Hannoverschen Bahnhof
Between May 1940 and February 1945, about 7700 jews and gypsies (the majority were jews) were deported from the Hannoverschen Bahnhof in Hamburg. Twenty transports left the station bound for ghettos in Lodz, Riga, Minsk and Theresienstadt. A few transports went directly to Auschwitz. The first deportation took place on May 16, 1940, when 910 gypsies were deported to the Belzec labor camp in southeastern Poland. Belzec was not a Holocaust camp at the time. About 90 percent of the total number of deportees were murdered.
Current status: Demolished with monument (2012).
Address: Lohseplatz, 20457 Hamburg.
Get there: Metro to Hafen city Station.
Follow up in books: Gilbert, Martin: The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War (1987).
In November 1941, two transports departed for the ghetto in Minsk, which was then called ”Hamburg ghetto”. The deportations to Riga in december 1941 had prompted the nazis in Riga to begin mass executions of Latvian jews from the ghetto. These Jews were killed in Bikernieki and Rumbula forest. The possibility of expanding the ghettos was not an option, the only possibility of freeing up space for new Jews was to murder a large number of Jews already living in the ghetto.