Annotations
Coesfeld
12/10/1941
Shortly before their deportation by truck, the deportees had to line up for a group picture at the assembly point in Coesfeld castle park, at that time the private property of the princely Salm-Horstmar family. They carry their hand luggage and extra winter clothing.
Image: Stadtarchiv Coesfeld
Annotations
People
19
Historical context
Deportation von Coesfeld nach Riga am 10.12.1941
On the morning of December 10, 1941, nineteen Jews from Coesfeld whom the Nazi authorities "considered fit for transport and work" were picked up by officers of the municipal police at the house of the trader Salomon Eichenwald. All of them had been forced to live there in cramped conditions, some of them since the November pogroms already. These nineteen people were taken to the castle park of the princely Salm-Horstmar family, which was inaccessible to the public. There they were photographed and forced to board a truck that brought them to the Gertrudenhof assembly camp in Münster. After a humiliating body search and luggage inspection, the Jews from Coesfeld and hundreds of other deportees from Münsterland spent three nights sleeping on chairs or the floor in the Gertrudenhof. On December 13, they were deported to Riga via Osnabrück and Bielefeld. The more than 1,000 people on this transport had to walk from the Skirotava train station to the ghetto, whose previous inmates had been murdered shortly before. Out of the nineteen deportees from Coesfeld, only one person was to survive the Shoah.
About the image series
Two photos of the deportation from Coesfeld on December 10, 1941, are known to exist. They were taken shortly after each other, probably within a minute, and show the group of persecutees in the Coesfeld castle park. Before being taken away by truck, they had to line up for a group picture. At that time, the park grounds were owned by the princely Salm-Horstmar family and were not open to the public. Nevertheless, the gate was unlocked on the morning of December 10, 1941, so that the park could serve as an assembly point for the deportees. It is conceivable that the photographer Anton Walterbusch, who had been commissioned by the local leadership of the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutscher Arbeiterpartei / National Socialist German Workers’ Party), took further photographs that have not been preserved. The surviving images are available in different forms: one as a glass negative, the other as a modern print.
Photographer
Anton Walterbusch, Photographer
The photographer Anton Walterbusch, born in 1899, learned his trade in the studio of the Münster photographer Friedrich Hundt; a Mr. Roth is given as his instructor. He had a press license and took many photographs during the war on behalf of the authorities. Among other things, he took detailed photographs of war damage. In December 1941, the local party leadership of the NSDAP commissioned him to document the deportation of Coesfeld's Jewish population.
Provenance
The two known photographs from the Coesfeld series are kept in two different locations. One is included in the estate of photographer Anton Walterbusch in Coesfeld Stadtarchiv (Coesfeld town archives) as an original glass negative. In the 1980s, it was also copied as a slide negative, which is held by the Coesfeld Denkmalbehörde (monuments/memorials administration). It is highly likely that Walterbusch gave the second picture as a print to the families of the survivors Gerd and Fred Hertz. Through the estate of the families living in New York, a print found its way to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where it is currently kept. Wilhelmine Süßkind, the only surviving person pictured, obtained a court order allowing the pictures to be reproduced for non-commercial educational and research purposes only.
Call number at source archive
ohne Signatur
Title at source archive
ohne Titel
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Stadtmuseum Coesfeld as well as Norbert Damberg from Stadtarchiv Coesfeld for supporting our research and for their kind assistance.
Text and research by Lisa Paduch.
Kooperationsverbund #LastSeen. Bilder der NS-Deportationen Dr. Alina Bothe Projektleiterin
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