Deportations to the "Reichskommissariat Ostland", 1941/42
Most of the Austrian Holocaust victims lost their lives in ghettos and extermination sites in the "Reichskommissariat Ostland". In 1941 and 1942 more than 15,000 Jews were deported from Vienna and Theresienstadt to Kowno/Kaunas, Riga, Minsk and Maly Trostinec, where almost all were murdered.
The "Reichskommissariat Ostland" was established in July 1941 as an administrative unit of the "Großdeutsches Reich", and consisted of the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and also most of western White Russia. The Schleswig/Holstein Gauleiter Hinrich Lohse was Reichskommissar and had his headquarters in Kauen (Kaunas/Kowno) and later in Riga. The policy of extermination of the resident Jews began immediately after the Germans marched into the city on June 22, 1941, and was extended in the fall of 1941 to the Jews who had been deported there from the "Altreich", the "Protectorate" and Austria.
In autumn 1943 SS units under orders from Himmler liquidated the ghettos and camps in the "Reichskommissariat Ostland". Most of the ghetto inhabitants were transferred to concentration camps at Kaiserwald and Stutthof near Danzig. Elderly persons, children and the sick were classified as unfit for work and killed immediately.
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