Annotations
Weingarten (Baden)
10/22/1940
Two trucks pick up Jewish citizens in front of the town hall in Weingarten to take them to the assembly point in Karlsruhe. Uniformed police officers watch over the deportation and the loading of the luggage.
Image: Bürger- und Heimatverein e.V. Weingarten
Annotations
Historical context
Deportation von Weingarten (Baden) nach Gurs am 22.10.1940
On October 22, 1940, the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot), the Gestapo and the municipal police deported at least 6,504 Jews from Baden and the region then known as Saarpfalz (English: Saar-Palatinate) to the Gurs internment camp in unoccupied southwestern France. Twenty-four people from Weingarten who were persecuted as Jews were arrested by the municipal police and given two hours to present themselves at the town hall at an early hour in the morning with a maximum of 50 kg of luggage and 100 Reichsmark in cash.
Uniformed police officers used two trucks to transport them to the “Fürstenbahnhof” assembly point at the main train station in Karlsruhe. They travelled on a French passenger train which passed through Mulhouse and Chalon-sur-Saône and took them to Oloron-Sainte-Marie in the Basses-Pyrénées department of France, where they probably arrived on October 25 or 26, 1940. They were taken to Gurs by truck.
Starting in August 1942, the prisoners were deported to the Auschwitz death camp via the Drancy assembly camp near Paris. Two people from Weingarten survived the persecution and emigrated to the USA.
About the image series
One photograph of the deportation from Weingarten has survived. The picture was taken from a great distance, from the steps of the former movie theater at the corner of Bruchsaler Straße/Jöhlinger Straße. It shows the deportation of Jews from Weingarten to the assembly point in Karlsruhe. As well as people with suitcases and other luggage, the picture also shows two trucks (one of them with a tarpaulin) and uniformed police officers in front of the town hall and the former inn “Zum goldenen Lamm.” None of the people on the photo have yet been identified by name.
Photographer
Gustav Hörmann, tailor
Gustav Hörmann was born on July 22, 1921, in Weingarten. He was a keen amateur photographer. In 1940, he was working in a shop on Kaiserstraße in Karlsruhe that sold made-to-measure clothes, including uniforms. According to his own statement, he saw crowds of people in Karlsruhe in the late afternoon of October 22, 1940, after he had finished work. On returning to Weingarten, he rushed home to get his camera and took a snapshot of the deportation of the Jews in front of the town hall in Weingarten. After the war, he ran his own tailor shop as a trained master tailor from 1948 to 1954.
Provenance
For many decades, the photo was in the possession of Gustav Hörmann, who took it himself in 1940. According to his own statement, Hörmann kept the photo together with various other prints that he had not organized or sorted in a shoe box at his parents’ house. It was not until many years later that he organized and labeled the large number of pictures it contained. He labeled the photo of the deportation as follows: “Deportation of Weingarten Jews, October 22, 1940.” In 2009, Hörmann made the photo available to the Bürger- und Heimatverein e.V. Weingarten for publication in the “Weingartener Heimatblätter.” The original print can no longer be found.
Call number at source archive
Ohne Signatur
Title at source archive
Ohne Titel
Acknowledgements
The description of the photo is based on research carried out by the Bürger- und Heimatverein e.V. Weingarten.
Text und Recherche: Kerstin Hofmann.
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