On 21 May 1943, Rolf Günther, Adolf Eichmann’s deputy in Department IVB4, informed all local police headquarters that Heinrich Himmler had ordered to complete all deportations of Jews from the Greater Reich and the Protectorate to the East and to Theresienstadt by 30 June 1943. The new regulations included several groups of Jews whose deportation was postponed until then. This included sick and infirm Jews, Jews who were still employed in slave labor for the war industry, employees of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden (Reich's Association of the Jews in Germany). The only exemptions were Jews married to non-Jews. The regulations also gave guidelines for the procedure of the deportation. In case of smaller deportations up to 400 Jews, special cars, connected to regular trains, were to be used.
Show more
In June 1943 the city of Berlin was officially declared “free of Jews” ("judenrein"). 9,529 Jews (according to the Nuremberg laws definition) remained in Germany. 6,790 resided in Berlin. Most of them were spouses in mixed marriages, Jews of mixed ancestry and Jewish community personnel that worked in the Jewish hospital. In addition, more than 2000 Jews were living in hiding.

Six days before this transport, on 10 June 1943, the Nazi authorities officially closed the offices of the "Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland" (Reich Association of Jews in Germany) in Oranienburger Strasse and Kantstrasse. All financial and property assets were confiscated. The only exemption was the Jewish hospital in Iranische Strasse 2-4 in Berlin-Wedding which, from March 1944, served as the assembly camp, prison, children’s home and hospital.

A few Jews were still employed in the Jewish hospital but still had to face the prospect of immediate deportation. People of mixed German/Jewish ancestry, the “Geltungsjuden”, were also still allowed to live in Berlin.

Unlike the smaller transports, this one departed not from Anhalter Bahnhof, but from Berlin Moabit/Putlitzstrasse train station on 16 June 1943 and arrived a day later in Theresienstadt. The train was ordered by the Gestapo and provided by Deutsche Reichsbahn. The transport consisted of 429 Jews, of whom 290 were women and 139 were men. The average age of the deportees was 50.4. The youngest of them was an infant, less than a year old and the oldest was aged 93. Fourty of the deportees were under 12, thirteen of them were between the ages of 13 and 18, 105 of them were between 19 and 45, 112 were between 46 and 60, and 144 of the deportees were between the ages of 61 and 85. Fifteen of the deportees were over 85 years old.

Most of them were patients of the Jewish hospital in Iranische Strasse 2-4, which was almost completely cleared. Among the deportees were also former employees of the Jewish community and the Reichsvereinigung. One of them was Dr. Moritz Henschel, the successor to Heinrich Stahl as Chairman of the Jewish community in Berlin, and his wife. Both survived and emigrated to Palestine, where Henschel died in 1947.

The procedure for dispatching the transport was different from the smaller transports.
The deportees were taken by truck from the assembly camp 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, the train route being Berlin-Dresden and along the river Elbe to Decin (Tetschen), Usti nad Labem (Aussig), Bohusovice (Bauschowitz), and finally to Theresienstadt where they arrived the next morning. From 1 June 1943 onward, 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/96 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, 78 deportees from this transport are known to have survived.

This was the 96th of 123 transports from Berlin to Theresienstadt during the war that were made up mainly of elderly Jewish deportees (Alterstransporte).


Testimony by Hildegard Henschel, wife of Moritz Henschel, Head of the Jewish Community in Berlin:

"The orders were to prepare the “resettlement” of both the bed-ridden and able-bodied patients of the Jewish hospital in Auguststrasse, which was run by Ms Rebekka Oberlaender. There were 300 bed-ridden patients who were evacuated to Theresienstadt on 29 May 1943. It goes without saying that numerous medical personnel went too, as without doctors, nurses, bone-setters and orderlies these transports would not have been feasible.

By now everyone knew that full-Jews would last only a short time in Berlin, therefore no one was astonished when, on 10 June 1943 in the morning at 10:00 am the Gestapo at the executive office of the community in Oranienburgerstrasse 29 announced that the Jewish community in Berlin had ceased to exist. Employees who were not intermarried with Aryans had to regard themselves formally arrested. The same happened in Kantstrasse 158.

After our arrest we were brought to the Grosse Hamburger Strasse assembly camp. We were looked after devotedly and benevolently by the remaining Jews who were married to Aryans. On Wednesday 16 June at noon the moving-van, by now a well-known sight in the Berlin streetscape, took us to Putlitzstrasse train station where the loading of the hospital patients had been taking place since dawn.

At nightfall the train left Berlin. It consisted of about 500 people, among them more than 300 bed-ridden patients. This was transport I (Berlin)/96. We struggled through our way to Theresienstadt. There are very few survivors of that transport."

Testimony by Martha Mosse

Dr. Martha Mosse was a Jewish-German jurist, and the first female officer to reach the ranks of the higher echelons in the Police Headquarters of Prussia. In Theresienstadt, she served as a judge for the Jewish authorities. After the war, she testified in the Nuremberg Trials and the Ministries Trial.

"On Wednesday, the 16th of June of the previous year we had to say our goodbyes. It was a very bright, sunny and warm day. The morning passed with preparations, and parting visits to the house. Elsa von Liszt came for a moment to say farewell. The pussycat sat on the other side of the table and looked at me with sad animal eyes, as though she understood. Then came the Jewish marshals and took our luggage. I went by foot to the next street corner so as to not make a scene. There they waited with the vehicle and brought me to the assembly camp in Grosse Hamburger Strasse. I was warmly received and stayed in Mr. and Mrs. Henschel’s room most of the time. In the early afternoon a furniture truck picked us up and brought us to the train station. The loading ramp of the Pulitzstrasse train station was at a desolate and bleak place between embankments so that we couldn’t see the street from there. There we waited until dawn when the train finally departed. How often I went along the many freight cars of our train and thought of home.

The next morning, the train travelled through the lovely green Sudeten Mountains, and arrived in a heavy rainfall. When we approached, I saw a number of young Jews engaged in farm work; they were all tanned, but they looked very sad. Then came our reception by the SS, luggage and body inspection (we had to undress before the SS!); confiscation of all or money, all of our cigarettes, and inoculation against typhus."

Testimony by Alexandra Henrietta Sternberg

"On February 27th 1943 the “Fabrik-Aktion” ]arrest and deportation of vital Jewish factory workers[ was put into action. In the early hours of the day numerous trucks stopped before the Siemens factory. SA and plain-clothes officers blocked all of the exits. The doors to our work area were torn open. Rifle-carrying SA and SS positioned themselves in a threatening manner. A plain-clothes officer delivered a short speech, whose words I can still remember well. “Jewish men and women! Form silently into rows of four. Leave your things where they are; you will not need them any more. Any resistance will be broken immediately with armed force! You will be transported away from here. Where to? That you’ll see. The Führer has given the orders, and you must obey!” I wanted to reach for my coat, but then an SA officer who stood nearby hit me on the hands with the handle of a working tool. Then we had to get in the trucks. We drove for hours through Berlin, hungry and shaking from the cold. The trucks were driving around picking up Jews off the streets, and putting them inside with us. A 10-year-old girl was brought into our vehicle who was taken from the street. After a 7-hour drive we finally arrived at Grosse Hamburgerstrasse. Thousands of Jews swarmed the rooms, in the corridors and on the stair landings.

We were registered and divided into different groups based on a system we couldn’t understand. My group’s destination was set to be Auschwitz. Because of the cold in the truck I was struck with fever. The Jewish physician Dr. Sternberg allowed for my transfer to the Jewish hospital where I stayed for three months as my release was postponed due to an operation. Eventually, I was put on a transport to Theresienstadt.

Theresienstadt
Our first impression upon our arrival in Thersienstadt was [the sight of] several young men hanging from the trees. They had been hanged because they had tried to transport mail illegally."

Testimony of a Jewish survivor from Berlin:

"We were not able to get rid of the Gestapo persecutors until we were taken out of our apartment by four officials on 4 March 1943. I was taken in a police car to the assembly camp Grosse Hamburger Strasse, the critically ill Paul was transferred to the Jewish hospital. Thanks to the intervention of a distant relative of mine, we managed to have ourselves taken off the eastbound transport and put on the transport to Theresienstadt instead, a concentration camp that seemed preferable. Paul was transported with the sick and the handicapped [Siechentransport] in a cattle car and it was this cattle car where we saw each other again at the onset of the journey. It was 16 June 1943."
Show less