Jewish ghettos established by Nazi Germany
Ghettos in South-Eastern Europe | |
---|---|
Date | 1939–1945 |
Incident type | Total of more than 1,000 ghettos created mostly in Central and Eastern Europe[1] |
Perpetrators | Schutzstaffel (SS), Order Police battalions |
Ghetto |
|
Beginning with the
Background and establishment of the ghettos
The first anti-Jewish measures were enacted in Germany with the onset of
The Nazis had a special hatred of Polish and other eastern Jews.
Nazi ideology depicted Jews, Slavs and Roma as inferior race
German forces regarded the establishment of ghettos as temporary measures, in order to allow higher level Nazis in Berlin to decide how to execute their goal of eradicating Jews from Europe.[8]
Nazi officials had an Endziel, an unarticulated final goal that would take time to reach, and also an Endlösung, a "final solution" which was a euphemism for the murder of Jews.
Toward the Endziel and Endloesung there were intermediate goals to be carried out in the short term, and one of these was to concentrate Jews from the countryside into larger cities, thus making certain areas
The first ghetto of World War II was established on 8 October 1939 at Piotrków Trybunalski (38 days after the invasion),[10] with the Tuliszków ghetto established in December 1939. The first large metropolitan ghetto known as the Łódź Ghetto (Litzmannstadt) followed them in April 1940, and the Warsaw Ghetto in October. Most Jewish ghettos were established in 1940 and 1941. Subsequently, many ghettos were sealed from the outside, walled off with brickwork, or enclosed with barbed wire. In the case of sealed ghettos, any Jew caught leaving could be shot. The Warsaw Ghetto, located in the heart of the city, was the largest ghetto in Nazi occupied Europe, with over 400,000 Jews crammed into an area of 3.4 square kilometres (1+3⁄8 square miles).[11] The Łódź Ghetto was the second largest, holding about 160,000 people.[12] According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archives, there were at least 1,000 such ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone.[2]
Living conditions
Ghettos across Eastern Europe varied in their size, scope and living conditions.[13] The conditions in the ghettos were generally brutal. In Warsaw, the Jews, comprising 30% of the city overall population, were forced to live in 2.4% of the city's area, a density of 7.2 people per room.[11] In the ghetto of Odrzywół, 700 people lived in an area previously occupied by five families, between 12 and 30 to each room. The Jews were not allowed out of the ghetto, so they had to rely on smuggling and the starvation rations supplied by the Nazis: in Warsaw this was 1,060 kJ (253 kcal) per Jew, compared to 2,800 kJ (669 kcal) per Pole and 10,930 kJ (2,613 kcal) per German. With the crowded living conditions, starvation diets, and insufficient sanitation (coupled with lack of medical supplies), epidemics of infectious disease became a major feature of ghetto life.[14] In the Łódź Ghetto some 43,800 people died of 'natural' causes, and 76,000 in the Warsaw Ghetto before July 1942.[15]
Types of ghettos
To prevent unauthorised contact between the Jewish and non-Jewish populations, German Order Police battalions were assigned to patrol the perimeter. Within each ghetto, a Jewish Ghetto Police force was created to ensure that no prisoners tried to escape. In general terms, there were three types of ghettos maintained by the Nazi administration.[2]
- Open ghettos did not have walls or fences, and existed mostly in initial stages of World War II in German-occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet Union, but also in Transnistria province of Ukraine occupied and administered by Romanian authorities. There were severe restrictions on entering and leaving them.[13]
- Closed or sealed ghettos were situated mostly in German-occupied Poland. They were surrounded by brick walls, fences or barbed wire stretched between posts. Jews were not allowed to live in any other areas under the threat of capital punishment. In the closed ghettos the living conditions were the worst. The quarters were extremely crowded and unsanitary. Starvation, chronic shortages of food, lack of heat in winter and inadequate municipal services led to frequent outbreaks of epidemics such as dysentery and typhus and to a high mortality rate.[16] Most Nazi ghettos were of this particular type.[13]
- The destruction or extermination ghettos existed in the final stages of the Holocaust, for between two and six weeks only, in German-occupied Soviet Union (especially in occupied Poland. They were tightly sealed off. The Jewish population was imprisoned in them only to be deported or taken out of town and shot by the German killing squads, often with the aid of local collaborationist Auxiliary Police battalions.[13]
Aryan side
The parts of a city outside the walls of the Jewish Quarter were called "Aryan". For example, in
Liquidation
In 1942, the Nazis began
See also
- Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland
- Judendienstordnung
- Judenrat
Notes
- ^ Yad Vashem, "The Ghettos". The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority. Overview. Retrieved 28 September 2015.
- ^ a b c Holocaust Encyclopedia (2014). "Ghettos. Key Facts". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on August 15, 2012. Retrieved 28 September 2015 – via Internet Archive.
- ^ Browning 2007, pp. 166, 172.
- ^ Browning 2007, p. 139, Gold rush.
- ISBN 9042006889.
- ^ "Public Health under the Third Reich". Experiencing History - Holocaust Sources in Context. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. Archived from the original on 20 April 2021. Retrieved 20 April 2021.
- ^ "Final Solutions: Murderous Racial Hygiene, 1939–1945". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC - Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. Archived from the original on 20 April 2021. Retrieved 20 April 2021.
- ^ "Ghettos". The Holocaust - The Nazi Genocide against the Jewish People. Sydney Jewish Museum, Australia. Archived from the original on 20 April 2021. Retrieved 20 April 2021.
- ^ https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/history-and-overview-of-ghettos Accessed June 2021
- ^ "First Jewish ghetto established in Piotrkow Trybunalski: October 8, 1939". Archived from the original on January 6, 2009. Retrieved June 1, 2016.. Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority.
- ^ a b Warsaw, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- ^ Ghettos Archived 2014-10-27 at the Wayback Machine, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- ^ a b c d Types of Ghettos. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
- ^ Browning 2007, pp. 149, 167: Sanitation.
- ISBN 0253347556. Retrieved 29 September 2015.
- ^ Hershel Edelheit, Abraham J. Edelheit, A world in turmoil: an integrated chronology of the Holocaust, 1991
- ^ Gunnar S. Paulsson, "The Rescue of Jews by Non-Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland", The Journal of Holocaust Education, vol. 7, nos. 1 & 2 (summer–autumn 1998), pp. 19–44.
- ISBN 978-0-7864-2913-4.
- ISBN 978-0-231-11200-0.
- ^ "Warsaw" Yad Vashem
- ^ "Order by Himmler for the Liquidation of the Ghettos of Ostland, June 21, 1943" Yad Vashem
References
- ISBN 978-0253355997.
- ISBN 978-0803203921.
- Corni, Gustavo (2003). Hitler's Ghettos: Voices from a Beleaguered Society 1939-1944. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-0-340-76246-2.