Haapalah / Aliyah Bet

In the mid-1930s Norbert Wollheim became involved in organizing groups of Jewish youth to attend summer camps in Denmark and Sweden.
After Kristallnacht, he was asked by the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden to administer the Kindertransport program, to send thousands of children, mostly Jewish, from Nazi controlled central Europe to the United Kingdom.
He was made responsible for the application process, communication with parents, reserving special trains and finding escorts for the transports.

With 24 hours, notice of the date and time of their departure, the Reichsvertretung assembled 200 children, a number of whom had been living in the children home in Fehrbeliner Strasse and other orphanages in Berlin that were destroyed, plus some from Hamburg and from Breslau.
The teachers,and escorts who accompanied the children, were compelled by the German government, to return to Germany, included Rudolf Melitz, Martha Wertheim, Norbert Wollheim.

Norbert Wollheim met with each Kindertransport group at the train station and personally escorted many to Britain, before returning to Germany to organize the next transport.
Norbert Wollheim arranged for over 7,000 Jewish children on 20 transports to reach safety in the United Kingdom.

In December, 1942, Norbert Wollheim's parents were rounded-up for deportation, even though his father had been decorated with the Iron Cross for military service in World War I, and both were sent to the gas chambers upon their arrival at Auschwitz Konzentrationslager,.

In March, 1943, in the last major deportation action in Berlin, Norbert Wollheim and his family were arrested and taken to the Grosse Hamburger Strasse assembly center.
On March 11, 1943, they were deported to Auschwitz Konzentrationslager, in a transport of over 1,000 Jews, only six of whom survived the war.

Claiming experience as a welder, Norbert Wollheim was sent to the Buna synthetic rubber plant at Auschwitz III Monowitz, where he worked in construction.
He befriended a group of British POWs who shared their Red Cross parcels with him, and relayed news of the war gleaned from BBC broadcasts.

On January 18, 1945, the women prisoners at Auschwitz concentration camp were sent on a death march to Germany.
Zanne Farbstein had to support Sarah through the snow and rain.
When the German guards abandoned the prisoners in a small town, the two sisters continued on to the American Zone, where they found soldiers from the Jewish Brigade.

Norbert Wollheim was was put on a forced march to Gleiwitz.

Of the 6,000 prisoners who began the forced march from Monowitz, only 2,000 remained alive when the train arrived in Berlin, on January 31, 1945.

On January 25, 1945, the prisoners who left Auschwitz on January 18, 1945, on the Death March, arrived in Mauthausen.

Heinkel Flugzeugwerke was a major user of Sachsenhausen labour, using between 6000 and 8000 prisoners on their He 177 bomber.

On April 20, 1945, during the bombing of Berlin, Heinkel was evacuated, and the prisoners were marched out under SS guard.