At the beginning of 1945, Nazi Germany faced military defeat. Allied forces liberated France, Belgium and most of the Netherlands. In Eastern Europe, the Red Army had advanced into the Baltic States and Eastern Poland.
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On 10 January, the Soviet forces launched a large scale offensive in Eastern Prussia and Poland (Operation Vistula – Oder). By the end of the month, Soviet forces had advanced to the Oder River - approximately 60 kilometers east of Berlin. Along with the advance, heavy aerial bombardments destroyed the cities infrastructure. The German transportation system was thrown into chaos. However, the Gestapo continued to issue deportation announcements.
On 19 January, the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office) informed all "Mischlinge" (who had been exempt from the transports) to prepare for deportation 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.
This transport departed from Berlin on 27 March or 28 March 1945 and arrived in Theresienstadt in the early evening of the same day. The transport consisted of 42 Jews, of whom 23 were women and 19 were men. The average age of the deportees was 44. The youngest of them was an infant, less than a year old and the oldest was aged 80. One of them were between the ages of 13 and 18, twenty of them were between 19 and 45, twelve were between 46 and 60, and eight of the deportees were between the ages of 61 and 85.
Although the city of Berlin had been declared "Free of Jews", the Gestapo continued to search for and arrest individual Jews that met the criteria for deportation. The deportees were brought to the assembly site, where they were detained until a larger group of Jews was assembled.
From 1 March 1944, the Jewish hospital in Berlin-Wedding, Iranische Strasse 2-4, was the last remaining center of Jewish life in Berlin and, sadly, also served as the assembly camp. On the day of the transport, the deportees had to leave the site and were taken from Berlin to Theresienstadt. The transport was given the reference I/123 in the Theresienstadt ghetto listings, where the Roman numeral I refers to Berlin.
According to historian Rita Meyhöfer, 14 deportees from this transport are known to have survived.
This was the last of 123 transports from Berlin to Theresienstadt during the war that were made up mainly of elderly Jewish deportees (Alterstransporte).
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