Krakow ghetto

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The entrance to the ghetto, photo taken around 1941

The Kraków ghetto was a German assembly camp for Jewish residents of the Polish city of Kraków ( Kraków in Polish ) during the Nazi era and was located south of the Vistula in the Podgórze district . The original Jewish quarter, however, is in the Kazimierz district . The German terms “Ghetto”, “Jewish housing estate” or “Jewish residential district” obscured the purpose of this type of concentration camp by suggesting a longer stay.

Establishment

Krakow was captured by German troops on September 6, 1939 during the invasion of Poland . They quickly set up a Judenrat under the leadership of Marek Biberstein . SS-Oberscharführer Paul Siebert selected its members. From November 1939 onwards, all Jewish residents aged twelve and over had to wear armbands, 53,828 of which were sold by the Judenrat .

Postcard from the Jewish Support Agency (JUS) in the Krakow Ghetto asking for gifts of love

On March 3, 1941, the chief of the Kraków administrative district, SS-Gruppenführer Otto Wächter , ordered the establishment of a Jewish housing estate in Podgórze, a district in the southern part of the city. By March 20, 1941, all of Krakow's Jewish residents must have moved to this ghetto. The area of ​​600 by 400 meters was cordoned off with a wall and barbed wire. The streets leading into the ghetto were closely guarded by the SS . Every citizen of Cracow was strictly forbidden to enter the ghetto. The parts of the ghetto were connected with a wooden bridge. Since this ghetto separated several residential areas in the center of the city, the residents of Krakow could use a tram to get to the other side of the ghetto. The tram cars were sealed while traveling through the ghetto; the window panes were taped shut.

15,000 people were crammed into a district where 3,000 people previously lived. The Jewish lawyer Artur Rosenzweig was forced to take over the chairmanship of the Judenrat. Several factories were set up in the ghetto; several hundred Jews were also obliged to work outside the ghetto.

"Evictions"

On March 19, 1942, around 50 prominent Jews were arrested, deported and murdered in Auschwitz. On May 28, the ghetto was sealed off and by June 8, 1942, 6,000 Jews had been sent to the Belzec extermination camp . Three hundred other Jews, including Artur Rosenzweig, were shot in the ghetto during this "action".

In a further evacuation operation on October 27 and 28, 1942, 7,000 Jews were deported to Belzec and Auschwitz and 600 shot in the ghetto. The site was again reduced in size and divided into Ghetto A and Ghetto B in December , with the residents being instructed according to their presumed ability to work.

Dissolution of the camp

Deportation, March 1943

The final liquidation began on March 13, 1943. The Jews classified as fit for work were transferred to the Plaszow concentration camp . In the end, only a few hundred survived. The other residents of the ghetto - around 2,300 old and weakened adults and children - were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp on March 14, 1943 .

Before that, there had been an act of resistance, an attack on the Café Cyganeria, which is only reserved for Germans in the city . The leaders of the Jewish Fighting Organization (Polish Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa ) were captured and killed.

This was followed by clean-up work in which the remaining possessions of those killed and deported were disposed of by small Jewish labor columns. Finally, a few weeks later, the last Jewish auxiliary policemen and the members of the Jewish Council no longer needed were brought to Płaszów and murdered there immediately.

remains

Remains of the wall around the Krakow ghetto (with a memorial plaque) in the Podgorze district, October 2010
Memorial on the square of the ghetto heroes
Fragments of the ghetto wall, the architectural structure of which is based on Jewish gravestones

Today only parts of the wall at ul. Lwowska and the ghetto pharmacy remain from the ghetto. The film Schindler's List was not shot on the site of the ghetto, but in the Kazimierz district immediately to the north . Historical recordings can be seen, for example, in the feature film Hitlerjunge Salomon (1989) and in the documentary film Hitler - Eine Karriere (1977).

Commemoration

  • A plaque on the ghetto wall reads:

“Here they lived and suffered and were murdered by the Nazi executioners.
From here her last way led to the extermination camp. "

  • A memorial on the square of the Ghettohelden (former Unity Square ): “Apparently empty chairs”, placed in the middle of the square and at the tram stops. Opened in December 2005 by Krakow architects Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Łatak.

Foundation of the Plaszow concentration camp

The concentration camp arose from the relocation of the prisoners who were able to work from the Kraków Jewish housing estate from Podgórze to Płaszów in the southeast of Kraków. Construction of a labor camp there began in the summer of 1940 on a site that included limestone quarries and two old Jewish cemeteries : the New Cemetery on Abraham Street and the Old Cemetery on Jerozolimska Street. Non-Jewish Poles were the first forced laborers there. The camp grounds were repeatedly expanded. In 1941, after an initial expansion, the first Jewish prisoners were also brought in. Before the Kraków ghetto was cleared, around 2,000 people were imprisoned in Płaszów, and afterwards over 10,000. From January 1944 it was an administratively independent main camp as a concentration camp. In 1944 it reached its maximum size of 81 hectares .

The first commandant of the camp was Amon Göth , who because of his cruelty was called the butcher of Płaszów by the inmates . His villa still exists today as one of the few buildings in the former camp. The access road to the labor camp was paved with the gravestones from the cemeteries .

people

Residents

Guardian

literature

  • Israel Gutman et al. (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust . Munich and Zurich 1995, ISBN 3-492-22700-7 , Vol. 2: Keyword Krakau , pp. 807-810.
  • Andrea Löw, Markus Roth: Jews in Krakow under German occupation 1939–1945 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-8353-0869-5 .
  • Recordings of Krakow Jews. in Zs. “Moment.” Reports, information and documents from the Düsseldorf memorial . Publisher as Hg .; No. 12–13, 1998 ISSN  1434-3606 pp. 8–11: large format photos.
  • Tadeusz Pankiewicz, Die Apotheke im Krakauer Ghetto, 288 pages, hardcover, ISBN 978-3-00058237-0 , www.die-apotheke-im-krakauer-ghetto.de.

Movie

A film called The Lives of Jews in Kraków was made before the outbreak of war. A second film is in contrast to this: Resettlement in the Krakow Ghetto . It was shot for the needs of German Nazi propaganda (demonstration in the pharmacy , a department of the city's history museum, which also has a large collection of photographs).

The American feature film Schindler's List by Steven Spielberg deals with the story of the Schindler Jews in the Krakow ghetto, who were saved by the entrepreneur Oskar Schindler .

Web links

Commons : Krakow Ghetto  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Gutman 1995, p. 809.
  2. ↑ Klaus-Peter Friedrich (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933-1945 (source collection) Volume 4: Poland - September 1939-July 1941 , Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-486-58525- 4 , p. 48.
  3. ↑ Gutman 1995, pp. 809 f.
  4. ↑ Gutman 1995, p. 810.

Coordinates: 50 ° 2 ′ 43 ″  N , 19 ° 57 ′ 17 ″  E