Lublin ghetto
The Lublin Ghetto was a Jewish ghetto established during the German occupation of Poland in Lublin , the district capital of what was then the Lublin District in the General Government . It existed from March 1941 to April 1942 and was one of the first ghettos in occupied Poland to be "liquidated" as part of Aktion Reinhardt .
history
At the time of the German occupation in 1939, the Jewish population of Lublin was about a third of the total population of around 120,000. On September 18, 1939, the city was occupied by the German Wehrmacht during the attack on Poland . On October 14th, the Jewish population received a request to pay 300,000 zloty as a contribution to the occupiers. German soldiers forced Jews to clean streets and robbed Jewish shops and houses. The Jewish population was registered on October 25, the census showed 37,054 Jews in Lublin. In particular, many younger or politically active Jews had already left the city by this time and tried to flee via the demarcation line to the Soviet-occupied part of Poland. After the formation of the General Government on October 26th, a civil administration was established in Lublin on November 1st. On November 9th, Odilo Globocnik was appointed SS and police leader in the Lublin district. On the same day, SS men began to evict Jews from their apartments in the city center. By decree of the Governor General Hans Frank of November 23, 1939, all Jews over 10 years of age were forced to wear the Jewish star as a sign of identification, and all Jewish shops and businesses were marked. Towards the end of 1939, the Lublin Jews had to elect the first so-called Judenrat , which was responsible for representing Jewish interests vis-à-vis the occupying power. In December, a forced labor camp was set up on Lipowa Street for Jewish prisoners of war from the Polish army, which was subordinated to the Lublin Jewish Council.
In November 1939, the SS leadership decided to set up a so-called “Jewish reservation” for Jews from the Reich in the Lublin district (→ Nisko Plan ). From December 1939 to February 1940 tens of thousands of Jews from the German Reich and the newly created " Reichsgauen " were deported to the area around Lublin . After the deportations stopped, some of the deportees were taken to Lublin, others to smaller ghettos in Piaski , Glusk and Bełżyce . In 1940, numerous raids by SS and police units took place in Lublin and the surrounding area, the Jews who were captured were taken to labor camps in the Bełżec area for forced labor and used there to build border fortifications. Many of them died under the conditions there. On orders from Globocnik, the Jews of Lublin were forcibly concentrated in the Jewish quarter in 1940. Shortly before the actual ghetto was established in March 1941, around 14,000 Lublin Jews were resettled in the rural surroundings of Lublin.
On March 24, 1941, by order of the district governor Ernst Emil Zörner, the Jewish residential area was declared a ghetto. This measure, which was linked to the "resettlement" of the remaining Jews, was mainly done to create accommodation for the German army, which at that time was deployed on the border with the Soviet Union for the planned attack . The Jews were forbidden to use roads reserved for "Aryans". There was no strict surveillance of the ghetto until March 1942, and many Jewish specialists and their families continued to live outside the ghetto and work for the occupying power. Many Jews from the Warsaw ghetto fled to Lublin because they expected better living conditions there, especially in terms of food supplies. The cramped living conditions, which encouraged the outbreak of epidemics such as typhus , were particularly problematic .
In October 1941, preparations began for the planned liquidation of the ghetto. In December, workers were singled out for the construction of the Majdanek concentration camp . At the beginning of 1942 the ghetto was divided into two parts, in Ghetto A there were mainly unemployed Jews, while in Ghetto B there were those who worked for the Germans in some way. A few days before the ghetto was dissolved, the working Jews were registered by the SS and given an entry in their identity card that protected them from deportation. On March 16, 1942, Globocnik's Jewish advisor, Hermann Höfle, informed various institutions located in Lublin of the planned closure of the ghetto and the deportation of the Jews to the Belzec camp . The working Jews were to be taken to the Majdanek camp, which was still under construction. This started the " Aktion Reinhardt ", the murder of the Jews living in the Generalgouvernement. The deportations to Belzec began in the early morning of March 17th. By April 14, around 26,000 ghetto residents had been deported to Belzec on trains on the Eastern Railway, where they were killed in gas chambers with engine exhaust after their arrival .
Officially, only 2,500 “working Jews” were supposed to stay in Lublin after the end of the campaign, but the SS estimated that around 7,000 to 8,000 Jews were still hiding in the ghetto. The remaining Jews were now taken to the Majdan Tatarski ghetto, a suburb of Lublin. There, on April 22nd, around 2,000 to 2,500 of them, mostly women and children who did not have a “Jewish ID”, were singled out and shot in a forest. After these selections , around 4,000 Jews remained in the Majdan Tatarski ghetto, which was now fenced in with barbed wire. This ghetto was also dissolved from September to November 1942, and most of the Jews were sent to the Majdanek concentration camp or from there to smaller satellite camps. Most of the survivors were murdered in November 1943 during the “ Aktion Erntefest ”.
Of the 42,000 Jews who once lived in Lublin, only around 200 to 300 survived the Holocaust . The American psychoanalyst Zvi Lothane (* 1934) is one of the few survivors .
See also
literature
- Geoffrey P. Megargee, Christopher Browning, Martin Dean: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945: Vol. 2 - Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe. Indiana University Press, 2012. ISBN 0-253-35599-0 . Pp. 675-678.
- Tadeusz Radzik: Zagłada lubelskiego getta. The extermination of the Lublin Ghetto. Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2007
- Wolfgang U. Eckart : Medicine in the Nazi dictatorship. Ideology, Practice, Consequences, Böhlau Verlag Wien, Cologne, Weimar 2012, Chapter 3: Biodictatory practice after 1933, here 3.3.6: The "Reinhardt Action", p. 145.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Lublin Ghetto. deathcamps.org
- ^ Lublin / Majdanek Concentration Camp. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Coordinates: 51 ° 15 ′ 10.8 " N , 22 ° 34 ′ 17.8" E