Ghettos

September 21, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich recommended the establishment of ghettos and the creation of Jewish councils within them. They were intended to be temporary and then serve as further means in the expulsion of Jews from German-occupied lands. Initially, ghettos were established on the initiative of local German authorities. The first ghetto was established on October 8, 1939, in occupied Piotrków Trybunalski in central Poland. During this period, the Nazis planned to create a ” Jewish reserve” in the Lublin region of eastern Poland, the design of which was overseen by Adolf Eichmann. In turn, in the spring of 1940, there was an extravagant idea to exile Jews to Madagascar, the execution of which was again entrusted to Eichmann.

The failure of this plan caused the Nazi authorities to proceed with the construction of larger ghettos. However, they were not built according to a specific pattern, as was the case with concentration camps, which were created on the basis of experience from the construction of Dachau Concentration Camp. This was not yet the time of central planning of extermination, therefore, in the initial phase of the war, ghettos were not treated as an element of indirect extermination. Isolated districts were created throughout German-occupied Europe. In the invaded lands of Poland and the Soviet Union alone, more than a thousand were created. These places were not identical – the Germans divided the ghettos into closed, open and transit.

The closed ones were isolated from the outside world, they were fenced off, and their entrances and exits were strictly controlled. Such ghettos were established in Lodz, Krakow and the occupied Polish capital, Warsaw. However, most ghettos were open, so they were not surrounded by walls. Often, non-Jews were not banned from entering them either; this type prevailed mainly in the provinces. Transit ghettos, on the other hand, began to emerge in the era of Operation Reinhardt. They were places that functioned for a short period of time, and were often established on the sites of liquidated ghettos. They were intended for Jews transported from Western Europe and were, in a way, “antechambers of extermination,” since from them transports of Jews were sent directly to death camps.

The largest ghetto in occupied Europe was established on October 2, 1940 in Warsaw. It had an overall area of 3km2 and corresponded in size to the Principality of Monaco, except that more than 400,000 people were gathered there, i.e. ten times as many as currently live in the Principality. The ghetto was administered by the Judenrat, or Jewish Council, and order was guarded by the so-called Jewish police – the Jewish Order Service. High population density, food shortages and the brutal policies of the occupiers led to the death of hundreds of people every day. By the time the Nazis launched the so-called Great Liquidation Action of the Warsaw Ghetto on July 22, 1942, nearly 90,000 people had perished within its walls. During the action itself – which lasted two months – 300,000 of its residents were deported to concentration camps and later murdered. A dramatic symbol of this period became the Umschlagplatz, i.e. the trans-shipment yard, where crowded Jews under the batons of the Jewish police and SS were loaded into wagons and taken to be slaughtered.

The Warsaw Ghetto was the birthplace of the Jewish resistance movement, which stood up to the Nazis during the final liquidation of the ghetto. The uprising broke out on April 19, 1943, and had no strategic goals. The survivors of the uprising themselves recounted that the uprising was an expression of a desire to die honorably in combat, as well as a desire to somehow respond to Nazi crimes. The uprising, without any chance of success, was put down in less than a month.