Kladovo transport

At the end of September,the men of the transport were transferred to the KZ Šabac and shot on 12 and 13 October by units of the Wehrmacht on the orders of General Franz Böhme.

The British considered Jewish refugees from the hostile areas as "enemy aliens" as they left the Balkans to acquire disused ocean vessels.

Eichmann threatened that all Hechaluz members who had not yet emigrated - there were hundreds waiting in the Hachshara camps outside Vienna for their departure - with deportation to Poland if they did not leave the country.

Ferdinand Ceipek, a former National Socialist, supported the Jewish rescue attempts and helped obtain 800 regular entry visas to Slovakia.

The group was approximately one third children and adolescents up to the age of 17, of which half were accompanied by their parents, and the rest in the care of youth associations.

The remainder was made up of veteran Zionists, who had previously been waiting in vain for entry certificates because of their age, as well as couples and not least individual Jews who were still able to pay a significant amount for the trip despite the political circumstances.

Equally mixed were the participants with regard to their social origins; they represented the entire spectrum of the Jews of Central Europe, and their religiosity also ranged from Orthodox to moderately traditional to atheistic.

They could only grab a backpack with personal belongings, which could not exceed more than eight kilos, and according to the "emigration tax threshold", ten Reichsmark in foreign exchange.

After about ten days' stay, they were brought to the port in buses and were able to board the DDSG steamship Uranus, flying the swastika flag.

These were chartered at premium rates on behalf of Mossad agent Moshe Agami by the "Association of Jewish Communities of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia."

Meanwhile, the weather conditions made an onward journey impossible, and the Danube iced up, so the riverboats went back to Kladovo, where they were to spend the winter.

The General Secretary of the Federation of Jewish Communities of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Sime Spitzer, through the Yugoslav government, had to commit himself to take over the group's accommodation.

In addition, the port could only be reached with a 24-hour delay due to its unfavorable position and the winter conditions, including a seven-hour sleigh ride, as the nearest railway station was 54 km away.

Around mid-January, a converted river barge with 280 beds and coke-burning stoves was provided as a relief ship, and after a few weeks, they were given permission to use a narrow shoreline for walking under the guard of gendarmes.

She observed that the refugees on board had, among others, already set up a shoe and clothing repair shop, published their own newspapers and taught Hebrew and English courses.

650 people were housed in the village that partly consisted of mud huts and had about 2,000 inhabitants - especially families and elderly, and 18-30 year-old members of the Hachshara youth.

On May 12, Sime Spitzer and Chief Rabbi David Alcalay came from Belgrade and held a general appeal on the sports field, where they praised the refugees for their perseverance and courage and promised that they would still reach their destination.

However, the journey towards Constanta, where it was to be repaired and adapted for the transport, only began on November 2, as there had been inconsistencies between the Mossad, the Americans and Spitzer due to the payment of the bill for the necessary coal.

However, when the train came with a Greek flag, he saw in it a risk that was too big for him to take, as he wrote to the Mossad agent Ruth Klüger: For this, we are an institution that is much too responsible.

The journey of the last group threatened to collapse, as all railcars required for mobilization of troops in Yugoslavia; finally, they were able to leave.

On May 30, the military commander Ludwig von Schröder adopted a Jewish Regulation (Judenverordnung), which restricted people's lives harshly, and a labeling requirement did what they had to wear a yellow ribbon with the inscription "Jew".

Between mid-July and August 1941, Josip Broz Tito's partisans committed approximately 100 acts of sabotage and were the strategically important and took a weapons factory in Užice.

Since the resistance of the partisans was not broken, the Wehrmacht commander of Serbia, General Heinrich Danckelmann, called for a reinforcement of troops, which was rejected because of the need in the East.

On September 3 Danckelmann stated in a report to the Wehrmacht Commander: Immediate sanctions for acts of sabotage against the German Wehrmacht, a total of some 1,000 communists and Jews have been shot or publicly hanged response to bandits, even an entire village were burned down; the continuous increase of armed insurrection could not be halted.In September, the resistance struggle intensified, which now involved the Chetniks.

For this post, he struck at the same time before Franz Bohme, who as "excellent connoisseur of Balkan relations" due to his experiences in World War I and - like other Austrians - because of that defeat harbored personal revenge.

First, they were brought by rail to the lying on Croatian soil city Ruma, from where they had to walk to the Sajmiste concentration camp, located north of the Sava in the Zemun district of Belgrade.

The Sajmište concentration camp was regarded by the Germans in Serbia, only as a temporary interim solution until the deportation of Jews to the East.

At the Wannsee Conference at the end of January 1942, however, it became clear that the deportation of Serbian Jews had no priority and they would have a longer stay in Serbia itself.

It has also not been determined in detail whether the gassed Jews were really dead.In November 1943, when anticipating the German defeat, the Sonderkommando 1005 under Paul Blobel began to dig the buried bodies and stack them on pyres to burn.

Gabriele Anderl and Walter Manoschek reconstructed the events based on documents, statements from survivors, witnesses and members of the Wehrmacht, and surviving letters and diaries of the participants.