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The deportations of the Jews
of Schneidemühl — a synopsis
(Copyrighted
material)
Drawing on
hitherto ignored archival material (Cf. file
75 C Re1, No. 483,
Bundesarchiv Berlin, and USHMM Archives: RG-14.003M; Acc. 1993.A.059), it is evident that deportations of
all Jews from the Gau
were primarily planned
on
orders of Franz
Schwede-Coburg, the
notorious Gauleiter
of Pomerania, in
cahoots with
several Nazi authorities of
Schneidemühl. The Gauleiter’s
personal goal was to be the first in the Reich to
declare
his Gau Judenrein
— cleansed of Jews. [Cf. Trial of Adolf Eichmann,
doc.
No.
795]
Thus on Wednesday, 21
February 1940 — merely one week after the
Stettin deportations — Jews
were arrested in Schneidemühl, while mass arrests
of Jews took place concurrently within an 80
km radius of Schneidemühl. Those rounded
up
ranged from
two-year-old children to ninety-year-old men. Surviving documents give
a grim account of the
subsequent Odyssey of
those arrested.
By
then
it
had
been
decreed
in Berlin that the victims of the round-up
should not be
sent to Poland but be kept
within the so-called Altreich,
i.e. within Germany's borders of 1937.
Over
the following eighteen months most of the arrested became ensnared in
the Nazi's maw — on a journey of terminal despair.
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