Participants in a deportation: policemen, soldiers and nurses at the fair in Cologne-Deutz, May 1940. This is a souvenir photo taken by a soldier and given to the people depicted here as prints together with two other motifs. They were involved in the organisation and execution of the deportation (May Deportation) of around 1,000 Sinti and Roma from the Rhineland to German-occupied Poland. Without the involvement of large sections of society, the persecution measures could hardly have been realised.
One of the nurses involved in the deportation handed over the original prints to the activist, Sintezza and survivor Hildegard Lagrenne (1921–2007) around 1987/88 after hearing them on a radio programme. Reproductions were made on the occasion of a public event at the site of the former collection camp in Cologne in 1989, which were handed over to the archive of the NS Documentation Centre of the City of Cologne in the 1990s.
