‘Without Any Hope of Return’. Deportation gathering points in Hamburg

The ‘denk.mal Hannoverscher Bahnhof’ memorial site commemorates the names of more than 8,000 Jews, Sinti and Roma from Hamburg and northern Germany who were deported from the Hannoverscher Bahnhof railway station between 1940 and 1945.

The deportations were linked to many places in the Hamburg metropolitan area and other towns and cities in northern Germany. Many throughout northern Germany observed the arrests, the people herded together at the gathering points and the transports by police van to the Hannoverscher Bahnhof railway station. Ahead of the deportations, those affected were summoned to the gathering points by the Gestapo or the Kriminalpolizei or taken there by force. For most, the hours and even days spent there signalled the beginning of an ordeal that would take them through ghettos and camps. Many were subsequently murdered.

The approaches taken to these historical events vary greatly at the present-day locations of these gathering points. The photography installation ‘Without Any Hope of Return’ aims to draw people’s attention to a cross-section of these historical gathering points and present-day memorial sites within Hamburg’s city limits, as reminders of the deportations.

The photography installation juxtaposes historical photos of the gathering points from archives in Hamburg with current photos taken by photographer Miguel Ferraz Araújo from similar angels. The title "Without any hope of return" is inspired by the memoir of Alice Kruse, who was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto on 14 April 1945 after being forced to stay in the former Talmud Tora school.

The photography installation will open on 27 April 2024 at 7 p.m. as part of the Long Night of Museums and will then be on display in the "Fuge" for three months.