The 24th Convoy consists of 625 people, including 54 children. Just like the previous Jewish convoy, the 23rd-A convoy of 15 January 15 1944, very poor in number, but it only took two and a half months and not four to bring together a quota of the same importance. This means that the hunt for Jews has increased, just like the other repressions in the occupied territory.
The political police got a new head since March, SS Colonel Constantin Canaris has taken over command of the Government Security detachment that he had left in November 1941 to Ernst Ehlers, then an SS major. In the Jewish section, a new chief, SS captain Werner Borchardt, succeeds the SS adjutant-chief Felix Weidman. The latter, a professional agent, did not had the zeal of the other persons in charge of Jewish affairs.
On 9 October 1944 this means was necessary to put an end to the infidelity of their predecessors: SS captain Fritz Erdmann and his buddy Kurt Assche, who had become his deputy since his dismissal on 19 November 1942. However his successor was in his way just as greedy, but he only charged the rich Jews for their release.
In March 1944, his replacement was urgently instructed "by order of the Central Government Security Office,to arrest the Jews". To the extent possible, the accelerated formation of the transport of 4 April responds to these new instructions.
The 24th convoy arrived in Auschwitz on 7 April 1944. It was not eradicated in the same proportion as the previous convoys. The eradication rate of 43.2% recalls the start of the Belgian deportation, when the % of the deployment of deportees was even greater than the % of the immediate extermination.
Of this convoy, 270 people were killed in the gas chamber upon their arrival, but 355 were admitted to the concentration camp. Nearly a quarter of the registered deportees will survive a year later at the liberation of the camps: 147 people. The survival rate of a Jewish convoy from Belgium has never been so high: 23 ½ %.
From the Memorial of the Deportation of the Belgian Jews, page 34 & 35.