Between 1939 and 1941 a number of Nazi Germany officials started discussing plans for deporting Jews out of Germany and the territories it had occupied. These proposals included the October 1939 "Nisko Plan", the May 1940 "Madagascar Plan" and an October 1940 plan to deport Jews from the regions of Baden and Palatinate (Pfalz) to France. In some cases the plans were never carried out; in other cases, they were carried out only partially.
Show more The Nazi leadership in Vienna (Wien) set its sights on Jewish property and attempted to that end to force the Jewish population into densely populated "Jewish houses" or even to banish them from the city altogether. On October 2, 1941 the Gauleiter (leader of a regional branch of the Nazi Party) of Vienna, Reichsleiter Baldur von Schirach asked Hitler to approve the mass expulsion of Jews from his city. On December 3, Hans Heinrich Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery (Reichskanzlei), notified Baldur von Schirach that Hitler had decided on a hastily expedited expulsion of 60,000 Viennese Jews, war notwithstanding, due to the city’s alleged housing shortage.
On February 1, Dr. Karl Ebner of the Vienna Gestapo informed Jewish community leader, Dr. Löwenherz that 10,000 Jews were to be deported from the city forthwith. According to instructions issued by Alois Brunner of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung), a train bearing 1,000 Jews would leave every week between February 15 and the end of May from Aspangbahnhof. Several towns in the General Government (Generalgouvernement) had been selected to accommodate the deported Jews. The expulsion of Vienna’s Jews took place concurrently with other attempts at "resettlement" (Umsiedlung) within the territories of occupied Poland. The objective was to forcefully banish thousands of Jews and Poles from their homes and resettle ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) in these homes instead.
On February 13 Adolf Eichmann, who headed the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt - Reich Main Security Office) Referat IV B4, the department of the RSHA that dealt with Jewish affairs and evacuation, notified the Third Reich police stations "that the Führer had ordered the deportation of Jews living in Vienna on account of the special situation prevailing in the city". The first wave of deportations started in February 1941, when 5,013 of Vienna's Jews were sent to the General Government. Every Wednesday for five weeks a transport of Jews left Vienna for Poland.
Transport number 1 left Vienna for Opole in the General Government on February 15, 1941. The transport consisted of 1,001 Jews. 202 deportees were older than 61, the average age of the deportees was 48 years.
Several days prior to the transport, the Jewish community had received a communiqué from the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna listing the people chosen for deportation. The task of notifying the Jews of the date of the transport was the responsibility of the community. The community also had to ensure that the deportees arrive on time at the Jewish-owned school building on Castellezgasse 35. The responsibility for providing the deportees with bare essentials and some food for their journey and for their stay on the school premises was imposed upon the Jewish community. At the school, representatives of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna forced the deportees to sign a document confirming that they were leaving of their own free will and were handing over their property to the state.
According to the plan, the list of deportees was to include stateless Jews and émigrés. At this stage, mixed-race families (one of the parents was non-Jewish) with children were exempt from deportation, as were severely handicapped WWI invalids, Jews with foreign nationality, state pensioners, sick and handicapped residents of retirement homes or patients in the Rothschild Hospital. Nonetheless, the transport consisted mainly of people aged sixty and more, including some who were blind, sick and mute, as well as war invalids.
The Jews were transported in open trucks from the school building to the railway station and loaded on to a train, ten people to a compartment. The majority of train compartments had no sanitation. Once in Poland, the deportees continued their journey by local freight train, in open carriages over rail sidings to the town of Opole, southwest of Lublin, close to the railroad tracks of Naleczow. Because of this proximity to the railway track the Opole Ghetto later became transit station for Jews on their way to the extermination camps.
In Opole, the deported Jews were housed in the local synagogue and in other large buildings. It is apparent from letters the deportees sent to their relatives in Vienna that the local Opole Jews, whose own situation was horrendous, did all they could to help the newcomers. But their efforts were fruitless; the lack of food and awful living conditions resulted in a high mortality rate among the old and the sick. In March 1941 the Jews of Opole and the refugees from Vienna were forced into the specially designated Opole Ghetto. In May 1941, the 800 able-bodied men who had arrived from Vienna were transferred to a forced labor camp in Deblin. Most of the Jews from the Viennese deportation were murdered as part of Operation Reinhard in spring and summer 1942.
In mid March 1941 Gestapo head Heinrich Müller informed the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna that the transports were being stopped, both because of fierce opposition on the part of the German leaders in the General Government and because the German army needed all available rail tracks for use in preparation for Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Under the circumstances, also other “resettlement” plans in the General Government were canceled.
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