Coos Wever
The Journey of the Last Evacuation Transport from Bergen-Belsen to Tröbitz, April 9-23, 1945
2020 | Full access
In April 1943, the SS established the “Bergen-Belsen Exchange Camp”. From July 1943 onwards, groups of Jews from all over Europe were brought to this camp. The German intention regarding these Jews was to exchange them for Reich citizens who had been arrested and interned by the Allies.
From spring 1944, Bergen-Belsen transformed from an Exchange Camp to a concentration camp. In the final stages of WWII, between December 1944 and mid-April 1945, at least 85,000 men, women, and children were deported to Bergen-Belsen from other concentration camps. There was neither room nor facilities for these numbers of prisoners in the camp. As a result, tens of thousands of prisoners died in Bergen-Belsen in the first months of 1945.
In order to make space for regular prisoners in Bergen-Belsen, at one point in spring 1945 it was decided to evacuate the Exchange Camp. Three evacuation transports, with 6,700 exchange prisoners, left Bergen-Belsen, all with Theresienstadt as their destination.
The first transport left the ramp of Bergen station on April 8 and was liberated on April 13 in Farsleben by American troops. The second transport left on April 9 and reached Theresienstadt on April 20, 1945.
The third transport left around midnight between April 10 and 11. The train wandered for almost two weeks between the different fronts and was finally liberated on April 23 by Soviet troops near the village of Tröbitz. Because for a long period nothing was known about the fate of this third evacuation transport, also after its liberation, it became known as the “Lost Train.”
The aim of this thesis is to give a comprehensive and chronological account of the journey of the “Lost Train”, from the moment the prisoners started leaving Bergen-Belsen to the ramp outside of the camp on April 9, its departure around midnight between April 10 and 11, and its journey until the liberation on April 23, 1945. The conditions faced by the prisoners on the “Lost Train” and their attempts to survive on their two-week journey are described. 133 prisoners would not survive the journey. The bodies of the dead were buried in several locations or left alongside the railroad tracks if burial was impossible. A “death list” of the deceased was administered during the journey.
The thesis places the journey of the “Lost Train” in the historical context of Bergen-Belsen’s transformation from an Exchange Camp into a concentration camp and adds to our knowledge on the final stages of Nazi Germany.
Supervisor:
Prof. Dan Michman