Annotations
Fulda
12/8/1941
A municipal police officer looks towards the camera while behind him to the right a youth reaches out with his hand towards the open train door and on his left a man wearing a neck pouch walks towards the photographer. You can see a group of deportees and two further police officers in the background.
Image: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Annotations
Keywords
3
Historical context
Deportation von Fulda nach Riga am 8. Dezember 1941
On December 7, 1941, 132 Jews residing in Fulda had to present themselves at the gymnasium on Rabanusstraße, following the orders of officers from the Gestapo field office in Fulda and the municipal police. The next morning, they had to walk to the train station and board passenger cars that had been attached to the regular train leaving for Kassel at 11:23 a.m. The central assembly point for the deportees from the Kassel administrative district was located in the gymnasia of citizens’ schools nos. 1 and 2 for boys and girls. On the following day, after humiliating luggage and body checks, during which the Gestapo stripped the deportees of their valuables, a total of 1,031 people were guided to the train station by policemen with dogs. The journey to Riga, which took place in extreme cold and with little to eat or drink, lasted 70 hours. Some people died on the train. The first selection was performed at the Riga Skirotava train station: The SS sent a group of men to Riga Salaspils to build a camp there, transported most deportees to the ghetto, and murdered aged or fragile/weak people directly in the surrounding woods. Only twelve out of the 132 Jews from Fulda were to survive the Shoah.
About the image series
The series consists of five photographs which were taken at the main train station of the town of Fulda. They show deportees and police officers in a snowstorm photographed at close range. Three of the photographs are preserved as historical prints in the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The place where the photographs were taken is written on the back of the prints in Yiddish and English; the date they show is wrong, though: “21.XII.41”. One of these pictures is kept as a print of similar quality and with the same wrong date in the photographic archive of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. The other two photographs have survived in digital format only. For an interview the USC Shoah Foundation conducted with Miriam Berline (née Gottlieb), a resident of Fulda, in December 1996, the fronts of the prints that were still available then were photographed/filmed and used here as a screenshot.
Photographer
Unknown, Unknown
The person who took the photographs is not known. The scenes photographed imply that he or she had access to the train platform during the deportation process and could take the pictures at close range. As at least one perpetrator is photographed facing the camera, it can be assumed that the photographs were taken with the consent of or by commission of the police or the town authorities.
Provenance
The photographer of the series is not known. It is evident, though, that he or she took the photos with the consent of the perpetrators. There is no documentation on how the pictures taken in Fulda became part of the YIVO archives or came into Miriam Berline’s possession. It can be assumed that the pictures were passed on by survivors, emigrants or other acquaintances after liberation.
Call number at source archive
RG 120 Germany 1993-45 Fulda 1
Title at source archive
Deportation of Jews from Fulda 1
Acknowledgements
We thank the Berline family for their trust and the committed search for the lost prints.
Students from the “AG Jüdisches Leben” (working group Jewish Life) in Fulda chaired by Anja Listmann were involved in describing the photographs of the deportation from Fulda. We thank them for the fruitful and successful cooperation.
We thank Vital Zajka for the kind correspondence regarding the prints in the YIVO.
Text and research by Lisa Paduch.
Kooperationsverbund #LastSeen. Bilder der NS-Deportationen Dr. Alina Bothe Projektleiterin
c/o Selma Stern Zentrum für Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg
Freie Universität Berlin
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14195 Berlin
lastseen@zedat.fu-berlin.de
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