Deportations to the "Generalgouvernement"

Deportations to the "Generalgouvernement" in February/March 1941 The suggestion to deport Austrian Jews to the "Generalgouvernment" in former Poland at the beginning of 1941 (that is, before the start of the general deportations which affected the entire "Großdeutsche Reich"), came from the new Reichsstatthalter of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, who in so doing was responding to a request of the Viennese NSDAP to clear the inhabitants out of Jewish apartments. Hitler's agreement to deportations of Jews from Vienna was passed on to Schirach in a letter from the head of the Reichskanzlei on December 3, 1940. After a report by von Schirach Hitler decided "that on account of the shortage of housing in Vienna the 60,000 Jews still resident in the Vienna Reichsgau should be deported to the 'Generalgouvernment' at an accelerated pace, that is, before the end of the war." Although the forced deportation of 60,000 persons had been approved by Hitler, the organisers interrupted the programme after five deportation transports. The 5,000 victims of the first mass deportations from Vienna, after the Nisko transports of 1939, were distributed among the small Polish towns of Opole, Kielce, Modlyborzyce, Lagow and Opatow and put into the already existing ghettos. Most of the men, women and children from Vienna who were deported to the Lublin district fell victim to the "Auskämmungsaktionen" in the Polish ghettos in spring and summer of 1942, and were murdered in the extermination camps of the "Aktion Reinhard" alongside Polish Jews from various places.
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