June 2022 (#067)
Routinely recording a wedding on the tree – Dorothy marries Peter in 1955 in Hemsworth, Yorkshire – I noticed something unusual. Peter had been born in Munich in 1923.
Upon investigation, I found that – in 23 Nov 1941 – his parents Siegfried and Paula has been deported by train from Munich, bound for a ghetto in Riga. There was apparently some controversy on how 59,000 deportees would be accommodated, and whether Reich jews were as inhuman as Ostjuden.
Eventually, five of the trains – 5000 people – were diverted to Kaunus in Lithuania. When the train reached the late C19 fortification on the outskirts of the city, the train was emptied and the SS shot everyone.
Addendum April 2023
Mum has a third cousin, Dorothy, last known in Nottingham about 20 years ago. The picture is her mother’s wartime registration card showing that she was married in Jersey in 1942. It also shows that she was transported to Germany in 1943 with two children.
Hitler had ordered the first batch of over 5000 mainland-British-born deportations and their families in 1941 as reprisal for Britain holding German ex-pats in Persia. In 1943, 201 more – including Phyllis and her British-born husband Sydney and their daughters Dorothy and Marcia – were deported in reprisal for a commando raid on Sark.
The family were interned at a former Hitler youth summer camp, with a view of the Bavarian alps, at Biberach an der Riß. Conditions were overcrowded and unsanitary, and twenty died of disease, including – in October 1944 Sydney and, just before Christmas, Marcia. The camp was liberated on St George’s Day, 1945, and the internees flown to England in May. Phyllis died in Sheffield in July 1945. Dorothy was seven years old.