More than 330,000 German Jews have already been deported from Germany to Nazi-occupied parts of Russia, it was reported today from Berlin.
At the same time Swedish newspapers today carry reports from their Vienna correspondents disclosing that mass-deportations of Jews from Vienna to occupied Poland were resumed this week under the most brutal circumstances, resulting in many sick and blind Jews committing suicide.
No distinction is made as to age and sex in the renewed deportations, the Vienna correspondents report. Even the “green letters” giving the deportees three days’ notice to prepare for expulsion are no longer sent. The victims are taken from their homes directly to transportation centers from where they are sent in cattle trains to Eastern European territories.
A number of Jewish patients in a Vienna hospital committed suicide when the Nazi police came to drag them from their beds to the transportation center. Inmates of the Jewish Home for Blind similarly took their lives when informed that they were being deported. Not a single Jew of those still remaining in Vienna is certain that within a few hours he may not be among the victims held for deportation, the neutral correspondents relate.
The suspension of the deportation of Jews from Vienna during the winter months was due chiefly to the lack of freight cars, the Swedish journalists emphasize. They describe Jewish life in Vienna today as a constant torture, with Jews being completely isolated from any contact with the rest of the world.
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