The deportations of Jews from Norway
On 26 November 1942, 532 Norwegian Jews (302 men, 188 women and 42 children) were handed over to the SS by the Norwegian police under the direction of the Gestapo . The Jewish prisoners were deported from Pier 1 of the Oslo port to Stettin. The prisoners were under the command of Untersturmführer Klaus Grossmann and Oberleutnant Manig. The men and women were housed in separate holds on the ship, where basic sanitary conditions were lacking.
After arriving in Stettin, the Norwegian Jews were transported from there by train to Auschwitz . 346 people were taken directly to the gas chambers. Only 186 men between the ages of 15 and 50 were classified as prisoners able to work and were not killed immeadiately. They were entered into the camp with the numbers from 79064-79249 and used for slave labour. Of this group of 186, only nine survived to liberation.
The ship that transported these people from Norway to the Auschwitz death camp was the Donau. It was built by Deschimag at the Vulkan shipyard in Hamburg for the North German Lloyd in Bremen and completed in 1929 . It was the last completed four - masted express freighter of the NDL. At 9,035 gross register tons it was a large for the time, and it was unusual amongst cargo ships for being powered by both a triple expansion steam engine and a steam turbine.
On the outbreak of war, the Donau was requisitioned for military service by the German Navy in Hamburg and equipped with anti-aircraft weapons and depth charges. During this time the ship was used to ferry troops and cargo in the Baltic as well as between Stettin and Oslo.
According to the protocol of the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, there were 1,300 Jews living in Norway. However due to refugees fleeing mainly from Germany there was probably closer to 2,100 Jews in the country. Initially they were largely left in peace making up a tiny percentage of the overall population but as from February 1942 on the instructions of Heinrich Fehlis, the ID cards of Jews were marked. Heinrich Fehlis was a lawyer who as from November 1940, commanded the security police, Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo) and security service Sicherheitsdienst (SD) in Norway .
On 13 February 1941 Wilhelm Wagner was transferred to the SiPo and SD in Norway where he headed of Section IV B (Gestapo Department of Jewish, Freemasonry and Church Affairs). He had two people under him, SS-Untersturmführer Erhard (Harry) Böhm and SS-Untersturmführer Klaus Großmann . In October 1941, he instructed the Norwegian Ministry of Police under Jonas Lie to make a systematic registration of Jews in Norway.
This was carried out by an announcement from the Ministry of Police of the 20 January 1942 that instructed that identification cards belonging to Jews needed to state that they were Jewish. On 23 October 1942, Wagner had a planning meeting with the leadership of the State Police in Oslo.
On 25 October 1942, Wilhelm Wagner, ordered the arrest of a number of Jewish men who were then interned in a camp called Søndre Berg near Tønsberg which had been set up not only for Jews but also opponents of the Norwegian regime. Norwegian police inspector Knut Rød organised in the arrest of Jewish men in and around Oslo on 26 October 1942, and in the confiscation of Jewish property at the same time. According to the police's own report, Rød worked without stopping from Sunday 25 October at 10 am to Monday 26 October at 8 pm to complete the detention of the Jewish people in the Oslo area. Immediately afterwards, the Norwegian puppet government under Quisling passed a law to confiscate the property of the Jews in favor of the state treasury. A law on mandatory registration of 17 November 1942 defined who was to be considered a Jew.
On 19 and 26 November 1942, the ship Monte Rosa took 46 Jewish people from Oslo to Denmark and from there, the people were sent to Hamburg and then to Auschwitz. Only two survived.
On 24 November, Wagner attended a meeting with the Chief of the Norwegian State Police Karl Alfred Marthinsen and other senior police officials. At this meeting, the action against Norwegian Jews on 25 and 26 November 1942 was planned. On 25 November 1942, the arrest of Jewish women and children was ordered, people from this round up were to find themselves on the SS Donau.
The head of the Gestapo in Oslo, Helmuth Reinhard, sent the following telex to his opposite number in Stettin : “For special reasons I can only announce today that on November 26th, 1942 a ship transport of about 7-900 male and female Jews of all ages will go from Oslo to Stettin. The crossing will likely take about 3 days. Since the ship is needed by the Navy immediately after its arrival in Stettin, I ask you to prepare for the disembarkation and accommodation of the Jews immediately after their arrival. The Jews are to be brought to Auschwitz. "
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