Deportation and its Consequences

Despite arrests being regularly photographed, no images of individuals boarding the trains are known to have survived. Survivors refer to “old French carriages.”

It is highly probable that seven trains from Baden were joined together in Freiburg. From here they travelled over the Rhine bridge near Breisach to Mulhouse, and from there passed through Belfourt and Dijon. Here, they met the two trains from the Saar-Palatinate district which had come through the border town of Forbach. In Forbach, the deportees from Saarland, who had previously been rounded up close to the border in Saarbrucken, also boarded the train and joined the others. As a consequence, nine trains passed the border by Chalon-sur-Saône into unoccupied France and were directed, through Toulouse, to Oloron-Sainte-Marie. The journey was more than 1,500 kilometres. After three to four days, the exhausted deportees arrived at their destination and were brought to the Gurs camp.

After her successful escape to the USA through Lisbon, Carola Loeb wrote this report for her children and grandchildren. Within, she extensively describes the behaviour of her German neighbours, of the “little Hitlers”, and the “good people”. She also documents with precision the train journey in carts without toilets, the places where they could buy food and drink, and where they could wash. <br /> <br /> Extract from a report by Carola Loeb, 13.10.1941
© Original im Privatbesitz von Ruth Külbs, Kopie im Besitz von Bernhard Kukatzki, S. 1
After her successful escape to the USA through Lisbon, Carola Loeb wrote this report for her children and grandchildren. Within, she extensively describes the behaviour of her German neighbours, of the “little Hitlers”, and the “good people”. She also documents with precision the train journey in carts without toilets, the places where they could buy food and drink, and where they could wash.

Extract from a report by Carola Loeb, 13.10.1941
Extract from a report by Carola Loeb, 13.10.1941
© Original im Privatbesitz von Ruth Külbs, Kopie im Besitz von Bernhard Kukatzki, S. 3
Extract from a report by Carola Loeb, 13.10.1941
Extract from a report by Carola Loeb, 13.10.1941
© Original im Privatbesitz von Ruth Külbs, Kopie im Besitz von Bernhard Kukatzki, S. 4
Extract from a report by Carola Loeb, 13.10.1941
© Stadtarchiv Lörrach, 2.43.7
Photo by an unknown photographer (possibly Gustav Kühner), 1940

It was also in order to repair a crumbling national budget that the Nazi regime attempted to seize Jewish property after the November Pogrom in 1938 – although these assets were, of course, not larger than those owned by the non-Jewish German population. After the deportations, many places held “bargain-hunts for national comrades”. The photograph is part of a larger series from Lörrach and shows the great crowds of people that were drawn by the public auctions.

© Arbeitskreis Justiz und Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus in Mannheim
Photo of Walter Wassermann

Walter Wassermann was defined as a “half-Jew” after the implementation of the Nurnberg Laws. At the age of 14 he was made to work as a forced labourer. Unlike his Jewish grandparents, he was not deported in October 1940. On the 13th of February 1945, three months before the end of the war, he was deported to Theresienstadt. After the liberation he returned to Mannheim. 60 years later he began to give testimony on his family’s history. He died in 2014.