Revisiting the "Cosel Period": A Fresh Perspective on the Stopping of Western Deportation Trains En Route to Auschwitz, 1942–1943

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Between August and December 1942, western deportation trains heading from Drancy, Westerbork, and Mechelen/Malines to Auschwitz were stopped in Cosel (today Kędzierżyn-Koźle, Poland, Upper Silesia), a town situated forty miles northwest of the death camp, by the SS and order police. During this so-called Cosel period, nearly 9,000 able-bodied men aged between sixteen and fifty-five were made to step out, while the elderly, the women, and the children rode on to Auschwitz, where they were murdered in the gas chambers almost immediately.From Cosel, the men were distributed among forced labor camps specifically set up for Eastern Upper Silesian Jews from the fall of 1940. These forced labor camps, superintended by SS Special Commissioner Albrecht Schmelt, were operated independently from the Auschwitz concentration camp and its satellites, hence the men were selected in Cosel and not on the ramp of Birkenau. The Cosel stops thus facilitated the transfer of western deportees into a secluded camp system that existed in parallel to the subcamps of concentration camps. The camp system was intrinsically linked to the construction of the "thoroughfare IV" to the Ukraine, supervised by the Reich Highway Company (Reichsautobahn), which had begun to use Jewish forced labor on a large scale.Most of the men taken off the trains in Cosel perished due to the adverse conditions in the camps. Based on survivor testimonies, this paper aims to providing the first detailed analysis of the Cosel period, while equally addressing the profound psychological trauma it effectuated.