There have been a plethora of books and academic articles written about the Nazi period in Germany (1933-1945), and the catastrophic, and often murderous effects the Nazis had upon European Jewry. It may therefore appear superfluous to add yet another article to the pile. However, this article exploits new material made available by the opening up of the International Tracing Service’s (ITS) massive documentary archive at Bad Arolsen in 2007 after years of pressure on the managing agency, the International Committee of the Red Cross, to do so. Digital copies of the database were made available to institutions in the member countries².

Drawing on the London based Wiener Holocaust Library’s copy of the ITS database, this article focuses on a very small part of that archive, namely, the 10 Gestapo deportation lists (V/1 – V/10) containing the names of the 435 mostly elderly Jews who were deported the 113 kilometres from Dresden to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in the period July 1942 to December 1944. These deportations were an intrinsic part of the Nazi ideology to make Germany Judenfrei (free of Jews) or Judenrein (purified of Jews). As will be shown in this article, a name on a deportation list was akin to a death sentence. This, of course, was the intention of the Nazis after the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942. As Jah notes (2016)³, the deportation of Jews was carried out for one purpose: whether it was death by murder in the gas chambers, death by over-work in the slave labour camps, or death by starvation and disease in the ghettoes, that goal was the extinction of European Jewry.

In this murderous system, the Theresienstadt Ghetto functioned as a smokescreen for the real intentions of the Nazis⁴. It was presented as a spa town with many facilities where elderly Jews could retire in safety⁵. As the fate of the Jews from Dresden in the article will show nothing was further from the truth, but this myth enabled the Nazis to ‘sell’ to younger Jews their deportation to the east as work assignments⁶. This illusion was even extended to the visit of the International Red Cross (IRC). Prior to the visit on June 23 1944, the ghetto was beautified, but as an eye-witness points out, this beautification was very limited. The barracks were painted only on the street side; the rooms which could be seen from outside were put in order; and in the psychiatric unit the nurses had to put flowers on the ⁷. All this came at the cost of 7,503 individuals who were deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz between May 16 and May 18 1944, in order to reduce the overcrowding there⁸.

In the wake of this visit, the Nazis made a propaganda film to demonstrate their benevolent attitude towards the Jews and to dispel the rumours about the death camps. However, after the film was made, most of the actors in the film and most of the children in the ghetto, were sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau⁹.

The purpose of this article is to show that a close analysis of a group of Jews of roughly the same age, from the same location, going to the same destination and sharing the same fate, can reveal new knowledge about the Holocaust, and can provide a starting point for comparative studies with the experiences of Jews deported from other German and Austrian cities. The evidence presented will also act to dispel the Nazi myth about Theresienstadt being a cosy retirement complex.

Those Jews, who were selected for deportation to Theresienstadt, were chosen primarily on the basis of the criteria set out in the Wannsee Conference of January 1942. These were¹¹:

Aged 65 or over.

Specific facts emerge from this table.

More than twice as many women as men were deported.

Another fact revealed by the information in Table 1 is that the deportations continued until the end of 1944 even when the war was effectively lost. This persistence is demonstrated by the fact that a further deportation, V/11, was planned for the 15 February 1945. There were 56 individuals earmarked for this deportation. This deportation did not occur because of the bombing of Dresden on the night of 13/14 of February which destroyed much of the city’s infrastructure and the Gestapo headquarters¹³. The fact that the deportations continued confirms the view put forward by Longerich (1994)¹⁴ and Held (2008)¹⁵, already mentioned in the Introduction, that ‘purifying’ the German race by expelling all others was a fundamental tenet of Nazism and not subordinate to waging a war. Urban (2013) summarises the climate prevailing for the Jews at that time, writing: “The ideology of race and the fervour with which the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ was developed and then pursued always won the upper hand over rational requirements.”¹⁶

The final observation revealed in Table 1 is that there were fewer people deported on transports V/6, V/7, V/8 and V/9, only for the numbers to increase again with transport V/10. The reason there were fewer people on V/6, V/7, V/8 and V/9 is that there were fewer Jews in Dresden to whom the Wannsee criteria applied than for the previous 5 deportations. This is obliquely confirmed in Turner’s (1999) article on Victor Klemperer when he writes that Klemperer’s friends had disappeared because the deportation of most of Dresden’s Jews had taken place in 1942 and 1943¹⁷.

The increase in numbers occurred again with transport V/10 because the criteria for selection for Theresienstadt established at Wannsee in January 1942 were changed by the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, on 18 December 1943¹⁸. He ordered that Jews who had been married to non-Jews, but who were divorced or whose spouse had died were to be deported to Theresienstadt. However, the situation was so delicate, that Müller had to wait to implement his decision¹⁹. The list for deportation V/10 confirms the change in Theresienstadt selection criteria as there are two additional columns on it: ‘St. A’ (Staatsangehörigkeit/nationality) and ‘Stand’ (marital status). These are shown in Figure 1. Figure 1.

V/10 deportation list¹.

An explanation for some of these facts lies in what was decided at Wannsee.

Table 2, which gives per deportation the number of those that survived and those that perished, confirms the high death rate of 87%. Table 2.

Number of deportees who survived and number who perished.

However, this table also shows that around 64% of those who were deported from Dresden actually perished in the Ghetto whereas according to Yad Vashem’s figures, overall, only 28% of those who were in Theresienstadt actually perished there. The bulk, 85,000, died elsewhere²², so for the majority, the Ghetto was a transit camp.

A possible explanation for this difference could be the age of those deported from Dresden. Figure 2, shows that most of those Jews deported from Dresden to Theresienstadt fulfilled the criteria established at the Wannsee Conference as 324 individuals were 65 or over. Figure 2.

Dresden deportees by grouped by age range.

When looked at from a gender perspective, the results show subtle differences in the survival and death rates between men and women. A summary table below (Table 3) reveals the following:

Table 3.

Death and survival rates by gender.

When the survival rates of men and women are expressed in percentage terms and the average age of male and female deportees is considered as in Table 4, Table 4.

Survival rates by gender and average age.

Then:

Of the 301 female deportees, 43 or 14.3% survived and they had an average age of 63.1 years.

So, in terms of survival, proportionately more women than men survived and those women who survived were slightly older on average than the male survivors.

The proportionately higher survival rate for women is not statistically significant without statistics for all the Theresienstadt survivors split by gender. However, it may be that a more nuanced approach needs to be taken regarding Holocaust survival and gender. The accepted notion is that more men than women survived because men were better equipped to endure the rigours of forced labour and because mothers went with their children into the gas chambers²⁹, but as Theresienstadt was envisaged as a ghetto for elderly Jews, the situation with children did not often arise. As shown in Figure 1 only six individuals of the group studied were under 14. Hajkova (2016) asserts that Theresienstadt was “gender-wise, a man’s world”, and that if women had a role at all, it was in “supporting, affirming and in social roles”³⁰. However, as the experience of the Dresden deportees shows, Theresienstadt may have been ‘a man’s world’, but that did not guarantee that men lived longer than women there as neither men nor women 65 or over were required to work³¹.

Figure 4 shows the percentage of survivors per deportation and indicates that deportations V/8, 19 March 1943, and deportation V/10, 11 January 1944, were the exceptions in terms of survival rate. For all the other deportations, if there were any survivors at all, then only between four and twelve per cent survived. Figure 4.

Survivors per deportation (%).

The deportation lists also contain the place of birth for everyone. This is useful for family origin and for revealing migration movements in Central Europe, but also for indicating nationality. The Nürnberg race laws of 1935 made German Jews second class citizens⁴⁰ and German citizenship was withdrawn completely from them in 1941 when they became stateless⁴¹. Figure 5.

Places of birth.

The last two categories to consider from the deportation transcripts are the occupations and the final addresses of the deportees in Dresden prior to their transportation to Theresienstadt, to determine if either or both of these categories shed any light on the socio-economic status of the Jews deported.

The process of isolating the Jewish citizens of Germany in Dresden from 1933 onwards when the Nazis came to power is well documented⁵⁰. Key features were: the boycott of Jewish shops and businesses from 01 April 1933, the dismissal of Jews from the civil service, universities and cultural institutions between April and November 1933, the Nürnberg race laws of 1935 which took away the right of Jews to vote, the Aryanisation of Jewish businesses especially in 1938-1939, and the confiscation of Jewish buildings and the basics for existence in March 1938⁵¹. This increasing social and economic isolation is the background to the following discussion about the occupations listed on the deportation sheets. The most prevalent occupations are shown in the Table 8 below. Table 8.

Principal Occupations of Deportees from Dresden.

It is impossible to draw any firm conclusions about social standing from the information in Table 8, partly because the restrictions on the economic life of the Jews imposed by the Nazis were so onerous and because the terms ‘businessman’ and ‘sales’ are very vague. Pieper’s (2014) comment that it is impossible to make any statement about social classification from occupational data appears to be supported by the information recorded on the Dresden deportation lists⁵² which is just too vague to be useful for these purposes.

The next step in the isolation of the Jewish population was the forced resettling of the individuals from their family homes and into specific houses, the so-called Judenhäuser or houses for Jews. Goldenbogen (1996)⁵³ uses the term ‘ghettoisation’ to describe this indignity. This process began in Dresden in the autumn of 1939. There were 37 houses set aside for Jews, but only 32 were ever used⁵⁴. A list giving the ‘Jewish’ houses is given in the cutting below (Figure 7). The caption reads: “Clean break between the Jews and Aryans in Dresden to be carried out by 01 April 1940 at the latest.” Figure 7.

Newspaper cutting on the resettlement of Jews in Dresden³.

The purpose of this study was to focus on the deportation of 435 predominantly aged Jews from their homes in Dresden to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and investigate if any new knowledge about the fate of those Jewish people under the Nazi regime emerges from such a study. The reason why this is an important question is that the ITS has only been accessible to the public since 2007, albeit in a limited way, thus giving researchers, family historians and individuals access to the millions of documents contained in its archives.

The main findings of this study arising out of the analysis of the transcribed deportation lists covering 435 deportees are as follows:

The most significant finding is the extraordinarily high death rate at Theresienstadt itself of the Dresden group compared to other inmates at Theresienstadt. Of those Dresden Jews that perished, 74% were murdered at Theresienstadt and 26% at other death camps. This contrasts with the Yad Vashem figures, which show that of the 118,000 individuals who were murdered, only 28% perished in Theresienstadt whilst 72% perished elsewhere⁵⁵.

The general findings that reflect Nazi policies are as follows:

The deportation of Jews from Dresden to Theresienstadt from July 1942 until the end of 1943 was in accordance with the criteria established at the Wannsee Conference of January 1942. The head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, changed this policy on 18 December 1943⁵⁷ and this change was reflected in the series of V/10 deportations from Dresden in 1944, as these contained only Jews whose marriage to a non-Jew had ended either because their partner died or their partner divorced them.

The value of the approach of using deportation lists as springboard for research into the group of elderly people deported from Dresden to Theresienstadt between 1942 and 1944 is best summed up in a document issued by ITS itself which states:

“With the passage of time, the deportation lists which the Prussian sense of order and lucky accident have preserved, appear to be assigned a new importance: from an aid to the search for missing persons, they have developed into an instrument for clarification and warning⁵⁸.”

The evidence presented and highlighted in this conclusion, shows that an analysis of the deportation of elderly Jews from Dresden to Theresienstadt reveals features which would not have been so evident if the lists had not existed. This study also shows that worthwhile results emerge if lists, such as deportations lists, are analysed at group level. They also show that, contrary to the illusion created cynically and deliberately by the Nazis, Theresienstadt was by no means a spa town for elderly Jews, but simply another cog in the German death machine as it rampaged through the Jewish communities of Europe.

Two areas of further study emerge from this project and these are the surprising findings:

The differences in gender survival rates between women and men in the group from Dresden compared with the survival rates between women and men in other camps.

It would be useful to compare these findings with the comparative rates of survival between women and men, and the rates of death in Theresienstadt with groups of elderly Jews from other German cities which had smaller, the same and larger populations of Jews who were deported to Theresienstadt. This would show if Dresden was unique in these characteristics.