JANUARY 1944

January 4

January 5

January 8

January 10

At a conference held at the Führer's headquarters to determine the labor
requirements of the Reich to be fulfilled from occupied countries, Albert
Speer (Minister of Armaments and War Production), Fritz Sauckel
(Plenipotentiary for Labor Allocation), Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler
(Minister of Interior), and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel determine that four
million conscripted laborers are needed to support the German war effort.
Of this total, France is expected to provide one million men between
February 1 and December 31, 1944.

The Italian Social Republic, or Salò Republic (RSI), the Fascist government of northern Italy, prohibits Jews from owning stock or land and also orders the seizure of all Jewish wealth.

The Central Office for Reich Security (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA) agrees to the release of five Danish Jews of mixed descent arrested in autumn 1943, as part of a November 1943 agreement between Adolf Eichmann and the Danish government.

Six German divisions begin an offensive in Yugoslavia and retake part of the Dalmatian coast from the partisans by February 1944.

The Polish government-in-exile in London announces that it has instructed underground forces in Poland not to cooperate with the Red Army until diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Poland have resumed.

Three hundred fifty-three Norwegian students are deported to Germany. They are the last of a total of 650 deported from fifteen hundred students arrested when Oslo University was closed as a center of resistance the previous fall.

Deported Libyan Jews, mostly former residents of Bengazi, arrive at Fossoli
di Carpi internment and transit camp, located near Modena in Italy. They
were initially held at the Taigura internment camp, located about eighteen
kilometers from Tripoli, and were shipped to Naples in January 1942.
The first order by Department 7, the Department for Public Security of the
Hungarian Interior Ministry, notes that Croatian civilians are fleeing to
Hungary in the wake of partisan victories and orders that all suspicious
persons, including aliens, Jews, and Gypsies, be held at the border.

The few remaining Jewish patients in psychiatric clinics throughout
Germany are assembled in Berlin, from where they are deported to the east.
An Italian Fascist tribunal condemns Count Galeazzo Ciano, former Italian
foreign minister and the son-in-law of Benito Mussolini, and seventeen
former members of the Fascist Grand Council to death for treason.

A transport with 259 Jewish prisoners leaves Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk for Auschwitz for extermination.

January 22

January 23

January 24

January 25

January 27

The Fascist government of northern Italy (RSI) orders all Jews previously exempted from arrest to be taken to concentration camps.

Executive Order 9417 establishes the War Refugee Board (WRB), which is mandated to take "all measures within [U.S.] power to rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death" and to provide "relief and assistance consistent with the successful prosecution of the war." President Roosevelt instructs the Departments of State, Treasury, and War to execute the plans, programs, and measures formulated by the WRB and to supply the WRB with information and assistance. The WRB is also empowered to accept the services or contributions of private persons and organizations. John Pehle is appointed executive director of the WRB.

Seventy-seven homosexual prisoners are among a transport of one thousand
prisoners to the Dora concentration camp, a satellite camp of Buchenwald.
Several homosexual prisoners are later transferred to Ellrich and Harzungen
subcamps.

Allied forces stage an amphibious landing behind German lines at Anzio in
Italy in an attempt to outflank the German defensive line.

Seven thousand three hundred two prisoners are registered at Gusen, a
subcamp of Mauthausen concentration camp.

A War Crimes Office is established within the office of the Judge Advocate
General of the U.S. Army to gather evidence on war crimes.

The head of the police in the Italian Social Republic (RSI) announces to all pre-
fects that the Italians will inform the Germans that all Italian Jews captured will
remain in Italian concentration camps. However, this directive is ineffective.

Hungarian General Ferenc Szombathelyi meets with Adolf Hitler and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel to discuss Hungary's request for the possible withdrawal of Hungarian forces from the Soviet front.

The Lodz Gestapo office informs the Auschwitz camp commandant that hereafter all documents of prisoners killed there are to be destroyed immediately and that such papers and personal effects are not to be sent back to the families of the deceased. The families are to be informed that personal effects cannot be returned.

The British cabinet adopts in principle a proposal for the partition of Palestine. The synagogue in Rijeka, Yugoslavia, is blown up as the Jews from Istria and Rijeka are deported.

A resolution advocating full opportunity for colonization and reconstruction of
Palestine as a "free and democratic Jewish commonwealth" is introduced in the
U.S. House of Representatives by James Wright (D-PA) and Ranulf Compton
(R-CT). A similar resolution is introduced on February 1 in the Senate by
Robert Wagner (D-NY) and Robert Taft (R-OH). After several hearings the
House Foreign Affairs Committee votes on March 17, 1944, to defer action on
the Wright-Compton resolution upon the recommendation of General George
C. Marshall, who urges postponement for military reasons, and Secretary of
War Henry L. Stimson, who notes that "further action on the Palestine resolu-
tions at this time would be prejudicial to the successful prosecution of war.”

January 28

January 30

January 31

Also in January

Members of the British cabinet, including Winston Churchill, agree that air-
drops to the Maquis, members of the French resistance, should rank second
only to the bombing of Germany on the RAF's (Royal Air Force) priority list.

The German Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service, SD) in Milan orders the
arrest of sick Jews over the age of
seventy.

A transport with 948 Jews from Westerbork transit camp in the occupied
Netherlands arrives at Auschwitz-Birkenau; 689 people are gassed on
arrival, and 190 men and 69 women survive selection on the ramp.

The German Foreign Office advises its representatives in eastern Europe
(in regard to the treatment of foreign Jews in Italy and former Italian zones
of occupied Greece) that the governments of Sweden, Finland, Romania,
Switzerland, and Spain have all requested that any of their citizens be
returned to them at once.

The head of the Italian police orders that all Jewish communities within the
RSI be dissolved by the next month.

A transport with 245 prisoners sent by the Bialystok Gestapo arrives at
Stutthof concentration camp.

Seven hundred Italian Jews are deported from Milan and Verona to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Ninety-seven men and thirty-one women are registered for labor; 572 are sent to their deaths on arrival.

The Committee for National Liberation in Italy creates a separate organization to achieve greater coordination of the various resistance elements in German-occupied northern Italy.

The young
Italian Jewish chemist Primo Levi, arrested on December 13,
1943, as a member of Giustizia e Libertà (“Justice and Liberty," Italy's
major non-Marxist anti-Fascist organization) arrives at the Fossoli intern-
ment and transit camp.... Widespread raids by the French police in Laon,
Saint-Quentin, Amiens, Reims, and Poitiers result in the arrest of hundreds
of French and foreign Jews as well as persons with suspicious or illegal
documents.... The Portuguese ship Nyassa sails from Lisbon and Cádiz for
Palestine with 170 Jewish emigrants from Portugal and 560 Jewish emi-
grants from Spain and Tangier.

February 6

February 8

February 9

February 10

February 11

February 12

February 14

attack, violent countermeasures must be taken. "There will be an immediate return of fire... immediate burning down of houses." The order is explicit in recognizing that the innocent might suffer: "If thereby innocent people are hit it is regrettable, but it is entirely the fault of the terrorists."

The sixty-seventh transport leaves Drancy for Auschwitz-Birkenau with more than one thousand Jewish deportees, most of whom are gassed on arrival on February 6. (See January 20.)

Italian Fascists violate Vatican territory to arrest several Jews hiding there.

The Polish Roma (Gypsy) prisoner Weronika Walansewicz (registered as Gypsy prisoner Z 9611) escapes from Auschwitz-Birkenau; she had been deported from Bialystok to Auschwitz on November 28, 1943.

A second group of Libyan Jews from Bengazi are transferred by the Germans from two Italian internment camps in Anzio province via Florence to the Fossoli transit camp. (See January 10.)

SS Obersturmbannführer (SS Lieutenant Colonel) Karl Rahm is appointed commandant of the Theresienstadt (Terezin) ghetto and is stationed there until the war ends. After the war he is tried by an extraordinary tribunal at Litomerice, Czechoslovakia, and sentenced to death; he is executed in April 1947.

The representative of the German Foreign Ministry in the Hague reports that to date 108,000 Jews have "left" the country and that the population does not approve of the deportation of Jews and considers it brutal. Church circles are reported to be especially active in promoting this attitude.

The sixty-eighth convoy, with fifteen hundred Jews, leaves Drancy for Auschwitz, arriving there on February 13; 1,229 are gassed on arrival. Twenty-four women and eighteen men do survive the war. (See February 3.) A transport of 1,015 Jews from Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands arrives in Auschwitz-Birkenau; eight hundred Jews are gassed while 142 men and seventy-three women survive selection on the ramp and are assigned to forced labor.

Parts of southern Italy, including Sicily and Sardinia, are returned to the jurisdiction of the Italian government (anti-Fascist government formed when Mussolini was deposed in July 1943).

The Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy writes to Hitler, asking permission to
remove forces on the eastern front "for use in the ... defense of the Carpa-
thians." (See March 18.)

Ira Hirschmann is appointed as the War Refugee Board representative in
Turkey; his main assignment is to find ships for the transport of Jews from
Romanian ports to Istanbul.

Arthur Greiser, Gauleiter and governor of the Wartheland, and Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler agree that the Lodz ghetto is to be reduced in size and that it will not be reorganized as a concentration camp.

Reich Marshal Hermann Göring requests concentration camp labor to build underground aircraft factories.