Auschwitz To Hessisch Lichtenau Transport List

This database includes 1,000 records of Hungarian women transferred from Auschwitz to Hessisch Lichtenau in September 1944.

Background

In late 1944 and early 1945, the labor shortage inside Germany had become so acute that tens of thousands of prisoners, males and females, Jews and non-Jews, were sent westward from camps such as Auschwitz to work in German factories.  One of these transports, with 1,000 Hungarian women, was sent in September 1944 from Auschwitz to Hessisch Lichtenau, a small town in eastern Hesse, southeast of Kassel in Germany, where they worked in a munitions factory, a sub-camp of Buchenwald.

In late October 1944, 206 of these women who had been ill or otherwise unable to work were sent back to Auschwitz, presumably to be murdered.  The 206 women sent back are noted in the database.

Almost all of the remaining women survived in Hessisch Lichtenau.  However, as American troops approached the area, they were sent by train to Dresden and then Leipzig, and finally on a march to Wurzen, where they were liberated.  It is not known how many of the women perished during these transports/marches, though ITS records could be consulted for individual cases where the survivors ended up in Displaced Persons (DP) camps.

An extensive description of the conditions in Hessisch Lichtenau where the women worked is available in Dieter Vaupel's Das Außenkommando Hessisch Lichtenau des Konzentrationslagers Buchenwald 1944/1945: eine Dokumentation (Kassel: 1984).

Database

This database includes 1,000 records of Hungarian women transferred from Auschwitz to Hessisch Lichtenau in September 1944.

The fields for this database are as follows:

• Prisoner Number
• Surname
• Given name
• Marital Status
  
  • vh. = verheiratet = married
  • ld. = ledig = unmarried
• Date of Birth
• Last Residence
• Occupation (See note below)
• Comments

Occupations have been entered from the source documents in German.  To assist the researcher with translations of the German occupation entries, please see the JewishGen InfoFile at: http://www.jewishgen.org/InfoFiles/GermanOccs.htm.

Acknowledgments

The information contained in this database was indexed from the files of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1997 A-0324, reel 3).  The list of women sent back to Auschwitz comes from the Vaupel book cited above.  Kurt Friedlaender, a JewishGen volunteer, compiled the list.

In addition, thanks to JewishGen Inc. for providing the website and database expertise to make this database accessible.  Special thanks to Warren Blatt and Michael Tobias for their continued contributions to Jewish genealogy.  Particular thanks to Nolan Altman, coordinator of Holocaust files.

Nolan Altman
Coordinator - Holocaust Database
January 2010

Searching the Database

This database is searchable via JewishGen's Holocaust Database and the JewishGen Hungary Database.