1942 Auschwitz

Today, the Aspangbahnhof in Vienna does no longer exist. However, between 1939 and 1942 the Nazi regime deported more than 47,000 Jews from this railway station. The trains were bound for Theresienstadt, for the ghettos as well as the concentration and extermination camps of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, and in one case for Auschwitz. Only 1073 of those who passed through the Aspangbahnhof survived the Holocaust or the ‘time without mercy’, as one of the survivors, Herbert Schrott, called it. Adolf Eichmann, who had grown up in Linz and joined the Nazi Party in 1933, was primarily responsible for the meticulous organisation of the mass murder.