Camp registration photo of Rudolf Richter who was deported to Auschwitz on July 9, 1941 and perished in the camp on June 24, 1942
Postwar photograph of SS-Unterscharführer Fritz Buntrock who supervised the liquidation of the Roma camp
It results from analysis of the preserved sources that, most probably, on July 18, nearly 2,000 Roma were taken from Birkenau: 535 women and about 1,400 men. They were placed in Auschwitz I, in Blocks 9 and 10 (women on the first floor of Block 10), separated from the remaining part of the camp with barbed wire fence. In this way, about 2,900 women and 1,500 men (in total 4,400 people) remained in section BIIe in Birkenau.
The last group of Roma was relocated from Birkenau to Auschwitz on August 1. They spent only one night there and then, together with other prisoners brought there nearly two weeks earlier, were led to the ramp in Birkenau. This is where the dramatic scenes of them saying farewell to the members of their families remaining in BIIe camp took place, as so often described by eyewitnesses. Next, these Roma were led to railway wagons and transported to KL Buchenwald and KL Ravensbrück.
On the afternoon of August 2nd, about 4,200 – 4,300 Roma were incarcerated in Birkenau: men, women and children. They were all subsequently led out from the barracks and, in spite of their desperate resistance, loaded onto lorries and transported to the gas chambers next to crematoria II and V.