Hannoverscher Bahnhof as a Deportation Station
“One was ashamed to belong to the German people in whose name all of this was supposedly happening.” (Erwin Garvens, 1941)
From 1940 to 1945, the station was used for deportations: During that time, twenty railway transports departed from Hannoverscher Bahnhof. With them went at least 7692 Jews, Roma and Sinti from Hamburg and northern Germany, destined for the ghettos and concentration camps of central and eastern Europe – for most of them, a journey into death. Not only committed National Socialists in Hamburg, but a multitude of compliant individuals from various authorities, agencies and privately-owned companies were responsible for the smooth implementation of the deportations. For the most part, the “People’s Community,” profiting in many ways from the deportations, looked the other way.
Today, this site in the eastern part of the newly emerging HafenCity symbolizes the historical closeness between normality and barbarity like hardly any other in Hamburg.
The Deportation to Bełżec
In northern Germany around 16 May 1940, criminal detectives began arresting hundreds of Roma and Sinti, interning them in the fruit warehouse at Magdeburg Harbor for several days. On 20 May 1940, 910 persons (550 from Hamburg, 200 from Schleswig-Holstein, and 160 from Bremen) were taken away on the first deportation from Hannoverscher Bahnhof, destined for Bełżec. »
The Deportation to Łódź
In September 1939, Poland was attacked and occupied by Germany’s military. Its second-largest city, Łódź, was renamed Litzmannstadt, and became Hamburg’s official partner city. Shortly after invading, the German occupiers began harassing and disfranchising the Jews. In February 1940, they enclosed several neighborhoods into a hermetically sealed ghetto, walling in some 164,000 people under catastrophically unhygienic conditions. »
The Deportation to Riga
The Hamburg and Lübeck Jews deported to Riga on 6 December 1941 were first interned at the provisional Jungfernhof concentration camp. The one-time country estate consisted of a manor house, barns, small barracks and cattle sheds. Most of the buildings were dilapidated and not heated. Some 4000 persons were accommodated here. »
The Deportations to Minsk
Before the German occupation, one of the Soviet Union’s largest Jewish communities lived in Minsk, Belorussia. In mid-July 1941, the German occupiers ordered the Jews to move into a two-square-kilometer ghetto, in the city’s northeast. It mostly contained wooden houses of one or two stories. The first transport of Hamburg Jews arrived in Minsk on 11 November 1941, with the second one departing Hamburg on 18 November. »
The Deportations of Jews to Auschwitz
The deportation transports went directly from Hamburg to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The transport in July 1942 contained 300 people, and the second in February 1943 contained 24. The destination was not disclosed, only that they were heading east. »
The Deportations of Roma and Sinti to Auschwitz
In his “Auschwitz Decree” of 16 December 1942, SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered that all remaining gypsy families left in the German Reich were to be deported to Auschwitz. Beginning in 1943, thousands of Roma and Sinti were rounded up in the occupied countries of Europe and brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau. There, they were imprisoned in Section B II e, referred to by the SS as the “gypsy camp.” A “Z” (for Zigeuner, “gypsy”) and a number were tattooed on their arms. »
The Deportations to Theresienstadt
In November 1941, the Nazi leaders designated the former garrison town Theresienstadt, sixty kilometers north of Prague, as a ghetto for Jews from Bohemia and Moravia. Beginning in July 1942, they used Theresienstadt as an “old-age ghetto” for German and Austrian Jews. The Hamburg Gestapo sent the first of eleven transports to Theresienstadt on 15 and 19 July 1942. These deportations accounted for 1697 people in July alone. The last transport left Hamburg in February 1945. »