Lublin

Lublin, in eastern Poland, was the capital of the Lublin District of the German-occupied "Generalgouvernement". On the eve of the war about 40,000 Jews lived in the city, roughly 35 percent of its population. In the early months of the occupation the German authorities pursued a plan for a Jewish "reservation" in the Lublin area; by February 1940, 6,300 Jews had been brought to Lublin under it before the scheme was dropped in April 1940.

Lublin was the headquarters of SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik, whom Himmler put in charge of "Aktion Reinhardt", the murder of the Jews of the "Generalgouvernement" in the killing centres of Bełżec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Globocnik's staff in Lublin planned the deportations, built the camps and coordinated the timing of transports; the clothing and belongings of the victims were stored at a camp on Lublin's "old airport".

The Lublin ghetto was formally established at the end of March 1941, after about 10,000 Jews had been expelled from the city. On 17 March 1942 the first transports from the ghetto went to Bełżec, the start of the mass murder there. Within about a month some 30,000 people were deported to Bełżec or killed in nearby forests. About 4,000 remaining Jews were moved to a "small ghetto" in the suburb of Majdan Tatarski; in the autumn of 1942 almost all of them were deported to Majdanek and murdered. The last Jews held in workshops in the Lublin fortress were killed in July 1944, shortly before the German retreat.

From Berlin

The Bundesarchiv chronology records no deportation train from Berlin with Lublin itself as its final destination. Lublin nevertheless lay on the route of Berlin transports sent into the Lublin District in 1942: the train of 28 March 1942 went to Piaski, and the train of 2 April 1942 had, according to a Berlin Stolperstein biography, originally been planned to go to Trawniki near Lublin before it was diverted to Warsaw.

The Berlin transport of June 1942 – dated 13 June by the Bundesarchiv and 2 June by statistik-des-holocaust.de – stopped in Lublin. There 36 men were ordered off the train and taken to the Majdanek concentration camp; 28 of them are known by name. The other deportees, including women and children, were presumably taken straight on to the Sobibor killing centre and murdered. One of the men selected at Lublin, Boris Schönhaus, was murdered at Majdanek on 16 August 1942.

No transport went directly from Berlin to this place.