The Curse of Gurs: Way Station to Auschwitz

Gauleiters Robert Wagner and Joseph Buerckel, the German administrative heads of the States of Baden and the Pfalz/Saar, sought to be the first to make their territories Judenrein (free of Jews). They engineered a massive westward expulsion of over 6,500 Jews to Camp de Gurs, located in unoccupied Vichy France. The event became known as the Wagner-Buerckel Aktion and was offered by the Gauleiters as their gift to the Fuehrer in October 1940. The relocation of Jews to the Gurs internment camp became an intermediate step when the infamous ?Final Solution? was pronounced at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. This Nazi annihilation program triggered yet a second round of transports that would move the incarcerated Jews from Gurs to the Parisian suburb of Drancy, an assembly point where the victims faced a final deportation to the death camp of Auschwitz. The story of this little known tragedy is told by the author who delves into the background of the historical events that led to the Aktion. He recounts the impact of this cataclysm on the area surrounding his boyhood residence in Germany and relates the tribulations and ultimate fate encountered by nearly seven-hundred members of his widely located family in the State of Baden.


About the Author
Werner L. Frank was born in Germany in 1929, immigrating to the USA in 1937. Frank, obtained a Bachelors Degree in Mathematics from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1951, followed by service in the U.S. Army in 1952-1954. He obtained a Masters Degree in Mathematics from the University of Illinois in 1955. His professional career began in the aerospace industry, followed by co-founding Informatics Inc. in 1962, one of the first viable software companies. He ended his career in 1998 as a key executive with Sterling Software, Inc., the latter having acquired Informatics in 1985. Mr. Frank published technical papers related to numerical analysis and software engineering and authored Critical Issues in Software, a book dealing with software economics, published by John Wiley & Sons in 1983. His business career has led to the writing of the novel Corporate War: Poison Pills and Golden Parachutes, available at Amazon and in eBook format on Kindle and Nook. Beginning in 1996, Frank has been researching his family's history, amassing a genealogical database of 35,000 names. This research has led to the book Legacy: The Saga of a German-Jewish Family over Time and Circumstance, published by Avotaynu Foundation in 2003. Now Frank has turned to the little known event that foreshadowed the Holocaust, by chronicling the October 1940 deportation of over six thousand Jews from Baden, Pfalz and Saar. Frank identifies seven-hundred family members who were among these victims that ended up in Camp de Gurs, located in Vichy France.