Following the Munich Conference and the annexation of the Sudetenland to the Reich in October 1938, Nazi anti-Jewish laws were implemented throughout the region. The Jewish population was persecuted and dispossessed of its property (Aryanized). These measures led many Jews to flee, mostly to neighboring Czechoslovakia.
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In 1939, in an attempt to segregate the Jewish population, the local authorities began transferring the Jewish population to camps such as Oder (Edersgrühn) near Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad), or to designated communal housing (Judenhäuser).
In September 1941, Reulens, a Gestapo official, informed the regional branch of the Association of Jews in Germany (Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland) in Usti nad Labem (Aussig) that all elderly Jews declared unfit for labor would be relocated to a camp situated in an abandoned castle in the small, remote village of Schönwald. At that time this village, located 30 km from Usti nad Labem, had been declared ‘free of Jews’ (“judenfrei”).
The authorities forced the Association of Jews in Germany to finance the renovation of the castle and to cover all maintenance costs of the camp and its inhabitants.
Similarly, at the end of 1941, the regional council of Litomerice (Leitmeritz) decided to move all of its Jews to a camp in Dlaschkowitz castle.
In November 1942, the RSHA initiated transports of the remaining Jews in the Sudetenland region. Gestapo headquarters in Liberec (Reichenberg), headed by Rudolf Schröder, oversaw the deportations.
On 18. December 1943, a memo was sent by Chief of the Gestapo Heinrich Müller to the regional police offices, asking that Jewish spouses married to non-Jews, whose marriage ended in divorce or death, be deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto.
The sixth transport left Usti nad Labem to the Theresienstadt Ghetto on 10. January 1944. It consisted of 58 deportees, most of them elderly Jewish inmates of the Schönwald camp, who were probably protected from deportation to Theresienstadt due of having been married to a non-Jewish spouse.
Very little is known about this transport. It is assumed that the deportees were driven in buses or trucks from the Schönwald camp to Theresienstadt. Prior to their deportation, the deportees were searched and all valuable items in their possession were confiscated. In the Theresienstadt Ghetto listings the transport was recorded as XIX/6 where the Roman numeral XIX refers to the area of Usti nad Labem.
According to historian Rudolf Wlaschek, out of the 58 persons on this transport, at least 10 died in Theresienstadt due to hunger and disease and five were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were in all likelihood murdered upon arrival. 43 people are known to have survived in Thersienstadt until the end of the war.
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