Lesson 4: The Ghettos
Assignment: Read "The War Against The Jews" and "Machinery of Hatred," in Holocaust Chronicle.
Confining Jews in ghettos was not new with Nazi Germany. For centuries, Jews had faced persecution, and were often forced to live in designated areas called ghettos. The Nazis' ghettos differed, however, in that they were a preliminary step in the annihilation of the Jews, rather than a method to just isolate them from the rest of society. As the war against the Jews progressed, the ghettos became transition areas, used as collection points for deportation to death camps and concentration camps.
On 21st September, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich told several Schutz Staffeinel (SS) commanders in Poland that all Jews were to be confined to special areas in cities and towns. These ghettos were to be surrounded by barbed wire, brick walls and armed guards.
The first ghetto was set up in Piotrkow on 28th October 1939. Jews living in rural areas had their property confiscated and they were rounded up and sent to ghettos in towns and cities. The two largest ghettos were established in Warsaw and Lodz. Warsaw, the largest ghetto, held 400,000 people, Lodz 160,000.
In October 1939, the SS began to deport Jews living in Austria and Czechoslovakia to ghettos in Poland. Transported in locked passenger trains, large numbers died on the journey. Those that survived the journey were told by Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Gestapo's Department of Jewish Affairs: "There are no apartments and no houses - if you build your homes you will have a roof over your head."
In Warsaw, the capital of Poland, all 22 entrances to the ghetto were sealed. The German authorities allowed a Jewish Council (Judenrat) of 24 men to form its own police to maintain order in the ghetto. The Judenrat was also responsible for organizing the labor battalions demanded by the German authorities.
In total, the Nazis established 356 ghettos in Poland, the Soviet Union, the Baltic States, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Hungary between 1939 and 1945. There was no uniformity to these ghettos. The ghettos in small towns were generally not sealed off, which was often a temporary measure used until the residents could be sent to bigger ghettos.
Larger cities had closed ghettos, with brick or stone walls, wooden fences, and barbed wire defining the boundaries. Guards were placed strategically at gateways and other boundary openings. Jews were not allowed to leave the so-called "Jewish residential districts," under penalty of death.
All ghettos had the most appalling, inhuman living conditions. The smallest ghetto housed approximately 3,000 people. Conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto were so bad that between 1940 and 1942 an estimated 100,000 Jews died of starvation and disease in the Warsaw Ghetto.
The Structure of the Ghettos
In contemporary usage, “ghetto” means “separate living quarters” for a specific racial or ethnic group. This was, clearly, not the case for Jews in Poland between 1940 and 1942. The ghettos created by the Nazis were transitional areas between deportation and the “Final Solution.” Many, though not all, were enclosed areas; barbed wire at Lodz, a brick wall in Warsaw and Cracow. Almost all were heavily guarded by armed military personnel.
While the ghettos were under Nazi control, each ghetto had an internal administrative structure—the Judenrat, or Jewish council, generally made up of leading rabbis and other influential persons in the Jewish community. Their functions were to administer Nazi policy within the ghetto. There has been considerable controversy regarding these councils' role in the fate of Jews. On the one hand, they provided some sense of autonomy to the Jewish community. They were responsible for health and welfare, the distribution of food, and for policing the ghetto internally. On the other hand, the Judenrat were, intentionally or unintentionally, a tool of the Nazis in the destruction of the Jews. While they had authority within the ghetto, they had no authority at all in representing the needs and interests of the Jews to the Nazi government. The members of the Jewish Councils were themselves subject to on-the-spot execution for any failure to carry out Nazi policy.
Living conditions in most of the ghettos were horrible. Malnutrition was widespread and death by starvation was a daily occurrence. Between 1941 and 1942, 20 percent of the population in the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos starved to death (over 112,000 people). At the same time, Jews during these two years were used extensively as slave labor and had, at least, some economic value to the Nazis. Why, then, would the Nazi government intentionally deprive them of food necessary for survival? For one thing, a steady flood of Jews were streaming into the ghettos from other parts of Europe. Any who starved to death, or were executed for disobedience, would likely be replaced very quickly. Also, despite the fact that the Final Solution had not begun officially, previous activities, e.g., the Einsatzgruppen, the T4 Program, had demonstrated that ridding the Reich of Jews was a desired outcome. Finally, starving the Jews to death was cheaper than shooting them or gassing them and all available foods and other survival necessities were needed at the front for military personnel.
After 1942 and the decisions reached by the Wannsee Conference, the liquidation of the ghettos became a much more systematic process.
