Convoy 77

Nils H. Roemer Director, Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies
Shefali Sahu, MS in Information Science
Yannis Soonjung Kwon, Undergraduate Research Apprentice

The beginning of the end of the Third Reich was shaped from June to September 1944. The landing of the Allies in Normandy on June 6 and the Soviet’s Operation Bagration between June 23 and August 19 infused new meaning to these summer months. The imminent military changes at the Western and Eastern Fronts brought more intensification to deport Jews to Auschwitz, the only remaining large camp with significant killing capacities.

In France, deportations continued even after the D-Day invasion. Transport 76, on June 30, 1944, brought 1,156 Jews to Auschwitz. The last mass transport left even later from Drancy on July 31, 1944.  Looking at the deportees of Transport 77 reveals a gender imbalance of 669 men and 447 women. There also is an unusually large number of children deported on Transport 77. Over 333 deportees were children and teenagers under the age of 19 who had been rounded up from the Union of French Jews (Union Generale des Israelites de France) homes in the Paris area. Included were 18 infants and 190 children under age 13. Additionally, a significant number of 181 adults were above 60 years old.

Moreover, the transport of 1,321 included men, women, and children from 37 different countries. The 639 Jews with French nationality represented only about 55 percent, the rest came from almost all of Europe including England but also Jews from Cuba and more than one hundred from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey. Upon their arrival in Auschwitz-Birkenau on August 3, 1944, 847 men, women and children were immediately gassed. No more transports departed from Drancy to Auschwitz, but one larger deportation was still to come from the South of France. On August 11, 1944, a train departed with 650 prisoners from Lyon that included men, women, and even 9 children under the age of 12. The deportation consisted of both Jews and non-Jews.

Convoy 77 and the diversity of its victims in both age and nationality illustrate that the Nazis understood that it would be the last deportation to leave France, and there existed no longer any limitations and even greater ferocity in the pursuit of identifying potential victims to produce a number large enough for transport. Even a single deportation underlines that the action of individual regional offices under Eichmann never confined their genocidal policies to any geography but pursued any Jews regardless of their national identity. The liberation of Auschwitz on January 27th, 1945 was still not the end for many of the deportees. The 250 survivors still had to survive a Death March and other forced labor camps until they were finally liberated.

References:  

Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews. 2nd ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2019. 

The Convoi 77 project at https://convoi77.org/en/