jewish spouses whose marriages to non-Jews had ended in either divorce or in the death of their non-Jewish partner, be deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto.
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By that time, the great majority of the Jewish population of Lower Silesia had already been deported to killing sites near Kaunas and Izbica, to Auschwitz-Birkenau and to the Theresienstadt Ghetto. The only Jews remaining in the capital city of Breslau were those married to non-Jewish spouses or the children of such unions. The non-Jewish spouses were under constant pressure to divorce their Jewish partners. Once such a divorce was ratified, the Jewish spouse would be put on a deportation list.

Transport IX/8 Ez1 departed from the Odertor train station presumably on May 5 1944, and arrived at Theresienstadt the same day. It was the 11th of 12 transports meant for the elderly and otherwise privileged Jews from the province of Lower Silesia. However, this was marked a Special Transport made up of only a single deportee, Elizabeth Niggl née Ehrmann, 65 years old, native and resident of Breslau.

Little is known of Special Transports such as this one. Presumably, Mrs. Niggl was arrested by the Gestapo and brought to the State Police Office in Anger Street, where she was detained for an unknown period of time. Prior to her deportation, she was forced to sign a declaration, relinquishing her entire property to the State.

On the day of the transport, Mrs. Niggl was taken to the Odertor station with her luggage. She presumably entered the station through a back entrance, and was put under guard in either a passenger car or a prisoner car, which was connected to a regular passenger train. The exact time and date of the departure is unknown; the journey took 12 hours at the very least, and possibly longer. The train presumably went west, to Dresden and from there to Bohusovice (Bauschowitz) via Decin (Tetschen) and Usti nad Labem (Aussig).

The transport was given the reference IX/8 Ez1 in the Theresienstadt ghetto listings where the Roman numeral IX refers to Breslau, the letters Ez mark it as a special transport (“Einzeltransport”), and the number 1 differentiates it from a similar transport which arrived on November 8 1944. In Theresienstadt, many of the elderly Jewish deportees died of hunger and disease. Others were later transferred to extermination camps in the East where they were murdered. Mrs. Niggl did not share their fate: at the end of the war, she was liberated in Theresienstadt.
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