The Westerbork transit camp in the occupied Netherlands.
Westerbork transit camp. Public domain.
- Type
- Transit Camp
- Location
- Near Westerbork and Assen, Drenthe province, Netherlands
- Operational dates
- Established as a refugee camp October 1939; a German transit camp from July 1942 to April 1945
- Liberation
- 12 April 1945, by Canadian forces, who found 876 inmates remainingThe Germans abandoned the camp in early April 1945; the last deportation transport had left on 13 September 1944.
- Approximate prisoner count
- More than 100,000 Jews passed through; the Germans deported approximately 100,000 people via the camp between July 1942 and September 1944
- Approximate death toll
- Deaths at the camp itself were comparatively low; the overwhelming majority were murdered after deportation, most at Auschwitz-Birkenau (over 55,000) and Sobibor (34,313), with smaller numbers to Theresienstadt and Bergen-Belsen. Only about 5,000 of those who passed through survived.Westerbork was a holding and dispatch point, not a killing site; the deaths are attributable to the destinations above. The ~5,000 survivors reflect post-deportation fate, not camp mortality.
- Primary prisoner categories
- Almost entirely Jews, initially German-Jewish refugees and later the broad Jewish population of the occupied Netherlands. A small number of Roma were also deported. A long-term resident population of about 2,000 was eventually deported as well.
- Commandants
- Albert Konrad Gemmeker was the longest-serving commandant (October 1942 to April 1945); he was sentenced at his 1949 Dutch trial to ten years, served about six, and a later West German investigation was closed in 1976 without prosecution. (Earlier commandants Erich Deppner and Josef Hugo Dischner have no clean Holocaust conviction reliably established.)
Westerbork sat in the flat, sandy countryside of Drenthe in the northeastern Netherlands, near the German border and far from Amsterdam, and for most of the occupation it was the place from which the deportation trains left. Begun by the Dutch in 1939 to shelter German-Jewish refugees, it was seized by the Germans in July 1942 and turned into the transit camp from which Dutch Jewry was funneled east. Transports left on a relentless schedule, twice weekly at first and then every Tuesday, bound mostly for Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor, with smaller numbers to Theresienstadt and Bergen-Belsen. Few died at Westerbork itself; almost everyone passed through it on the way to somewhere worse. More than 100,000 people were deported through its gates, and only about 5,000 of them survived the war.
