Jews Being Forced to Move Into the Lodz Ghetto Lodz, Poland

The Ghettos

On September 21, 1939, a week before Poland surrendered to the German invaders, the order was given to Nazi troops to collect Jews in concentration camps. According to Chief of the German Security Police and Security Service, Reinhard Heydrich, Jews were to be collected “in as few concentration points as possible so as to facilitate subsequent measures… in cities which are rail junctions, or at least are located along railroad lines…”

The “concentration points” were actually ghettos, many of them completely sealed off from the world. The first ghetto in the occupied areas of Poland was established in the October 1939. Jacob Birnbaum, a surviving witness, has left an account of the terror unleashed by the Germans after they entered the town. Birnbaum relates that the Germans shot the first twenty Jews they saw and set fire to entire streets in the Jewish quarter and then killed the occupants as they came running out of their burning homes.

Jews being forced to move into the Lodz Ghetto – Lodz, Poland

In November 1939 it was decreed that all Jews living in Poland over the age on nine should wear a four-inch white arm band marked with the “star of Zion on the right sleeve of their inner and outer clothing.” Similar markings were to be placed on Jewish homes and shops.

Within a year, all Jews under German rule in Poland were confined to ghettos. Ghettos of this type had not existed since the Middle Ages. The Nazis established over 400 ghettos, as a means of controlling and segregating the Jews. All were overcrowded and gripped by hunger and disease. In the Warsaw ghetto, into which were crammed some half million Jews in 1.3 sqaure miles, 50,000 died of starvation in 1941. Most ghettos (situated primarily in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe) were closed off by walls, barbed-wire fences, or gates. Ghettos were extremely crowded and unsanitary. Starvation, chronic shortages, severe winter weather, and the absence of urban services led to repeated outbreaks of epidemics and to a high mortality rate.

The Nazis required many Jews to perform forced labor for the German Reich within the walls of the ghettos. Daily life in the ghettos was administered by Nazi-appointed Jewish councils (Judenraete) and Jewish police, whom the Germans forced to maintain order inside the ghetto and to facilitate deportations to the extermination camps. Illegal activities, such as smuggling food or weapons, joining youth movements, or attending cultural events, often occurred without the approval of the Jewish councils (though in many cases the Jewish councils did in fact sponsor cultural activity). In some ghettos, members of the Jewish resistance staged armed uprisings. The largest was the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. There were also violent revolts in Vilna, Bialystok, Czestochowa, and several smaller ghettos.

The ghetto system was temporary, as the final goal of the Nazis was the total destruction of the Jews by death camps. In August 1944, the last ghetto was evacuated and the Nazis completed the destruction of the last major ghetto, in Lodz, Poland.