Hur många dödades under förintelsen?

Since 2007, the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem has been studying the transports as an extensive phenomenon that transcended individual states, not in the context of the Holocaust within a specific country or a single community. As such, this project examines the transports as an historic event that is significant in its own right, not just as a technical stage during which Jews were transported from one place to another. Indeed, the transports played an important role in translating the grim theory of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem” into reality and enabling it to spread its tentacles to the very edges of the territories controlled by the Third Reich.

The aim of the resulting database is to reconstruct all the transports that took place during the Holocaust from territories of the Third Reich, countries under German occupation, Axis states, and satellite states. The database has been constructed on the basis of information from a wide variety of documents, research, legal material, survivors’ testimonies, and memoirs.

In this project, the term “transport” refers to the organized deportation of Jews from their homes to locations beyond the borders of the countries in which they lived or to ghettoes and camps inside their home country. With regard to their extent, it is worth noting that although most of the transports consisted of around a thousand or more deportees, others were much smaller. This study encompasses all transports, not only the larger ones.

The site is updated periodically. It provides information about transports from various locations in Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Luxembourg, Greece, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Poland to destinations in Eastern Europe and the Theresienstadt Ghetto between 1939 and 1945.

The database is based on rigorous historical research. It provides an overview of all aspects of the transports, with a particular focus on four main issues:

Reconstruction of the transport’s route
Information on persons and organizations involved in organizing the transport
Survivors’ recollections of the transport
Witnesses’ recollections of the deportation

In total, over 1,600 trains were organised by the Reich Ministry of Transport, and logged mainly by the Polish state railway company taken over by Germany, due to the majority of death camps being located in occupied Poland.[42] Between 1941 and December 1944, the official date of the closing of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, the transport/arrival timetable was 1.5 trains per day: 50 freight cars × 50 prisoners per freight car × 1,066 days = ~4,000,000 prisoners in total.[19]