In the Cologne-Deutz transit camp, German Reich, May 1940. Sinti and Roma from Cologne and the Rhineland are forced to line up in the inner courtyard of the Cologne fair, which serves as a transit camp, before being registered for deportation. On 21 May 1940, they are led to the train station to be deported to German-occupied Poland. The so-called May deportation was the first family-by-family deportation of Sinti and Roma from the Reich. The women, men and children were deported to the General Government. There they had to do forced labour in various camps and ghettos. Many did not survive.
So far, only one Sinteza depicted here has been identified: The pregnant woman in the left half of the picture is Karoline Meinhardt (1914–2000) from Düsseldorf.
One of the nurses involved in the deportation handed over the original prints to the activist, Sinteza 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.
