Hanau05/30/1942

Close-up view on platform two of the Hanau main train station: The label of the luggage owned by Walter Schwarz from Rückingen can as clearly be seen as his armband with the number 14. No one knows what the number means. Cookware and a thermos bottle can be seen attached to pieces of luggage.

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Historical context

Deportation from Hanau to Majdanek and Sobibor on May 30th 1942

In the morning of May 30, 1942, the municipal police picked up 86 Jewish residents of the Hanau town and rural district from their flats and took them to the Hanau main train station where they were forced to get on four passenger cars provided on platform two. The train took the route via Schlüchtern, Bebra, and Fulda to Kassel. Officers of the municipal and security police who were waiting for the deportees to arrive late in the evening drove them like cattle to the assembly camp at the gymnasium of the Kassel Bürger schools where they were subjected to a humiliating body search. 508 Jews aged under 65 were deported from the administrative district of Kassel. Two nights later, the deportees were compelled to board a train bound for Poland to which further cars with deportees were linked in Chemnitz. After a two-day journey, 98 men aged between 15 and 50 were selected for forced labor for the Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin. The Gestapo transported the remaining deportees on to Sobibor where they were murdered in the gas chambers immediately upon their arrival. The only survivor of this deportation was Robert Eisenstädt who managed to escape from Majdanek.

Sources

Entry on the deportation on the website “Statistics of the Holocaust”Entry on the deportation on the page of Yad Vashem Video „Hanau - One Day in May 1942“Hanauer Juden 1933-1945. Entrechtung, Verfolgung, Deportation Letter of the Kassel Gestapo office to the county commissioners, mayors and police offices in the administrative district dated May 22, 1942

About the image series

Hanau, 05/30/1942

Description

The picture series taken at the Hanau main train station and its forecourt on May 30, 1942 consists of nineteen photographs which record the deportation of the Jews from the Hanau town and rural district. The photographs were taken by Franz Weber, town photographer and head of the Hanau “Bildstelle” (photographic service), who archived the small picture negatives available on six strips (A-F) himself. Contact prints were made, glued on file cards and labeled in the post-war era. They show the deportees waiting in front of the station, boarding the train and the train’s departure in the direction of Kassel on platform two (today: platform nine).

Photographer

Franz Weber

Photo archivist

Franz Weber, born April 24, 1898, was a Hanau elementary school teacher and self-taught photographer. He ardently loved to take pictures and had already put together a large photographic collection when the Nazi authorities tasked him with establishing a local photographic service in 1934. In addition to teaching and managing this “Bildstelle,” he served as the town’s official photographer, taking official images — including those of the deportation of Jews on May 30, 1942. Weber was a member of the NSDAP (German abbreviation of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party). He retired in 1967. He died on February 19, 1984. The “Bildstelle” exists to this day and preserves his estate. Franz Weber’s son Gerhard later commented on his father towards the German newspaper “Frankfurter Rundschau”: “Taking photos was all that mattered to him, he never thought about the consequences.”

Provenance: Franz Weber, photographer of the series, headed the Hanau “Bildstelle” (photographic service) which was established in 1934. There he archived and developed the negatives himself. A photo from the series which shows the Gernsheimer family boarding the train has been preserved at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Holocaust survivor Simon Strauss stated that he had received the print from the US American Military Government in 1945 and written his uncle’s name Ludwig Gernsheimer on it. He showed it on the occasion of two contemporary witness interviews recorded on video which are part of the holdings of the Visual History Archive now.
Call number at source archive: MZHU0098 B03
Title at source archive: Abtransport der Juden nach Kassel 1942
Acknowledgements: Ground-laying research on the deportations from Hesse was done by Monica Kingreen. We thank Sabine Salfer for providing additional information.
Research & Text: Lisa Paduch

Hanau05/30/1942

Deportation from Hanau to Majdanek and Sobibor on May 30th 1942

Hanau, 05/30/1942

Other images in the series

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