Deportations from Leipzig and cities of the District Office Central Germany

Scope and content

Contains:
This unit contains digital scans of directories and lists of names of deported Jews that were in the records of the Saxony-Thuringia District Office (from July 1942: Bezirksstelle Mitteldeutschland der Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland / Central Germany District Office) of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany. In a few cases, correspondence (concerning individual victims) has been handed down. The originals are stored in the archives of the Jewish Religious Community in Leipzig.

As part of an administrative reorganization, the so-called Bezirksstelle Mitteldeutschland der Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland was founded in July 1942, combining the territories of Saxony, Anhalt, and Thuringia.

Documented are the deportations from the geographical area of the Bezirksstelle Mitteldeutschland to various ghettos (Theresienstadt, Warsaw, Bełżyce), as well as to the concentration and extermination camps Majdanek, Sobibor, and Auschwitz in the period February 1942 and February 1945. There are lists of Jews from Leipzig, Magdeburg, Dessau, Weimar, Halle, Schmalkalden, Chemnitz, and Dresden, with the individual lists in turn listing the surrounding communities and cities from which those affected had previously been transported and collected in one of the cities mentioned. The surrounding towns and cities are also mentioned in the respective archivival descriptions.

As a rule, the deportation trains originated from other cities of the German Reich and made an intermediate stop in the cities listed above, where additional wagons were coupled or those to be deported had to board.
In the course of processing the inventory in September 2020, an attempt was made to depict the overall context of the deportations: Thus, in the respective archival descriptions/titles, the actual places of departure (and in some cases other intermediate stops) of the deportation are placed in brackets. The fact that this unit corresponds with other sub-collections of the Arolsen Archives (especially sub-collection 1.2.1.1 and the units on deportations from the Gestapo areas of Berlin, Dresden/Chemnitz, Kassel and Hamburg) was also pointed out under the heading "Related units of description". In Theresienstadt, the collective transports were registered according to the point of departure of the deportation. This explains the different Roman numerals with which the deportation trains (to Theresienstadt) are titled.