(This addition regards among others the transport Westerbork -> Auschwitz of 9 October 1942.
After the women and children were separated from the men upon the arrival of a transport at the Auschwitz station, the usual selections for employment took place.
It must be assumed that in general, i.e. except for a number of exceptional cases, during the Cosel period and also of the direct transports to Auschwitz in that period, only men were selected for employment, while the women, as well as the children and men who were not considered 'workable' (“arbeitsfähig”) were immediately killed by gassing.
The latter is deduced from this, that
1e) only very sporadically the names of women deported by these transports are found in the Auschwitz administration;
2nd) statements by survivors have only revealed the existence of very few women after the day of arrival;
3e) of the ± 20,000 Jewish women who were deported from the Netherlands to Auschwitz in the period August-December 1942, none returned, nor even (after the evacuation of Auschwitz) was found in one of the western camps.
To determine the time of death of the women, of whom individually nothing is known, the greatest accuracy is therefore obtained from the point of view of probability theory, if the date of death is taken as the day of arrival at Auschwitz, i.e. 3 days after the date departure from Westerbork of the transport involved. The same date of death therefore applies to children and to men who were not selected for employment.
In connection with this, this chapter need only be concerned mainly with determining the time of death of the men who are known or must be assumed to have been among those employed, insofar as there is no information regarding their death, no individual data are available.
This task is somewhat easier than with the Cosel transports, because almost all of the selected men are employed in the camps (sub-commands) of the actual Auschwitz complex, i.e. in the "Stammlager" (main camp) Auschwitz I, in Birkenau (Auschwitz II) or in the Monowitz-Buna, Jawischowitz and Golleschau (Auschwitz III) labor camps, and therefore not, like the men, who were taken off the train in Cosel, were spread over a large number of widely separated "Zwangsarbeitslager" (forced labor camps). They are also all included in the Auschwitz administration from the day of arrival and appear under separate matricule number series, which can usually be determined quite accurately.
Chapter III, from paragraph 3: Age limits of employed men.
It has become apparent that also in the case of direct Auschwitz transports, the age limit that was taken into account in the selection for employment, can generally be set at ±15 to 50 years. Only for two transports, namely those of 28 September 1942 and 12 December 1942, it appeared that this limit had to have been between ±15 to 40 years.
Source: the archives of the Dutch Red Cross, Publication “Auschwitz III”, (Deportation transports in the so-called Cosel period (28 August 1942 - 12 December 1942), published October 1952, from Chapter III - the Direct Auschwitz-transports, paragraphs 2 and 3 on pages 63 and 64.