From Home to an Unknown Fate: The Deportation of the Jews of Wurzburg

By the end of 1941, World War II had entered its third year. Germany advanced from one conquest to the next; they controlled almost all of Europe, from the outskirts of Moscow to the Pyrenees Mountains on the Spanish border. For the leaders of the Nazi regime, it was the opportune moment to eliminate the remaining Jews from Germany. The two thousand Jews of the small city of Würzburg in southern Germany, located between Frankfurt and Nuremberg, were among the first to be deported.

In November 1941, on a clear winter Thursday, hundreds of Jews, including many elderly and children, gathered under the trees in a square in Würzburg, awaiting the train that would take them to an unknown destination. The children wandered aimlessly, while the elderly sat on chairs, benches, and makeshift seats.

Earlier, the Jews of Würzburg had been required to submit a list of their assets to the authorities. Nearly all of their property was confiscated. The Gestapo, the German police, seized valuables from their homes: according to racial theory, a Jew was not considered a person, and therefore had no right to property, just as a dog or a horse has no such right. Therefore, taking property from them and transferring it to the German authorities was considered an act of justice. The Jews' assets were transferred to local authorities, who in turn transferred them to Nazi institutions or sold them at public auctions.

After plundering their property, the Gestapo forced the Jews to sign a declaration confirming that they were transferring their assets to the state willingly. It was a combination of robbery and humiliation, while attempting to maintain a semblance of legal procedure.

To ensure the deportation proceeded without resistance, escape, or hiding, the Gestapo and local police told the community leaders a softened, fabricated story: they claimed that due to the hardships of war, they claimed, the authorities were forced to transfer the city's Jews to labor camps in the East, where they would contribute to the German war effort. As part of the deception, the Germans allowed each deportee to take tools, some money, a suitcase weighing up to 50 kilograms, clothing, shoes, bedding, eating utensils, and food for two to three weeks. It is doubtful whether the community members believed the lie: what benefit could Nazi Germany, a superpower, derive from the forced labor of a few hundred Jews, including children, elderly individuals, and pensioners, most of whom were merchants who had never worked in a factory or manual labor? Regardless, for most of them, it was already too late to flee, organize resistance, or seek a hiding place.

The Gestapo ordered the Jews to vacate their apartments and sealed them off. The Jews were gathered into groups and required to stand in formations resembling military order. They were then marched through the city streets to a government building, where they were commanded to place all their packages for meticulous inspection. Here, the few valuables they had managed to salvage from their homes and bring with them were confiscated—in other words, robbed. German officials searched their bodies and belongings for hidden valuables, weapons, poison, foreign currency, money, and jewelry. The officials confiscated every item they deemed valuable, including cocoa, chocolate, coffee, honey, and sugar. Even scissor cases, nail files, tobacco, pipes, and cigarettes were confiscated and transferred to the German Reich's authority. Finally, each deportee was ordered to wear a large tag with a number—their personal number—on a ribbon pinned to their coat lapel or collar.

Even if some of the Jews understood they were about to board a train that would take them on their final journey, they did not know how distant their destination would be and how swift their end would come. They were transported over sixteen hundred kilometers northeast and arrived in Riga, Latvia, which had been occupied by the Nazis for about half a year, where they were placed in the Riga Ghetto. At best, all that remained of their earthly possessions was a half-empty suitcase.

Who were the Würzburg Jews deported to Riga? Many of them were merchants and professionals. There were rabbis and teachers amongst them. They were loyal German citizens. Some had served in the German army during World War I and were members of the German veterans' organization, the 'Union of Jewish Front Soldiers.' They included Zionists, modern religious individuals, and also immigrants from Eastern Europe, who were more devout in their religion. They were deeply involved in welfare and charity activities and gave their children a modern education.

They were attacked from the early days of Nazi rule. They were beaten, their cars were confiscated, their businesses were shut down, their organizations were disbanded, and they were forbidden from practicing many professions. After the initial shock, the local Zionist branch began to help many of them plan emigration through vocational training and courses in Hebrew and other foreign languages. Public and social life continued as much as possible, as did welfare and business assistance. The Jewish hospital and the Jewish old age home were expanded, an association was established to hold lectures and performances by Jewish artists, and the Jewish elementary school had expanded.

The persecutions, the plundering of businesses, and the antisemitic incitement continued simultaneously. Hundreds of Jews emigrated from Würzburg, but many others, especially the elderly, were afraid to leave. They feared moving to a foreign country, a different climate, and an unfamiliar language, and wondered how they would make a living when a significant portion of their property and money had been confiscated by the Nazi authorities.

As Würzburg Jews emigrated, their places were taken by other Jews fleeing antisemitic persecution from smaller towns and villages, keeping the city's Jewish population steady at just over two thousand. Even before the Nazis, they were a tiny minority in a city of a hundred thousand, and now, mostly rural newcomers, they were strangers to the locals. This made it easier for Germans to ignore what happened on that cold morning, 27 November 1941, when hundreds were removed from their homes, marched to a government building, and then sent to an unknown destination in the East. The Nazis filmed this 'Jewish Exodus,' as they mockingly called it, “for posterity.”

The train departed early in the morning, reached Nuremberg in the afternoon, and continued to Riga two days later. It carried approximately a thousand Jews, including children, teenagers, families, and elderly people, mostly from Nuremberg and Würzburg, and the rest from small towns and villages.

On December 2, 1941, the Würzburg Jews arrived at the Riga ghetto. Strangely, many of the ghetto's houses stood empty. The Würzburg Jews knew nothing of the fate of the ghetto's previous inhabitants.

Until then, the crowded Riga ghetto housed about thirty thousand Jews, with several families crammed into each apartment. To make room for the expected Würzburg and Nuremberg Jews, the Nazis chose a horrific solution: two days before their arrival, while they were still en route by train, Germans and Latvian policemen expelled 25,000 Jews from the ghetto, marched them eight kilometers in the cold to the Rumbula forest, and shot them to death. Out of the 30,000 Jews, only a few thousand remained in the Riga ghetto.

A few days after the massacre of most of the Riga ghetto's Jews, the Würzburg Jews arrived. They were housed in the ghetto's ghostly dwellings. Some surely looked at the furniture, tables, chairs, beds, and meager household items now standing orphaned, and wondered what had become of the houses' former occupants. This wondering was pushed aside by the hardships of survival, mainly the cold and hunger.

Most of the Jews who arrived on 27 November 1941, were murdered about two years later, in the summer of 1943. The few who survived were deported to Auschwitz at the end of 1943. Of the thousand Jews sent on 27 November 1941, only 52 people survived the war, 15 of them from Würzburg.

These photos were taken in November 1941, when the Germans, as mentioned, were at the height of their military success and did not yet think they would ever have to cover up their actions. When the Nazi Germany’s military failures began, the filming of murders and deportations for extermination decreased, and some of the documentation was destroyed, thinking it might be incriminating evidence if Germany lost and the deportees and murderers had to answer for their crimes.

View the complete album of photos of the deportation in the Yad Vashem photo collection.

Read more about the beginning of the Würzburg Jews' deportation to extermination camps