SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 337
Earlier Forms of Expulsion and Deportation.
There were various isolated instances of expulsion even before
the outbreak of war. Thus, in November 1938, between 15,000 and
16,000 Polish Jews living in Germany were seized, packed into
freight cars and taken to the Polish border, many of them to the
frontier town of Zbonszyn.
In this case the German authorities could claim that they were
foreigners. [1026] But this was not so in another case which attracted
much attention because of the exceptional attendant circumstances.
After the annexation of Austria, 400 Jewish families living in the
province of Burgenland were expelled. Some escaped to Vienna and
other to Czechoslovakia, but a group of about 70, who were packed
on an old freighter, remained aboard for more than four months in a
no-man’s land between Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
After the outbreak of the war, the expulsion of Jews began at first
in a somewhat unorganized fashion, its object being to place the
Jews outside the limits of German rule. In September 1939 Polish
Jews fled in masses from the invading armies, pushing further and
further east in an attempt to escape to Soviet-occupied territory. In
this they succeeded, owing to the attitude of the Soviet authorities
during the first two months of the Soviet occupation of Poland. The
Germans often tried to encourage this flight; many cases were reported
of Jews literally driven at the point of guns and bayonets to
the demarcation line and into the frontier rivers. Many were openly
admitted by the Soviet authorities; many others managed to cross
the border secretly. The number of Jews who fled into the eastern
Polish provinces (both before they were occupied by the Soviet Union
and after) is estimated by the Institute of Jewish Affairs at
200,000 al least.
At the end of November, the Soviet Government closed the frontier.
In the meantime the Germans had begun to carry out another
plan for the elimination of the Jews, that of deportation to the socalled
Lublin ‘reservation.’ This idea of a special Jewish region, to
which Jews from all German-ruled countries would be sent, is attributed
to the National Socialist theorist Alfred Rosenberg, who pro-
1026 As described by Reitlinger who speaks of 17,000 persons expelled in his German book
Die Endlösung. Hitlers Versuch der Ausrottung der Juden Europas 1939-1945, Colloquium
Verlag, Berlin 1992, pp. 10f. In the 1968 English edition, op. cit. (note 560), p. 9,
he speaks of “15,000 Jews with Polish passports.”