Jewish Prisoners from Countries Occupied by the Germans

Under German occupation, the Jewish population of countries in Central and Eastern Europe was taken to ghettos and forced labor camps and, from mid-1941, systematically murdered. The Gestapo also deported Jewish people from Germany and Western and Southern Europe to the extermination camps in the east. In 1944, due to the damage caused by Allied bombings, the labor shortage in Germany became so severe that it could not be filled with new slave laborers from the occupied countries. Therefore, the SS brought Jewish prisoners from Auschwitz to work at satellite camps in Germany. A total of 13,000 Jewish prisoners, most of them from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, were imprisoned at Neuengamme concentration camp and its satellite camps. More than half of them were women.

A total of around 90,000 Jewish people from Hungary were deported as slave laborers to Austria. Between Octoberand December 1944, around 76,000 of those sent to Austria were forced to march all the way to Hegyeshalom and Zürndorf on the Austrian-Hungarian border under murderous conditions. This photograph shows one of these deathmarches.