Deportation of Roma and Sinti from Lackenbach to the Łódź Ghetto

Conditions in Lackenbach and the Deportation Process

The Lackenbach camp, established in November 1940 in Burgenland (Austria) on a former manor estate, was the largest so‑called “Gypsy camp” on Austrian territory. It was administered by the Vienna criminal police and used to intern and exploit primarily Roma and Sinti under appalling conditions: inmates were crowded in barns and stables, with inadequate sanitation, minimal food, and forced into brutal labor for local farms, factories, and construction projects. By late 1941, the number of detainees in Lackenbach had swelled, on 1 November 1941 there were about 2,335 people in the camp. On the orders of Heinrich Himmler, the systematic deportation of Austrian Roma and Sinti to occupied Poland began. Between 4 and 8 November 1941, exactly 5,007 Roma and Sinti were deported to the Łódź Ghetto (Litzmannstadt), in five consecutive transports, among them roughly 2,000 came from Lackenbach.

Each transport was tightly controlled: every train carried approximately 1,000 deportees and was escorted by an officer and about 20 guards from the Reserve Police Battalion 172. The deportees included whole families. Upon arrival in Łódź, the Roma and Sinti were confined to a segregated section of the ghetto, often in overcrowded and squalid housing entire families cramped into small apartments, sometimes 30 persons per room, with no heating, insufficient water, no proper sanitation or cooking facilities. Within just a few weeks, disease broke out: a typhus epidemic struck, and more than 600 deportees died shortly after arrival. The fate of the survivors was also grim in December 1941 or January 1942, many of them were deported again, this time to the extermination camp Chełmno (Kulmhof), where they were murdered. Thus, the transports from Lackenbach on 4–7 November 1941 marked a decisive step in the genocide of Roma (also known as Porajmos), transforming forced‑labor internment into mass deportation and extermination.