On November 8, 1941, around 1,000 Hamburg Jews were deported to Minsk. Almost all died on the way or were later killed. In total, the Nazis deported around 8,000 Jews, Sinti and Roma from Hamburg.
The ticket to death reached several Jewish households in Hamburg the day before, on November 7, 1941. On this day, 20-year-old Heinz Rosenberg, his sister Irmgard, their parents and hundreds of others received a letter from the SS commando.
Forced transport disguised as resettlement
Hamburg-based Heinz Rosenberg was one of the few deported Jews to survive in Belarus.The order is to go the following morning with packed suitcases to the former lodge on Moorweidenstrasse. "The apartment key must be handed in at the nearest police station before leaving. The apartment and its contents may not be sold or damaged," it says and:"All property, accounts, cash and valuables are hereby confiscated."
According to the Nazis, the reason for this is a large-scale resettlement of German Jews in the East. In truth, Rosenberg and the others are awaiting deportation to Belarus, which the Germans invaded and occupied in the summer of that year. It is the first forced transport of European Jews to the Soviet Union. Rosenberg will be one of the few to survive the trip to Minsk and the years to come. It is also thanks to his notes that we know what horrors await Hamburg and tens of thousands of other Jews in Belarus.
As an "enemy of the German government" no right to property
Before departure, the Nazis in the deportation administration compel all Jews to sign the following text:"I, the undersigned Jew, hereby confirm that I am an enemy of the German government and as such have no right to the property left behind by me. My German citizenship is hereby revoked and I am stateless from November 8, 1941." Later, they are taken from Moorweidenstraße in police cars to Hannoverscher Bahnhof, which is located in what is now Hafencity. There they are pushed onto trains. Destination:Minsk. Heinz Rosenberg describes the trip like this:
"The wagons were not heated, the compartments were overcrowded with people and luggage. At each stop, the SS guards surrounded the entire train with their pistols drawn."
Deportees have to clear away the bodies of former ghetto residents
Around 1,000 people spend three and a half days crammed into the compartments. They are only allowed to get off at the Minsk train station to march to what will be called the "Hamburg Ghetto" in the future - although Jews from many other German and European cities will be imprisoned there over the coming months.
In the camp, which is fenced off with barbed wire, is a former schoolhouse. Those who have arrived will be housed there. When they enter, they find something horrible:bodies are lying around everywhere. It is the Belarusian Jews who previously lived in the existing ghetto. They were shot in a Nazi murder campaign to make room for the Reich German deportees - on the day the SS summons was issued to the Jews of Hamburg.
Under threat of violence, the SS men force the prisoners to clear away the bodies. The last meals of the murdered are still on the tables.
"The dead were carried to a place in the yard, the inventory was simply thrown out of the windows and later burned in the yard",
writes Heinz Rosenberg. They spend the first night in the house without water, light, fire or furniture.
Estate as administrative center of the largest Nazi extermination site in Belarus
In the coming days, the Nazis divided the deportees into "prisoner functionaries" who were able to work and those from whom they expected no benefit. Old, sick and weak are shot or die of hunger and cold. Rosenberg is used for timber and food transport, among other things. Trains carrying Western European Jews now regularly arrive in Minsk, and the Nazis choose a village near Minsk for their systematic extermination:Maly Trostenets.
German hits blare to shootings
There, the former Karl Marx collective farm is converted into the property of the commander of the security police in Belarus. In order to ensure their supply of food and everyday goods, the Nazis used prisoners as craftsmen and in agriculture. The estate becomes the administrative center of the largest extermination site on Soviet soil. Tens of thousands of people are shot dead in the nearby Blagovshchina forest. Contemporary witnesses report that the firing squads let German hits blare through the forest over a public address system during the killing actions:"Everything will pass, it will all pass".
The grandparents of singer-songwriter Biermann were also "shot into the pit"
About 20 relatives of the Hamburg-based singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann, including his grandparents, died in this way. "All of them, without a single exception" were - probably on the same train as the Rosenberg family - deported from Moorweide to the ghetto in Minsk in November 1941 "and then shot into the pit by soldiers in the city forest," writes Biermann in an essay in the "Welt".
Trucks as mobile gas chambers
From around June 1942, the Nazis in Trostenets also used so-called gas vans:These trucks, which look like furniture vans from the outside, have a box-shaped, airtight structure. The exhaust gases are fed in through a hose when the engine is started. Up to 100 people suffocate per killing action. Their corpses are buried in the Blagovshchina Forest of Death. Heinz Rosenberg's parents and his sister are also murdered in gas vans.
Sonderkommando destroys traces of mass murder
In early 1943, the Red Army defeated the Germans at Stalingrad. Fearing the consequences of their atrocities, the occupiers begin to cover up the mass murders in Maly Trostenets. In "Sonderkommando 1005" prisoners from Minsk have to pull the corpses out of the pits with iron hooks, stack them and burn them. Then they sift through the ashes to find gold teeth and jewellery. In order not to leave any eyewitnesses of the action alive, those who carry out the "de-earthing" are regularly murdered themselves.
The Minsk ghetto is also dissolved:almost all of the residents are killed and the buildings are blown up. Heinz Rosenberg from Hamburg survived and spent the time until the end of the war in other concentration camps, until he was rescued by the British when Bergen-Belsen was liberated in 1945. He later emigrated to the USA, where he lives under the name Henry Robertson. He dies in New York in 1997.