From the Fall of 1943 onwards, the deportation of the remaining Jews from Berlin to Theresienstadt was carried out amid heavy aerial bombings (“The Battle of Berlin”). Allied air strikes caused severe damage to the German capital’s infrastructure and to the Nazi Security Services facilities. Under these circumstances it was difficult to organize transports, but they did not cease.
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In December of 1943, a memo signed by Heinrich Müller (Head of the Gestapo) was sent to all local Security Police offices. It stated that it was now possible to deport Jewish spouses of mixed marriages that were terminated by divorce or death to Theresienstadt. Documentation and information regarding the deportations from Berlin - not only those that took place during the last of phase of expatriation - are quite scarce since the majority of these records were destroyed in the air raids or were deliberately burned in the yard of the Jewish hospital during the last days of April 1945.
Unlike the smaller transports, this one departed not from Anhalter Bahnhof, but from Berlin Moabit/Putlitzstrasse train station on 10 January 1944 and arrived a day later in Theresienstadt. The train was ordered by the Gestapo and provided by Deutsche Reichsbahn. The transport consisted of 352 Jews, of whom 235 were women and 117 were men. The average age of the deportees was 62.4. The youngest of them was a 2-year-old boy and the oldest was an 89-year-old woman. Three of the deportees were under 12, two of them were between the ages of 13 and 18, twenty-three of them were between 19 and 45, 112 were between 46 and 60, and 208 of the deportees were between the ages of 61 and 85. Four of the deportees were over 85 years old.
The vast majority of them were patients of neurological wards from all over Germany who had been brought to Berlin. The transport also included divorced Jews from mixed marriages or Jews whose Aryan partner had died.
The procedure of dispatching the transport was different from the smaller transports. From the assembly camp the deportees were taken with trucks to the train station, where they had to wait for hours until everyone was registered and counted. This procedure lasted from the afternoon until the evening, when the train left Berlin. They traveled all night long and arrived the next morning in Theresienstadt.
The train's route took the deportees from Berlin to Dresden and along the river Elbe to Decin (Tetschen), Usti nad Labem (Aussig), Bohusovice (Bauschowitz) and finally to Theresienstadt. From 1 June 1943 on the trains went directly into the ghetto, as the prisoners had built a connecting railway line from Bauschowitz station to Theresienstadt. The transport was given the reference I/105 in the Theresienstadt ghetto listings, where the Roman numeral I refers to Berlin. In Theresienstadt many of the elderly Jewish deportees who had arrived on these transports died of hunger and disease during the following months. Others were later transferred to extermination camps in the East, where they were murdered.
According to historian Rita Meyhöfer, 205 deportees from this transport are known to have survived.
This was the 105th of 123 transports from Berlin to Theresienstadt during the war that were made up mainly of elderly Jewish deportees (Alterstransporte).
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