Jews, Sinti, Roma:Nazi regime deports thousands of hamburgers

On May 20, 1940, the Nazi regime in Hamburg began its systematic deportations. After Sinti and Roma, the Nazis soon also deported Jews to Eastern Europe. Few survive.

by Dirk Hempel

Eighty years ago, around nine months after the start of the Second World War with the invasion of Poland and its occupation, systematic deportations began in Hamburg on May 20, 1940, first of Sinti and Roma, and soon of people of Jewish origin as well. For years they have been registered, disenfranchised and persecuted by the Nazi authorities across the country. Now, on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, the "Reichsfuhrer SS and Chief of the German Police", they are to be taken to the East, their property is to be stolen, their labor is to be exploited.

Deportations begin with Sinti and Roma

Four days earlier, the criminal police had arrested more than 900 Sinti and Roma in Hamburg, Bremen, Kiel, Flensburg and other northern German cities - men, women and children. They were taken to the port of Hamburg in trucks and buses and crammed into Fruchtschuppen C. There they are registered and have to hand in their papers and valuables. Then the police drive them to the nearby Hanoverian train station, the city's central freight depot. There is a great crowd on the platform. There are policemen everywhere.

Children also have to do forced labor

The journey in the overcrowded goods wagons to Bełżec in Poland, where the Sinti and Roma are locked up in a forced labor camp, takes three days. Until the summer of 1940, the children also had to do the hardest work here. They dig an anti-tank ditch to protect the border against the nearby Soviet Union. Food is scarce, there is no running water, and there is no doctor either. Many die. The survivors are later taken to a penitentiary in Krychow and used to drain the bog and channel the Bug River. The following year, the SS transported the prisoners to various ghettos and the Auschwitz concentration camp. Few survive.

From October 1941 Jews are also deported

In Hamburg, the deportations from the Hanover train station continued on October 25, 1941. This time, the Nazi authorities deported 1,034 Jews to the ghetto in Łódź, Poland. Nazi Gauleiter Karl Otto Kaufmann, head of the Hamburg state and municipal administration since the late 1930s, personally pleaded with Hitler to have them transported away. He wants to distribute their apartments to other Hamburgers who have recently become homeless in a heavy bombing raid. In the Łódź ghetto, the deportees live in misery. Thousands do forced labor here for the Wehrmacht - and also private companies. In the years that followed, 200,000 people from the Łódź ghetto were murdered in the nearby Chelmno and Auschwitz extermination camps.

In October 1941, the Nazi regime began to systematically deport Jews to the East in many German cities. They are first transported to ghettos and labor camps in Poland and the occupied territories of the Soviet Union and later from there to the death camps. Since 1942, the Reichsbahn deportation trains have also been going directly from Germany to Majdanek, Sobibor and Auschwitz.

Thousands of Hamburgers are murdered in the East

In November 1941, another 1,955 Jews were taken in two transports from Hamburg to Minsk, where they were first forced to do forced labor in a camp. Many of them are shot in May and September 1943 or suffocated in trucks with exhaust fumes. At the beginning of December 1941, the Nazi authorities deported 753 Jews from Hamburg, Lüneburg and Lübeck to the Latvian capital Riga. Among them is the Chief Rabbi of Hamburg, Dr. Joseph Carlebach with his wife and three daughters. In the camp, Carlebach secretly organizes school classes and provides religious support. But in the spring of 1942 he and his family were shot in a nearby forest.

The Nazi authorities also deported other Hamburg Sinti and Roma twice more to the East, to the "gypsy camp", as it was called in Nazi parlance, part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, where most of them were murdered.

Deportations from Hamburg:applause instead of protest

Thousands more people were deported from Hamburg by the Nazi authorities up to 1945, and 18 more trains traveled from the Hanover train station to the ghettos and camps of Central and Eastern Europe. The deportations did not take place in secret, but before the eyes of the Hamburg population. The collection points are in the middle of the city, mostly in the Grindelviertel, for example in the Logenhaus at Dammtor station, in the Jewish community center (today's Hamburger Kammerspiele) or the Talmud Torah school. Some people are shocked and turn away. Business people donate food anonymously during the first transports - but there are never any protests. Many Hamburgers even welcome the kidnapping of their fellow citizens. They applaud when the Jews have to get on the trucks that take them to the freight depot. Shouts like "It's good that the pack is swept out!" get loud. And at public auctions, tens of thousands bid on the property of the deportees.

Transports of political opponents

But not only transports with Sinti, Roma and Jews leave the Hamburg freight station, the National Socialists also banish political opponents from the city from here. In 1942 and 1943, the regime forced more than 1,000 Hamburgers, who had previously been imprisoned in prison or concentration camps, into Wehrmacht punishment and probation units. You have to fight on the front lines in the Soviet Union, in the Balkans and in Africa and carry out particularly dangerous operations such as mine clearance. Four-fifths of those soldiers die.

Of the at least 8,071 Jews, Sinti and Roma who were deported from the Hanover train station between 1940 and 1945, only a few hundred survived; the exact number cannot be determined. The last transport left the Hanseatic city on February 14, 1945, a few weeks before the end of the war.

Those responsible go unpunished

The officials of the Hamburg administration who were involved in the deportations - finance officials, officials from the housing authorities, the Reichsbahn, the police and the criminal police - are never brought to justice, but mostly remain in office after the end of the Nazi regime.

The place of remembrance today

The Hannoversche Bahnhof is demolished in 1955, only part of a platform has been preserved. Today the Lohsepark is located there in Hafencity. Since 2017, the memorial "denk.mal Hannoverscher Bahnhof" has commemorated the deportations. A documentation center is to be opened in 2023.