Warsaw Ghetto: A Comprehensive Reflection

Introduction

The Warsaw ghetto was the largest Jewish ghetto the German occupation authorities established during World War II. Instituted in autumn 1940 and sealed for good in November of that year, it existed until the suppression of the uprising that broke out in April 1943.

Formation of the Ghetto

As early as November 1939, shortly after the Wehrmacht occupied Warsaw, an attempt was made to concentrate some of the city's Jews in a special quarter. SS (Schutzstaffel) officials issued a directive in the name of the Warsaw's German military commander, ordering the Judenräte (the council that the Germans had appointed to deal with Jews' affairs) to concentrate the Jews in a special quarter within three days. The directive, however, was cancelled and planning of the Warsaw ghetto did not begin until early 1940 (Czerniaków, pp. 67-78). The Nazi occupation authorities in Warsaw justified the need to intern the Jews in a sealed ghetto by claiming that the Jews were spreading disease, endangering the population's health, engaging in speculation and black-market commerce, and exerting a pernicious influence on society at large. Jews, then, were to be isolated until a comprehensive territorial solution to the "Jewish problem" could be found, whereupon all the Jews would be deported (Czerniaków, pp. 67-78).

On 14 October 1940 the German Warsaw District governor, Ludwig Fischer, issued the directive establishing the ghetto and published a list of the streets that the ghetto would include. Some three hundred thousand Warsaw Jews, along with many Jewish refugees who had streamed into the capital from elsewhere in Poland, were to relocate to the designated area by 1 November. The deadline was later extended to 15 November. About 30 percent of Warsaw's population was compressed into an area comprising less than 2.5 percent of the municipal territory. Only seventy-eight of Warsaw's eighteen hundred streets were allotted to the ghetto, which was encased in a brick wall with a circumference of eleven miles and a height, in most places, of ten feet, topped with concertina wire (Ringelblum, pp. 67-69).

The establishment of the ghetto tumbled Warsaw into chaos. It displaced some 115,000 Poles and 140,000 Jews from their homes. Poles tried to intervene with the German authorities to minimize the harm to their population, but many Jews had to relinquish spacious dwellings and businesses or sell them for a pittance because they were outside the area where Jews were allowed to live. The ghetto wall also created problems for public transit, municipal electricity and water systems, garbage removal, burial (Ringelblum, pp. 67-69), and other services. Few buildings in the ghetto had even minimal sanitation facilities; the inhabitants used common conveniences in the yards. By the end of 1940, housing congestion in the ghetto climbed to 332,800 people per square mile and 7 or 8 to a room.

Society and Economy

The ghetto's population mounted steadily as Jewish deportees and evacuees from elsewhere were sent there. In the spring of 1941, the population was 450,000. The German authorities in charge of the ghetto were not prepared to ...