ghettos

ghettos. The Nazis first established ghettos in which Jews were compelled to live after the Polish campaign in September 1939. Until this time, Nazi policy towards the Jews within the frontiers of the enlarged Third Reich sought to disenfranchise them, strip them of their property, and compel them to emigrate. anti-Semitism had, from the start, been a central feature of Nazi ideology, serving to bind together the disparate aspects of Nazi doctrine. Of the hostility of the inner core of Nazis to the Jews and of their desire to root out Jewish influence, there can be no doubt. Some dispute has, however, arisen as to whether Hitler aimed, from an early date in his political career to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish problem’ by mass murder, or whether the exigencies and the op portunities created on the Eastern Front led to the Final Solution. Certainly, as early as January 1939, speaking in the Reichstag, he threatened: ‘If the international Jewish money power in Europe and beyond again succeeds in enmeshing the peoples in a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the world and a victory for Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’

Nazi policy towards the Jews in occupied Poland was laid down by Reinhard Heydrich on 21 September 1939, even before the final Polish defeat. Heydrich was head of the RSHA (Reich Main Security Office), a central body which had, in that month, been created under the control of the SS to unite the state and party police. Heydrich's directives stated that Jews were to be expelled from the areas directly annexed to the Reich (Upper Silesia, Wartheland, the part of western Poland which had been annexed to Germany, and the area around Danzig), with the exception of Łódź. They were to be concentrated in the General government (see Poland, 2(b)), as the remainder of German-occupied Poland was designated. In order to control them more easily, they were to be forced to live in ‘ghettos’ which would be administered by Jewish councils (Judenräte) which would be ‘fully responsible in the literal sense for the execution of all orders’. This was to prove a thankless task. Some representatives of the Jewish élite accepted functions on the Jewish councils, hoping in this way to mitigate the harshness of Nazi rule and save at least some of the Jews under their care. They have been severely criticized for their role, particularly in the period when the Nazis deported the bulk of the inhabitants of the ghettos to death camps. But it should be borne in mind that at this stage the Germans had not yet adopted their ‘final solution’. Thus attempts to save a remnant of the Jewish people, a policy as old as the diaspora, had a certain rationale at a time when the ghettos, which were in fact at the same time prisons and forced labour camps, had achieved a certain stability.

The first ghetto was established in Piotrkow on 8 October 1939. In February 1940, a ghetto was created in Łódź, which, before the war, had contained the second largest Jewish community in Poland. Here, more than 165,000 Jews were forced into an area of less than 4 sq. km. (1.5 sq. mi.), which was sealed off from the rest of the city in May 1940. In 1940, ghettos were set up in almost all Polish towns with a significant Jewish population. It took some time before a ghetto was established in Warsaw (see Warsaw risings), but in October 1940 the Germans issued an order creating one, which in November was cut off from the rest of the city by a wall, imprisoning over 400,000 people. After the invasion of the USSR in June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA), ghettos were established in most towns with a substantial Jewish population occupied by the Germans, including Wilno, Riga, Lwów, and Minsk as well as in many smaller urban centres.

Conditions in the ghettos were deliberately kept harsh. By 1941, the daily food ration for a Jew in Warsaw was as low as 184 calories, compared to 669 for a Pole and 2,163 for a German. Their inhabitants were subjected to sustained terror and forced labour and many died as a result of the terrible conditions they were forced to undergo. Higher casualties were only prevented by large-scale food smuggling, which was, for the most part, tolerated by the Germans. Yet, in spite of the harsh ness of the treatment they were experiencing, many Jews hoped that if they made themselves useful to the German war effort, some of them would survive the war. This was, in fact, a cruel illusion, fostered by the Nazis in order to facilitate the achievement of their goals. From mid1941, Nazi policy towards the Jews had taken a very ominous turn. The invasion of the USSR was accompanied by the notorious Kommissarbefehl (commissar order), empowering German commanders to shoot out of hand any Soviet commissar who fell into their hands. As a first step, Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads, were set up, which followed the advancing German troops and were entrusted with the task of murdering Jews, along with communist officials. It was at this time that the fateful decision was taken, in which Hitler was almost certainly personally involved, to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish problem’, by mass murder.

From the spring of 1942, Jews were deported from the ghettos of Poland, Belorussia, the Ukraine, and the Baltic States to the death camps of Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka, and Auschwitz, where they were killed by gassing. Subsequently Jews from the rest of Europe, where ghettos were not established, were to share their fate. More than 4.5 million people perished in this way. The last of the ghettos to be destroyed was that of Łódź, whose leadership had managed up to that date to prevent the murder of the remnant of its population by producing uniforms for the German Army. Initially the Germans were able to carry out the deportations, making use of the SS, their own police, Polish and Jewish police, and the Jewish councils without much resistance. As it became apparent what fate was in store for the Jews, movements aiming to oppose deportation by armed resistance began to develop. Given the vast disparity of forces, resistance of this sort could only have a symbolic character. Armed opposition to the Nazis was offered in the Warsaw, Białystok, and Minsk ghettos. In many others armed formations were created which engaged in armed resistance in the countryside after the destruction of the ghettos. See also Ringelblum and Theresienstadt.

Antony Polonsky