Skip to content
Teaching the Holocaust and other Genocides

DA 49 Transport

Home

DA 49 was the name of the deportation train leaving Würzburg on April 25, 1942. During a stop in Bamberg, 32 inhabitants of the Lichtenfels district, including Alfred Oppenheimer and his family, had to board. No one knows their feelings when they passed their home one last time when the train went  through Lichtenfels and Burgkunstadt again on its way to Sobibór extermination camp in eastern Poland.

The 955 Jews from Franconia traveled four days over 570 miles to Krasnystaw in south eastern Poland. From there the Nazi guards forced them to march ten miles to the ghetto in Krásnyczyn. The SS had cleared it the day before by deporting all inhabitants to Bełżec death camp and killing them. The exact fate of the women, men and children on DA 49 is not exactly known.

The victims arrived at the railway ramp and had to jump down from the wagons about three feet off the platform. The guards immediately shot people who were not able to do this or who got hurt. To calm down the panic of the others, the Nazis promised them new clothes and work after they showered. The guards had everyone take off all their clothes and separated men and women. Then the guards drove groups of about 100 people to the gas chambers via a camp road enclosed by barbed wire (“Road to Heaven”). At Sobibór, as in other camps, the Nazis camouflaged the gas chambers as shower rooms. It is highly probable that it was in these gas chambers that the Nazis murdered the rest of the 955 Jews on Da 49.

Alexandr Petscherski, a Jewish prisoner in Sobibór, described the procedure:

From the ceiling through thick metal tubes dark and dense swaths of gas were creeping down, pumped in by an electric engine. It became clear that they were all ordained to a painful death. Desperate weeping, frightened cries of children unified into a single scream. Mothers hugged their children or laid them on the ground to cover them with their bodies. Dying, in spite of the torments they suffered, the women instinctively tried to save their children and at least for a short while delay their deaths. Many people threw themselves back and forth like shot birds trying to find a corner where they hoped to survive. But the gas inexorably crept lower and lower. Terrible were the agony of these people who were slowly suffocating (Bruder).

No passenger of DA 49 survived.

Discussion Questions

1. What was the significance of the DA 49 transport in the broader system of Nazi deportations?

2. How many residents of Lichtenfels were on the transport?

3. What role did infrastructure, such as railroads, play in the Nazi genocide, and how did it impact the efficiency of deportations?

4. How did Sobibór function as part of the Nazis' extermination machinery?

5. What role did deception play in the extermination process at camps like Sobibór?

6. What do survivor testimonies or records, like Alexandr Petscherski’s, reveal about the human impact of these events?

7. How do these personal narratives contribute to our understanding of the Holocaust?

View Citations