Did Diamond Mothers separated from Diamond Children on December 5th 1944 end in Sweden?

 

"Diamantairs" was a comprehensive 213 group of people of Jewish diamond workers and traders, mainly from Amsterdam, who came to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp together with their family members in mid-May 1944 from Westerbork transit camp. Germans wanted to build own diamond industry. However, when these plans crashed due to lack of the raw material. Dutch children, later called Diamond children, were on December 4-5, 1944, separated from their parents that were deported from Bergen-Belsen to other camps. Men of the Diamantairs group were sent on December 4, 1944, to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and women on December 5 to Helmstedt-Beendorf camp that was a satellite camp of Neuengame concentration camp. 

57 children of "Diamantairs" that remained in Bergen-Belsen were loaded on the truck and driven from the hut number 17 in Star Camp to barrack 211, called Kinderheim in Women's Camp. According to testimonies, children were abandoned in a snowy field behind the Kinderheim barrack. That must be the night on December 5th, the day they were separated from their mothers.

"Diamantairs" women that were sent to on December 5 to Helmstedt-Beendorf concentration camp were working camp in the salt mines with armament production in the Bartensleben and Marie mines. They worked for the Askania factory in the Bartensleben mine and LuftfahrtgerätewerkHakenfelde in the Marie mine. There Germans manufactured electro-mechanical components such as control units and steering gear for the V1 rockets and for fighter aircraft.
10 April 1945, both camps were evacuated, and the women and men were loaded onto goods cars and taken via Magdeburg, Stendal and Wittenberge to the Wöbbelin “reception camp”, which they reached on 16 April. The men stayed there but the women continued on. Their train stopped for three days at the railway station in Sülstorf in Mecklenburg, and the many women who died there of starvation and thirst were hastily buried by the inhabitants of the village. After ten days of the travel, on 20 or 21 April, the train reached Hamburg and the prisoners were distributed to the largely empty Hamburg satellite camps of Eidelstedt, Langenhorn, Sasel and Wandsbek. Most of the prisoners were able to leave Hamburg on a train on 1 May, which took the women via Padborg in Denmark to Sweden.

Now, Swedish Holocaust Memorial Association is looking through the list of Dutch women that arrived to Padborg in Denmark and then to Sweden on so called Spoke Trains at the end of WWII. This is a new project conducted together with Dutch researchers.