Jewish Prisoners from Germany

Several hundred Jewish people from Germany were imprisoned in Neuengamme and its satellite camps. Jewish prisoners suffered even more harassment than other prisoners and consequently had even less chance of survival. The first Jewish prisoners in Neuengamme arrived in 1940 from Sachsenhausen. In the spring of 1942, a commission of doctors selected a group of Jewish prisoners to be taken to Bernburg/Saale to be gassed. In autumn of the same year, the SS deported the remaining Jewish prisoners to Auschwitz. A much larger number of Jewish prisoners from all over Europe – a total of over 12,000 people, the majority of them women – started arriving in Neuengamme in the spring of 1944. Many of them had been selected in Auschwitz for slave labor in the Reich, and they were usually taken directly to the satellite camps near the workplaces they had been assigned to.