Warsaw Ghetto

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Warsaw Ghetto
("Jewish Residential District in Warsaw")
location
Basic data
Country " General Government "
surface 3.1 km²
Residents 450,000 (1941)
density 146,580 inhabitants per km²
Arrangement Ludwig Leist on the resettlement of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, August 7 1940th
A child lies on a sidewalk in the ghetto. Admission by a member of the propaganda company 689 Zermin, May 1941
Location of the ghetto in 1940 (on a map from 1938)
Grün - Bürstenfabrik; Blue - workshops; Pink - "Umschlagplatz" (formerly Güter-Bf). Yellow - remaining area after the mass deportations in 1942
Rest of the Ghetto Wall in a Warsaw Backyard (2005)
Bridge to Connect Two Parts of the Ghetto (1942)

The Warsaw Ghetto , known by the German authorities as the “ Jewish Residential District in Warsaw ”, was built by the National Socialists for Polish and German Jews during World War II and was by far the largest assembly camp of its kind. It was opened in mid-1940 in Warsaw city ​​center , west of the old town Erected in the Wola district between Gdańsk train station and the old Warsaw Główna central train station and the Jewish cemetery. Mainly Jews from all over Warsaw, from other Polish regions under German control, as well as from the German Reich and other occupied countries were deported here . In the end, it served mainly as a collection camp for the deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp of the SS and as such was part of the organized mass extermination , the so-called " Final Solution of the Jewish Question " (the Shoah ). In 1943 the Warsaw Ghetto was the site of the largest Jewish resistance action against the genocide , the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto , which lasted from April 19 to at least May 16, 1943

As early as October 2, 1940, the Germans ordered all Jewish residents of the city to move to an area west of the center within six weeks. The non-Jewish residents had to leave their homes there. From the night of November 15 to 16, 1940, the Warsaw ghetto was subsequently cordoned off with an 18-kilometer-long and 3-meter-high enclosure wall and the initially 22 gates were guarded by SS guards under the command of Paul Moder . Heinz Auerswald , a German Nazi lawyer, was appointed as a commissioner for what is now known as the “Jewish residential district”. Like other assembly camps in occupied Europe, the ghetto received only nominal self-administration in the form of a Judenrat , which was completely subordinate to the Germans and which in turn was subordinate to an unarmed Jewish police . The tasks of the Judenrat, with Adam Czerniaków as the eldest, were diverse: they ranged from caring for the poor to everyday security services, compliance with labor regulations and providing the number of Jews required by the Germans at the transshipment point for transports to Treblinka . The Warsaw transfer office acted as the German administration of the collection center. It regulated and controlled commercial traffic in and out.

Despite overcrowding, more and more people were brought into Warsaw's Jewish residential area. Its population was around 350,000, and a total of around 500,000 people were deported to the ghetto. For comparison: at the end of 1939 a total of 1.31 million people lived in Warsaw. Strict food rationing resulted in hunger and epidemics. The Polish doctor Ludwik Hirszfeld , who was penned in the Warsaw ghetto from 1941 to 1943, described the inhumane conditions there in the following words:

“The streets are so overcrowded that it is difficult to get ahead. All are ragged, in tatters. Often you don't even have a shirt anymore. There is noise and shouting everywhere. Thin, pathetic children's voices drown out the noise. […] On the sidewalks, manure and rubbish are piled up in piles and mounds. […] I see an enormous number of men and women being hunted down by the security service. The old, the crippled and the infirm are liquidated on the spot. [...] Often there is something covered with newspapers on the sidewalk. Terribly emaciated limbs or pathologically swollen legs usually look out from underneath. It is the carcasses of those who have died of typhus that are simply carried out by the roommates in order to save burial costs. [...] Thousands of ragged beggars remind us of starving India. You experience gruesome spectacles every day. "

- Ludwik Hirszfeld
Announcement of the death penalty for unauthorized departure from Jewish residential areas, Warsaw November 10, 1941

Many ghetto residents were forced by the SS to work in various large companies, the so-called factories of German entrepreneurs and suppliers for the military. At first there were around 50 more private companies outside the ghetto in which Jews had to do forced labor . Activities outside the camp were increasingly restricted.

The food allocations of the ghetto residents comprised 184 kilocalories per capita per day, while Poles received 634 and Germans 2310 kilocalories.

Despite the inhumane conditions, there was a form of cultural life in the ghetto that, in view of the everyday struggle for survival, the threat of hunger, epidemics and the violent actions of the Germans, largely took place underground: starting with the so-called house committees, which deal with the interests of the The poorest took care of the youth departments, which organized children's corners for orphans, played theaters (in the orphanage of Janusz Korczak ) and ran libraries (library of Bacia Temkin-Berman) in order to give the tortured youth at least a few brief moments of distraction from the hell of everyday life in the ghetto up to larger concert and literature evenings in attics and in backyards that the SS could discover at any time ( Bluma Fuswerk theater , symphony concerts under the direction of Simon Pullman , performances by the singer Marysia Ajzensztat and the young violinist Ludwig Holomann or exhibitions by the sculptor Felix Fry dman ). In the early days of the ghetto in 1940/41, important contacts for the work of the conspiratorial youth departments and other illegal aid organizations (e.g. Judenhilferat Żegota under Julian Grobelny , Helena Grobelna, Władysław Bartoszewski , Adolf Berman, etc.) were established - not to be confused with that Judenrat set up by the Germans), who worked out plans for the partisan war outside the assembly camp and finally also for the ghetto uprising of April / May 1943.

Resistance and insurrection

The Warsaw Ghetto was the SS from July 22, 1942 in the " Great Action " as part of Operation Reinhardt gradually dissolved. The ghetto residents were sent to extermination camps, most of them to Treblinka . With the progressive waves of deportations, the ghettos were reduced in size until they were finally "liquidated", as is the German usage for the murder of all other prisoners.

After the large deportations in the summer of 1942, the ghetto was no longer a residential area, but a large camp with forced laborers, referred to by the Germans as a residual ghetto, which was not a contiguous area. Now many of the remaining prisoners of the remaining ghetto were cut off from their family members who were still living a few streets away, and the "shops" - that was the name given to the German companies that produced on the ghetto site, but also outside, on the Aryan side - were for many now unreachable - a proof of work in one of the shops (“forced labor permit”) meant the (temporary) right to survive. After the last shops on the Aryan side outside the ghetto were finally closed at the beginning of September, further downsizing of the remaining ghetto followed. Since the Germans no longer needed many of the Jewish slave laborers in the ghetto, all ghetto residents had to assemble in the square between Miła, Lubecki and Stawki streets on September 6, 1942 at 10 a.m. - for new selections that were supposed to further reduce the size of the ghetto . One of the residents of Miła Street, until then employed in the shop of the East German joinery workshop, watched the so-called Great Action that morning:

“I myself live at 6 Miła Street; on September 6th I was standing at the window since the early morning and watched everything. No report, no picture likes to reproduce the nightmare of that morning. Tens of thousands of emaciated, desperate, unwashed faces. Mothers with children in their arms, crying children, torn from their mothers by force. Masses, masses and again and again these masses wandering back and forth with desperate looks. The train never ends. And these selections take place and some return, but the majority - some tens of thousands - are led to the transshipment point. "

A group led by Emanuel Ringelblum succeeded in documenting Jewish life in the Warsaw Ghetto during captivity from 1939 for posterity in a partially preserved underground archive called Oneg Shabbat , named after the traditional get-together on Friday evening at the beginning of Shabbat .

The Warsaw ghetto was repeatedly and brutally downsized by the occupiers, and the remaining ghetto residents, who often lost their entire family, relatives and friends, grew insecure and threatened by the day. At the beginning of 1943, a little more than 40,000 people officially lived in the ghetto. Historians assume, however, that there will be up to 30,000 more illegal ghetto residents. Quite a few decided now, with certain death in mind, to offer armed resistance against the SS units and their helpers. On April 19, 1943, the Jewish Fighting Organization (Polish Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa or ŻOB or ZOB) began the uprising in the ghetto that lasted several weeks. The uprising was bloodily suppressed by the SS under Jürgen Stroop by May 8 . The resistance lasted until May 16. Only when the entire ghetto was completely burned down could the SS bring the area under their control. The ghetto itself has now been finally dissolved and completely destroyed, the remaining residents were either shot on the spot or transported to the extermination camps (especially Treblinka). Only a few were able to escape through the sewers prepared with smoke bombs and explosives, among them some senior members of the staff of the Jewish Combat Organization: Hersz Berliński , Marek Edelman and Zivia Lubetkin .

Captive Jewish residents of the ghetto are led away through the burning streets by the SS (May 1943)

On May 16, 1943, SS Brigade Leader Jürgen Stroop was able to report by telegram to General Krüger in Krakow:

“[...] The former Jewish residential district of Warsaw no longer exists. When the Warsaw synagogue was blown up, the major action ended at 8:15 p.m. […] The total number of Jews recorded and verifiably destroyed is 56,065. And he added: My people did their duty flawlessly. Your camaraderie was unparalleled. "

This announcement marks the official end of the Warsaw ghetto. Even if the ghetto uprising itself ended with an almost complete liquidation, it was used as a model by many other Jews in ghettos and concentration camps: In June 1943, young Jewish people in occupied Lviv and Czestochowa rose against it the Germans. There were further uprisings in Będzin - Kamionka, Sosnowiec - Środula (Sosnowitz - Schrodel and Klein Schrodel) on August 3 and in Białystok on September 16 - the support of artillery and air force was called in to suppress the latter uprising . Armed uprisings also took place in the Treblinka extermination camps , where most of Warsaw's Jews were murdered, and Sobibor . The Treblinka uprising took place on August 2, 1943, the Sobibór uprising on October 14, 1943. At the same time, the Polish and Jewish underground organizations in Warsaw, supported by the population, began preparing for the great Warsaw uprising on August 1 1944 began.

Arnold Schoenberg put the victims with his composition A Survivor from Warsaw ( "A Survivor from Warsaw") a musical monument.

After the uprising

After the suppression of the ghetto uprising, the Germans began to systematically destroy the remains of the former Jewish residential area, which covered around 400 hectares. Increasingly, unpaid workers - Hungarian, Slovak, Greek and Polish Jews from Auschwitz - were deployed in a labor camp on the former ghetto site. At the same time, in May 1943, large-scale raids took place against the Polish intelligentsia in Warsaw and throughout the General Government - for example, after the Warsaw synagogue was blown up in April 1943, around 700 people from highly respected Warsaw families were brought to the Warsaw Gestapo prison in a single day; 14 days later, these members of the Polish intelligentsia were murdered on the site of the former ghetto, which now became the place of execution for countless Poles and also for numerous Jews who had escaped from the ghetto and hid in the Polish and German parts of Warsaw, as well as for their brave life savers. The Pawiak prison (which has existed since 1829) , on the grounds of which the SS were shot almost every day, served the occupiers to intern airborne underground fighters and Jews - the historian and initiator of the Ringelblum archive (conspiratorial research and Documentation Institute for Polish Jews in World War II, Oneg Shabbat = joy on Shabbat), Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum , shot together with his wife and son.

In the remaining ruins of the totally destroyed Warsaw ghetto, despite repeated German raids and terrorist measures , some residents and persecuted hiding survived until the liberation by the Red Army - some of these Robinsons from the former ghetto also took part in the great Warsaw uprising in 1944. The history of the Warsaw ghetto did not end with the demolition of the great Warsaw synagogue on May 16, 1943.

After the uprising, the Warsaw concentration camp was partly built by the Nazis on the former site of the ghetto .

After decades of discussion, the foundation stone for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews was laid on June 26, 2007 opposite the Memorial of the Jewish Ghetto . The museum shows the entire history of the Jews in Poland from the Middle Ages to the turn of the millennium, including in detail the time of the Warsaw Ghetto. It comprises approx. 12,800 m² of exhibition space and was partially opened on April 19, 2013 with a celebration on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and in 2014 the entire opening.

Warsaw ghetto after its destruction in 1945

Criminal trials in Germany

The photo of the boy from the Warsaw ghetto was established in the Nuremberg war crimes trial mentioned.

On March 31, 1954, the Dortmund Regional Court acquitted 20 members of Police Battalion 61 of the murder charge of having shot 110 Jews, including 10 women, in a prepared mass execution at the end of June / beginning of July 1942 ; rather the jury had come to the conclusion that “that all of the defendants who were somehow involved in the execution acted in a proven, genuine state of coercion ”.

Well-known prisoners in the Warsaw Ghetto

see also category: prisoner in the Warsaw Ghetto

reception

Diaries and autobiographical matters

Contemporary photographs

Novels

Music and stage

Melodrama
Play

Movies

Propaganda film

Feature films

Documentaries

  • Tomasz Pijanowski: The Warsaw Getto. The Warsaw Ghetto 1940–1943. - 912 days. Production TPS Film Studio. Polish, English, Yiddish, German., 3 parts: History of the Warsaw Ghetto (37 '), Children in the Ghetto (4'), The Ghetto Uprising (4 '). Original recordings of the time from film archives, about everyday life and death, armed resistance and the destruction of the ghetto and its inhabitants. Linking texts by Feliks Tych . Science Advice: Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw) , German speakers: Jürgen Hensel, Jan Frontzek, B. Buschmann
  • Yael Hersonski: Ghetto film is a secret . The Warsaw Ghetto and Nazi Propaganda. Documentary film about recovered film scenes and the making of this propaganda film; Israel, France, Germany 2009, 87 minutes.
  • Roberta Grossman: The Secret Archives in the Warsaw Ghetto . The film tells the story of the Oneg Shabbat underground archive , which Emanuel Ringelblum set up together with helpers in the ghetto with the aim of giving posterity the most authentic possible picture of life in the ghetto and of the crimes of the Nazi occupiers.

literature

  • Wladyslaw Bartoszewski : The Warsaw Ghetto. How it really was. Testimony from a Christian. Fischer TB, Frankfurt 1986, ISBN 3-596-23459-X .
    • Wladyslaw Bartoszewski: It pays to be decent. (= Herder spectrum. 4449). Edited by Reinhold Lehmann. Herder, Freiburg 1995, ISBN 3-451-04449-8 .
  • Barbara Engelking , Jacek Leociak; Emma Harris (Translator): The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide To The Perished City. Yale Univ. Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-300-11234-4 (English).
  • Martin Gilbert : Final Solution. The expulsion and extermination of the Jews. An atlas. Trans. V. Nikolaus Hansen. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1982, ISBN 3-499-13670-8 .
  • Bernard Goldstein : The stars are witnesses. The armed uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. Report from one of the leaders. (= Unwanted books on fascism. Volume 3). With a preface v. Beate Klarsfeld . Ahriman-Verlag, Freiburg 1992, ISBN 3-922774-69-5 .
  • Joe J. Heydecker : The Warsaw Ghetto. Photo documentation of a German soldier from 1942. dtv, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-423-30724-2 .
  • Franz-Josef Jelich (Red.): The exhibition "Oneg Shabbat - the underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto". On the culture of remembrance in Poland and Germany. Klartext, Essen 2006, ISBN 3-89861-611-8 .
    • Emanuel Ringelblum , Ruta Sakowska u. a. (Ed.): Oneg Shabbat. The underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto. Exhibition catalog, documents. 3. Edition. Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw and Work and Life , Düsseldorf 2003, ISBN 83-85888-72-1 . (Text in German, doc. Multilingual)
  • Samuel D. Kassow : Ringelblum's Legacy. The secret archive of the Warsaw Ghetto. German by Karl Heinz Siber. Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-498-03547-1 .
  • Ulrich Keller (ed.), Uta Ruge (translation): Photographs from the Warsaw Ghetto. (= The Photo Paperback. Volume 2). Nishen, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-88940-609-2 .
  • Stefan Klemp : acquittal for the “murder battalion”. The NS-Ordnungspolizei and the post-war justice system. Lit-Verlag, Münster 1998, ISBN 3-8258-3994-X .
  • Stefan Klemp: Destruction. The German Ordnungspolizei and the murder of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto 1940–1943. Prospero, Münster 2013, ISBN 978-3-941688-42-1 .
  • Christa Laird: In the shadow of the wall. A novel about Janusz Korczak. dtv, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-423-78066-5 .
  • Anna Mieszkowska : The mother of the Holocaust children. Irena Sendler and the rescued children from the Warsaw Ghetto. Trans. V. Urszula Usakowska-Wolff and Michael Wolff. DVA, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-421-05912-8 .
  • Gunnar S. Paulsson: Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940-1945. Yale University Press, New Haven 2002, ISBN 0-300-09546-5 , Detailed Review JR 2003 (in English; translation of the title: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw - A Secret City. Paulsson presents ways to escape the ghetto and in the remaining in Warsaw).
  • Stefan Rammer, Peter Steinbach (Ed.): Once upon a time. Warsaw in autumn 1939. Neue Presse Verlag, Passau 1995, ISBN 3-931256-00-6 .
  • Markus Roth, Andrea Löw: The Warsaw Ghetto: Everyday Life and Resistance in the Face of Destruction. Beck, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-406-64533-4 .
  • Ruta Sakowska: People in the Ghetto. The Jewish population in occupied Warsaw 1939–1943. (= Klio in Poland. Volume 2). Trans. V. Ruth Henning. fiber, Osnabrück 1999, ISBN 3-929759-37-3 .
  • G. Schwarberg: In the Warsaw Ghetto. Heinrich Jöst's photographs. Steidl, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-88243-630-1 .
  • Karin Wolff (Ed.): Job 1943. A Requiem for the Warsaw Ghetto. Neukirchener Verlag, Neukirchen-Vluyn 1983, ISBN 3-7887-0708-9 .
  • Eva Seeber: The Warsaw Ghetto. From exclusion to genocide. In: Eva Seeber, Marian Feldman: Contributions to the history of the Warsaw ghetto. (= Texts on political education. Issue 11). Rosa Luxemburg Foundation , Leipzig 1994, ISBN 3-929994-13-5 , pp. 17–58. (with numerous references p. 59 ff.)
  • Georg Grinsteidl, Klaus Emmerich: The man with the ghetto. Projekt-Verlag Cornelius, 2012, ISBN 978-3-86237-231-7 . (The impressive life story of Max Bischof during the expiring period of the Austro- Hungarian Empire in World War I and afterwards is described. The Viennese banker, married to a Jew, is responsible for the ghetto in Warsaw.)
  • Tadeusz Pankiewicz : The pharmacy in the Krakow ghetto. translated by Manuela Freudenfeld. Essen 1995, ISBN 3-88498-058-0 .
CD
Tomasz Pijanowski, Krzysztof Wesolowski, directors: The Warsaw Getto Feliks Tych (Erz.); Eva Lacek; Ross Emans; David Smith (voices); 2005. Polish, English, German, Hebrew. Duration: 45 ′. tps film studio. Distribution Log-in-Productions New York (contains: 37 ′: Warsaw Ghetto; 4 ′: Children in the Ghetto; 4 ′: Ghetto Uprising 1943) Archive material, Jüd. Histor. City Institute. Excerpts: logtv.com

Web links

Commons : Warsaw Ghetto  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Sources, citations

  1. ↑ Documents shown here .
  2. ↑ Udo Christoffel: Berlin Wilmersdorf - The Jews / Life and Suffering. Verlag Kunstamt Wilmersdorf, 1987, p. 294.
  3. ^ Gerhard Schoenberner: The yellow star - The persecution of Jews in Europe 1933-1945. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1991, pp. 77 and 78.
  4. ↑ This is how Barbara Schwindt shows it using quotations from Himmler in: The Majdanek Concentration and Extermination Camp : Functional Change in the Context of the Final Solution. 2005, ISBN 3-8260-3123-7 , p. 150.
  5. ↑ Willi Jasper: As a girl in the Warsaw Ghetto - Human under inhuman conditions , Die Zeit of July 24, 1987.
  6. ↑ Quoted from: Anna Mieszkowska: The mother of the Holocaust children - Irena Sendler and the rescued children from the Warsaw ghetto. Munich 2006, p. 114.
  7. ↑ On three contemporary German city maps, digitized on www.landkartenarchiv.de, shown: November 1940 , July 1941 , "III, 1943"
  8. ↑ Quoted from: Wladyslaw Bartoszewski: The Warsaw Ghetto - How it really was. Testimony from a Christian. M. e. Preface v. Stanislaw Lem. Frankfurt am Main 1986, p. 106, as well as: Philip Friedman: In the Ghetto of Warsaw. In: The Second World War. Volume 2: From Pearl Harbor to Stalingrad. Stuttgart u. a. 1989, p. 126.
  9. ↑ BUILDING A MUSEUM OF LIFE ( Memento from December 16, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Video Jan. 2011, 14 min.
  10. ^ Building ( Memento of May 7, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ^ LG Dortmund, March 31, 1954. In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German convictions for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966. Volume XII, edited by Adelheid L Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs and CF Rüter . Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 1974, ISBN 90-6042-012-8 , No. 396, pp. 323-351.
  12. ↑ Trailer ( Memento from December 27, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) at logtv.com

Coordinates: 52 ° 14 ′ 34.5 ″  N , 20 ° 59 ′ 34.9 ″  E