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Ghettos & Deportation

Ghettos

During the Holocaust, ghettos were a central step in the Nazi process of control, dehumanization, and mass murder of the Jews.

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and as a result, the UK and other Western European countries declared war. Thus, the Second World War began – but the initial fighting in Poland lasted only a few weeks, as Poland’s old-fashioned army was quickly defeated by the modern, advanced German forces. In spring 1940 the Nazis established ghettos in the larger towns and cities across Poland.

The Germans regarded the establishment of ghettos as a provisional measure to control and segregate Jews while the Nazi leadership in Berlin deliberated upon options to realize the goal of removing the Jewish population, which in turn formed the “Final Solution”.

The largest ghetto in Poland was Warsaw, where 400,000 Jews were crowded into 1.3 square miles of the city. Other ghettos in Poland included those in the cities of Lodz, Krakow, Bialystok, Lvov, Lublin, Vilna, Czestochowa, and Minsk. Many thousands of western European Jews were also deported to ghettos in the east.

The ghettos were specially selected areas where Jews were forced to live. Some had walls built around them, others were marked out by barbed wire. They were nearly always in the poorest areas of town and desperately cramped with poor sanitation. As time went on, food restrictions were introduced and terrible conditions led to hundreds of thousands dying from disease or malnutrition. Men, women and children were forced to leave their homes, taking only the possessions they could carry, and move into overcrowded houses and rooms, where their movement was strictly prohibited. Conditions in the ghettos were appalling, where families were crowded together without adequate supplies of food or water. Many people died from starvation, disease and casual executions carried out by the Nazis.

All inhabitants of the ghettos were forced to wear a Star of David, making them instantly recognisable to the Nazi authorities. Many Jews were used as forced labour in factories and businesses outside of the ghetto. Daily life in the ghettos was administered by Nazi-appointed Judenraete (Jewish Council). Ghetto police carried out the orders of the Nazis, assisting with deportations, punishment and oppression.

Deportations

After the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 the Nazis decided to step up their policy against the Jews through the implementation of mass murder. By December 1941 over 1.5 million Jews had been killed by beatings, starvation or mass shootings. Camps were established as soon as the Nazi’s came to power and those who were considered to be opponents of the regime were imprisoned and treated with great brutality. The first concentration camp was established at Dachau on March 23, 1933. Following Kristallnacht huge numbers of Jews were imprisoned in camps simply because they were Jews. As the Nazis captured more territory the camp system was greatly expanded and used as a tool in the creation of the racial state.

The Wannsee Conference (20/01/1942) attended by German SS and State Officials saw the formulation of the attempted mass-deportation of European Jews to extermination camps that existed or were being constructed in German-occupied Poland. This “Final Solution”, if successful would see the extermination of 11 million Jews, not only in Nazi-occupied countries, but throughout Ireland, Great Britain, Sweden and Turkey. Deportation on this scale required organisation on an industrial scale and included many Government departments – the Ministry of Transportation to arrange train schedules and routes, the Order of Police to direct and manage the deportation and the Foreign Office to organise cross-border travel for Jews in allied countries. The co-ordination of these deportations showed how “normal” hatred against the Jews had become.

It is generally accepted that the Nazis attempted to disguise their intent, referring to the removal of Jews from ghettos to extermination camps as “resettlement in the East”. Jews would be rounded up from the Ghettos and made to prepare for their “resettlement” taking with them few of their most valuable possessions, if they were able.

The Germans used freight and passenger trains for the deportations. No food or water was provided for those on the trains, despite being sealed into packed freight cars, with little or no room to sit or lay down – those inside endured intense heat during the summer and freezing temperatures during the winter. Aside from a bucket, there was no sanitary facilities, adding to the indignity faced by those being deported. Many of those packed onto these trains died on route to the camps through starvation or over-crowding.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest Nazi extermination camp, where transports such as these arrived on a daily basis from virtually every Nazi-occupied country in Europe.