77 years ago closed Theresiendstad, the Nazi camp “for families”

On July 12, 1944, Adolf Hitler’s men closed what became known as the “Camp for the Families of Theresiendstadt“, a section adjacent to the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau.

To empty, between July 10 and 12 murdered 7,000 people. Also known as “Terezin field“It had been opened on September 8, 1943 to lock up the Jews who lived concentrated in the Theresiendstadt ghetto, on the territory of then Czechoslovakia occupied by Nazi Germany.

Nazi propaganda called Theresiendstadt “The city Hitler gave to the Jews.” It was hell like any ghetto.

The intention of the Nazis when they created this camp was to show the world, through visits from the International Red Cross, that the concentration camps were in fact places where people locked up were treated with a certain humanity. A facade.

Most of the Jews locked up in Terezin had arrived in one of the large transports which took place between September and December 1943 and then in May 1944.

“Privileges? “

When they arrived on the ground, they were not selected and had what the Nazis called “privileges”, like a barracks for children and which they received lessons.

Although this is not an extermination camp like Auschwitz or Treblinka might be, the death rate was very high.

Of the 17,517 Jews who came to pass through Terezin, only 1,294 survived the war.

Most died of hunger and disease. The rest during the massacres of March 8 and 9 and those that took place before its closure, between July 10 and 12, the date of which today marks the 77th anniversary.

“Field for families”

Post-war academic studies believe (no Nazi documentation is available) that the Nazis created what they knew as a “family camp” to have a place that would show the International Red Cross that the Jews who were ‘they deported were not sent to death.

There they locked up the Jews who were deported from the Czechoslovak ghetto of Theresiendstadt, from which it later took its name.

Most of the Jews locked up and died of starvation, disease or murder in Terezin were Czechoslovakians.

Groups of German, Austrian and Dutch Jews also ended their days in Terezin.

When the Nazis made the great deportations to this camp from Czechoslovakia, they told the Jews that they were being sent to Birkenau to establish a new labor camp.

There was massive deportations more than daily arrivals as in other areas. On September 6, 1943, in two transports, 5,007 Jews arrived in Terezin.

Tattoos and letters

None were killed on arrival. They weren’t shaved, they weren’t wearing prison uniforms, but they were tattooed.

They were forced to write letters to relatives who remained in the Theresiendstadt ghetto. The Nazis tried this way deny the information already circulating about the mass killings.

If the deportees wrote letters, they were still alive. Their tattoo read “SB6”, which meant they would be killed six months after entering the field.

The land was led by Fritz Buntrock, senior Nazi SS official known as the “bulldog” among the prisoners.

After the war, he was tried by Polish justice and sentenced to death. On January 28, 1948, he was hanged in Montelupich Prison, a facility near Krakow that the Nazis had used since their invasion of Poland in 1939.

Buntrock named Arno Böhm, a German who had been convicted of murder, Lagerältester (kapo). In March 1944, Böhm joined the SS and his post was taken by another criminal, Wilhelm Brachmann.

It was different. Sentenced for petty theft, he tried on several occasions, according to post-war accounts, to help the Jews.

Make-up to show off to the world

Terezin was small. It was only 600 meters by 150 meters. It was a rectangle that got muddy when it rained and was surrounded by an electrified fence.

Prisoners at Auschwitz believed Terezin had better conditions, but death rates were not far off for prisoners who were not killed on arrival.

Those locked up in the camp were officially entitled to receive packages that could be sent to them by the International Committee of the Red Cross or by their friends and family in Czechoslovakia.

It was a theoretical right because the packages were systematically stolen by the SS. The field had 32 barracks. Men, women and children under 14 slept in separate barracks.

Adolf Eichmann met Terezin. In February 1944, the Nazi Holocaust architect visited the camp accompanied by a delegation from the German Red Cross, also controlled by the Nazis.

He applauded what the camp leaders “sold” as cultural activities. Eichmann’s visit from 1944 showed that the Nazis continued with the idea of ​​making this field the one they could show the world.

The killings

In March, there was a first massacre. After deceiving the prisoners with an alleged transfer to a labor camp, the Nazis separated men, women and children.

SS agents in Joseph Mengele’s service selected twins to later perform their horrific pseudo-medical experiments.

The men were taken to Crematorium III in Auschwitz and the women to Crematorium II. Within hours, 3,792 people were gassed.

The sonderkommando They reported after the war that by stripping and gassing, the prisoners sang the Czech anthem, the Hatikvah and the International.

The end

At the end of June, when the Auschwitz crematoriums were operating at full capacity, the closure of Terezin and the assassination of the remaining prisoners were prepared.

During these months, between May and July 1944, over 300,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered at Auschwitz.

On July 2, all people between the ages of 16 and 45 who could work were separated. More than 3,500 people (men, women and just under 100 children) have been transferred. The remainder, around 6,500 people, were murdered in the gas chambers between July 10 and 12, 1944.

The women who were not killed, around 2,000, ended up mostly in the Stutthof camp. About 1,000 men were sent to Sachsenhausen. The children stayed at Auschwitz.

Of all these people, two-thirds died before the end of the war, from diseases, hunger, assassinations or in the death marches with which the Nazis tried to prevent Soviet troops from finding the camps. concentration and extermination during their advance towards Poland.

Almost 18,000 people have passed through this field. At the end of the war, there were 1,294.

Live to tell the horror

At least three of these survivors wrote books of memory about their experience. Otto Dov Kulka, who arrived in Terezin at the age of 10 and passed through Auschwitz, arrived in Israel in 1949. He died on January 29. He was a historian, writer and university professor. His field work is titled “Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death”.

Gerhard Durlacher was a Jew born in the German city of Baden-Baden to a Dutch family. He arrived in Terezin at the age of 15 after fleeing the Nazis with his family in 1937 and taking refuge in Dutch soil.

After the liberation of Auschwitz he returned to the Netherlands, where over the years he was a university professor of sociology. He is the author of several books. About Terezin he wrote “Lines in the Sky”. He died in Haarlem, the Netherlands, in 1996.

Ruth Klüger was born in 1931 in Vienna. At the age of 12 he came to Terezin and in 1944 to Auschwitz. In 1945, when they were transferred from the Christianstadt camp in Lower Silesia during one of these death marches, Ruth and her mother they managed to escape.

After a long journey, they took refuge in Bavaria and emigrated in 1947 to the United States. Ruth was 16. He studied in New York and California, where he made his living. She became a professor at Princeton and a visiting professor at the German University of Göttingen. He was one of the world’s authorities on German literature.

In 1992, he published “Continue Living”, a reflection on deportation and extermination. He died in October of last year in Irvine, California.

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