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The deportations of the Jews
of Schneidemühl — a synopsis
(Copyrighted
material)
Drawing on
hitherto ignored archival material (Cf. file
75 C Re1, No. 483,
Bundesarchiv Berlin, and USHMM Archives: RG-14.003M; Acc. 1993.A.059), it is evident that deportations of
all Jews from the Gau
were primarily planned
on
orders of Franz
Schwede-Coburg, the
notorious Gauleiter
of Pomerania, in
cahoots with
several Nazi authorities of
Schneidemühl. The Gauleiter’s
personal goal was to be the first in the Reich to
declare
his Gau Judenrein
— cleansed of Jews. [Cf. Trial of Adolf Eichmann,
doc. No. 795]
On 15 February 1940 an order had been
issued by the Gestapo in
Schneidemühl
that the
Jews of that town should get ready to be deported within a week,
ostensibly to the Generalgouvernement
in Eastern Poland.
When Dr. Hildegard Böhme
of the
Reichsvereinigung had become aware
of Gauleiter Schwede-Coburg’s plan — and fearing a
repetition of the events
on
the scale of the Stettin deportations — her timely and tireless
intervention on behalf of the Reichsvereinigung with the RSHA in Berlin resulted in a modification
of the planned
deportations of
Schneidemühl’s Jews.
The Stapo, the State
police in
Schneidemühl, however, played its own part in the planned round-up
of the city’s
Jews by
giving in to the local Nazi Party cadre
and
to the orders of the city’s fanatic Mayor Friedrich Rogausch, in
concert
with the Gauleiter. The
latter
two are known to have planned a Schneidemühl-Aktion as a revenge for the earlier
interference by the Reichsvereinigung
in the
Stettin deportations.
On Wednesday, 21
February 1940 — merely a week after the
Stettin expulsions — 160 Jews
were arrested in Schneidemühl, while mass arrests
of Jews took place concurrently within an 80
km radius of Schneidemühl, in
the
surrounding administrative district of
Köslin, Stettin and Grenzmark
Posen-Westpreussen, whereby
384 Jews were seized by the Gestapo. In
total 544 Jews were arrested during the entire Aktion
in and around Schneidemühl. Those rounded
up
ranged from
two-year-old children to ninety-year-old men. Surviving documents give
a grim account of the
subsequent odyssey of
those arrested.
By
then it had been decreed in Berlin that the victims of the round-up
should not be
sent to Poland but be kept
within the so-called Altreich,
i.e. within Germany's borders of 1937. Subsequently the RSHA turned the
entire operation into a spontaneous, tragic
and
un-coordinated event, without the later
pseudo-legal preparations that stripped Jews of all their possessions
prior to their deportations.
Over
the following eighteen months most of the arrested became ensnared in
the Nazi's maw — on a journey of terminal despair.
Soon
after
the mass arrests, every man, woman and child was registered and
literally shuffled
from
one locale of detention to another. Following the initial
round-up,
297
of the detainees were forced to stay overnight in one of the most
inhospitable
locales, the Leichenhalle, or
mortuary, that had been left standing at the
destroyed Jewish cemetery. A further group of 166 persons was housed at
the Bürgergarten. The Jewish prisoners
held
there comprised of families, parents with
teenagers and small children under the ages of five, as well as men and
women in their sixties and
seventies. More than half of those detained in the overcrowded
primitive
quarters were women, and the conditions and the stress soon claimed the
lives
of the oldest and the weakest. Another 81 men, women
and children were confined to
crammed
quarters at the Gemeindehaus,
the Jewish community building.
On
22 February, a group of 104 persons,
largely kept together as married couples or families, was sent from
Schneidemühl to Landwerk Neuendorf im Sande. As a calculated part
of Nazi policy, this former Hachshara camp had
been turned into an Arbeitslager, used as a virtual
reservoir for
cheap farm labor. Only the seemingly healthiest were kept there to do forestry work — the common
Nazi
euphemism for forced labor.
Children
of
all ages were being sent to, and removed again and again, from foster
homes,
children’s homes, old
age homes and hospitals in Berlin and Potsdam. On 27
February, seventeen frail and elderly men and women were sent with a
transport to
institutions
such as the
Berlin Jewish
Hospital and the hospice of the
Berlin Jewish community.
Monday, 11 March 1940. From
the hundreds of men, women and children
still detained in Schneidemühl, a group of 165 persons was
selected to be deported
to a camp in Poznán,
located
in the annexed Polish province
of Poznánia
that had become part of the enlarged area named Warthegau. There the detainees were forced to live
for
the following three weeks under
primitive conditions in
barracks of the garrison, a locale not fit for human
habitation, where hunger
and cold were the
order of the day.
This
camp was known as Durchgangslager
Glówna — not to
be
confused with the town
of Glówno
near Łodz — and was previously used for deporting
Poles, Gypsies and other Jews from
Poznán and from the Polish Corridor
to the General
Gouvernement. In early April 1940 the remaining 161
Jews in camp
Glówna was divided into
three separate
Judentransportgruppen for
further deportations to the Jüdisches
Umschulungslager
Bielefeld, to Berlin and to
Lager
Radinkendorf.
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