27-596: The Międzyrzec Podlaski Ghetto was one of the Nazi ghettos established for the confinement and persecution of the Jewish population of Międzyrzec Podlaski in the General Government territory of occupied Poland . The ghetto was liquidated in stages between 1942 and 1943 as part of the " Final Solution ", with all Jews either killed on the spot in mass shooting actions or deported to Treblinka and Majdanek death camps . At
54-469: A "final solution" which was a euphemism for the murder of Jews. Toward the Endziel and Endloesung there were intermediate goals to be carried out in the short term, and one of these was to concentrate Jews from the countryside into larger cities, thus making certain areas Judenrein ("clean of Jews"). The first ghetto of World War II was established on 8 October 1939 at Piotrków Trybunalski (38 days after
81-668: A city outside the walls of the Jewish Quarter were called "Aryan". For example, in Warsaw , the city was divided into Jewish, Polish, and German Quarters. Those living outside the ghetto had to have identification papers proving they were not Jewish (none of their grandparents was a member of the Jewish community), such as a baptism certificate. Such documents were sometimes called "Christian" or "Aryan papers". Poland's Catholic clergy massively forged baptism certificates, which were given to Jews by
108-620: A series of armed revolts against the regime of Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1943 in the newly established Jewish ghettos across Nazi-occupied Europe . Following the German and Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, Polish Jews were targeted from the outset. Within months inside occupied Poland , the Germans created hundreds of ghettos in which they forced the Jews to live. The new ghettos were part of
135-596: The Reichsgaue , and then throughout the Generalgouvernement territory. The Nazis had a special hatred of Polish and other eastern Jews. Nazi ideology depicted Jews, Slavs and Roma as inferior race Untermenschen ("subhumans") who threatened the purity of Germany's Aryan Herrenrasse ("master race"), and viewed these people and also political opponents of the Nazi party as parasitic vermin or diseases that endangered
162-730: The Holocaust trains , and another 2,000 were murdered locally, the ghetto underground staged an uprising, resulting in a blockade of the ghetto which lasted for a full month. There were other such struggles, leading to the wholesale burning of the ghettos such as in Kołomyja (now Kolomyia, Ukraine), and mass shootings of women and children as in Mizocz . The uprisings erupted in five major cities, 45 provincial towns, 5 major concentration and extermination camps, as well as in at least 18 forced labor camps. Notable ghetto uprisings included: To some extent,
189-560: The Jewish Quarter . There were several distinct types including open ghettos , closed ghettos , work , transit , and destruction ghettos , as defined by the Holocaust historians. In a number of cases, they were the place of Jewish underground resistance against the German occupation, known collectively as the ghetto uprisings . The first anti-Jewish measures were enacted in Germany with
216-598: The Warsaw Ghetto alone to Treblinka over the course of 52 days. In some ghettos, local resistance organizations staged ghetto uprisings . None were successful, and the Jewish populations of the ghettos were almost entirely killed. On June 21, 1943, Heinrich Himmler issued an order to liquidate all ghettos and transfer remaining Jewish inhabitants to concentration camps . A few ghettos were re-designated as concentration camps and existed until 1944. Ghetto uprising The ghetto uprisings during World War II were
243-406: The Warsaw Ghetto before July 1942. To prevent unauthorised contact between the Jewish and non-Jewish populations, German Order Police battalions were assigned to patrol the perimeter. Within each ghetto, a Jewish Ghetto Police force was created to ensure that no prisoners tried to escape. In general terms, there were three types of ghettos maintained by the Nazi administration. The parts of
270-485: The invasion of Poland during World War II , the Nazi regime set up ghettos across German-occupied Eastern Europe in order to segregate and confine Jews , and sometimes Romani people , into small sections of towns and cities furthering their exploitation. In German documents, and signage at ghetto entrances, the Nazis usually referred to them as Jüdischer Wohnbezirk or Wohngebiet der Juden , both of which translate as
297-433: The German official policy of removing Jews from public life with the aim of economic exploitation . The combination of excess numbers of inmates, unsanitary conditions and lack of food resulted in a high death rate among them. In most cities the Jewish underground resistance movements developed almost instantly, although ghettoization had severely limited their access to resources. The ghetto fighters took up arms during
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#1733084652127324-520: The Jewish population of the city survived the German occupation. Jewish townsman Sender Dyszel, who managed to escape shootings in Międzyrzec, was rescued by Polish Righteous Franciszka Abramowicz (1899–1990). She brought him food into the forest until he could return to her later. Dyszel emigrated to Argentina after 1947. 51°59′N 22°47′E / 51.983°N 22.783°E / 51.983; 22.783 Nazi ghetto Beginning with
351-526: The Nazi regime did not acknowledge this; instead, German medical professionals published essays blaming Jewish people's supposed "low cultural level" and "uncleanliness" for the typhoid epidemics. Posters depicting Jews as lice, which transmit from person to person the bacteria that causes epidemic typhus, were publicized, and the respected status of German doctors helped spread the belief that the Jews were responsible for spreading typhus. The German public health officials in occupied Poland were concerned only with
378-540: The Nazis: in Warsaw this was 1,060 kJ (253 kcal) per Jew, compared to 2,800 kJ (669 kcal) per Pole and 10,930 kJ (2,613 kcal) per German. With the crowded living conditions, starvation diets, and insufficient sanitation (coupled with lack of medical supplies), epidemics of infectious disease became a major feature of ghetto life. In the Łódź Ghetto some 43,800 people died of 'natural' causes, and 76,000 in
405-548: The Soviet Union . The Germans set up a transfer ghetto in the historic neighbourhood of Szmulowizna. It held 20,000 Jewish prisoners at its peak. On August 25–26, 1942 some 11,000–12,000 Jews were rounded up by German Order Police battalions amid gunfire and screams and deported to the Treblinka extermination camp . The next mass extermination action took place around October and November 1942. "Strip-search" of young Jewish women
432-728: The biggest of all Jewish uprisings during the Holocaust took place in the Warsaw Ghetto between 19 April and 16 May 1943, and in Białystok in August. In the course of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 56,065 Jews were either killed on the spot or captured and transported aboard Holocaust trains to extermination camps before the Ghetto was razed to the ground. At the Białystok Ghetto , following deportations in which 10,000 Jews were led to
459-610: The dominant Polish resistance movement, the Home Army ( Armia Krajowa , or AK). Any Pole found by the Germans to be giving any help to a Jew was subject to the death penalty. In 1942, the Nazis began Operation Reinhard , the systematic deportation of Jews to extermination camps . Nazi authorities throughout Europe deported Jews to ghettos in Eastern Europe or most often directly to extermination camps built by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland . Almost 300,000 people were deported from
486-643: The end of September 1939, during the Soviet invasion of Poland , the Red Army occupied the city of Międzyrzec Podlaski . At the beginning of October, the Soviet Union handed over the city to Germany as part of the German-Soviet Frontier Treaty amended to the secret Hitler-Stalin Pact against Poland in 1939. Following the exchange, approximately 2,000 of the city's Jews left for the territories of Poland annexed by
513-431: The ghettos were generally brutal. In Warsaw , the Jews, comprising 30% of the city overall population, were forced to live in 2.4% of the city's area, a density of 7.2 people per room. In the ghetto of Odrzywół , 700 people lived in an area previously occupied by five families, between 12 and 30 to each room. The Jews were not allowed out of the ghetto, so they had to rely on smuggling and the starvation rations supplied by
540-499: The health of German personnel, so they repeatedly urged occupation authorities to isolate Jews further from the rest of the population. German forces regarded the establishment of ghettos as temporary measures, in order to allow higher level Nazis in Berlin to decide how to execute their goal of eradicating Jews from Europe. Nazi officials had an Endziel , an unarticulated final goal that would take time to reach, and also an Endlösung ,
567-722: The heart of the city, was the largest ghetto in Nazi occupied Europe, with over 400,000 Jews crammed into an area of 3.4 square kilometres ( 1 + 3 ⁄ 8 square miles). The Łódź Ghetto was the second largest, holding about 160,000 people. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archives, there were at least 1,000 such ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone. Ghettos across Eastern Europe varied in their size, scope and living conditions. The conditions in
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#1733084652127594-687: The invasion), with the Tuliszków ghetto established in December 1939. The first large metropolitan ghetto known as the Łódź Ghetto ( Litzmannstadt ) followed them in April 1940, and the Warsaw Ghetto in October. Most Jewish ghettos were established in 1940 and 1941. Subsequently, many ghettos were sealed from the outside, walled off with brickwork, or enclosed with barbed wire. In the case of sealed ghettos, any Jew caught leaving could be shot. The Warsaw Ghetto, located in
621-478: The most deadly phase of the Holocaust known as Operation Reinhard (launched in 1942), against the Nazi plans to deport all prisoners – men, women and children – to camps , with the aim of their mass extermination . Armed resistance was offered in over 100 locations on either side of Polish-Soviet border of 1939 , overwhelmingly in eastern Poland. Some of these uprisings were more massive and organized, while others were small and spontaneous. The best known and
648-594: The onset of Nazism ; these measures did not include ghettoizing German Jews: such plans were rejected in the post- Kristallnacht period. However, soon after the 1939 German invasion of Poland , the Nazis began to designate areas of larger Polish cities and towns as exclusively Jewish, and within weeks, embarked on a massive programme of uprooting Polish Jews from their homes and businesses through forcible expulsions . Entire Jewish communities were deported into these closed off zones by train from their places of origin systematically, using Order Police battalions , first in
675-492: The overall health of the Volksgemeinschaft , the German racial community. German doctors and public health officials helped advance these racist fearmongering ideas. The German invasion of Poland (Sept. 1, 1939) and the formation of Jewish ghettos caused hunger and poverty, crowding and unsanitary conditions, which in turn actually created typhus epidemics in occupied Poland. German physicians and public health officials in
702-461: The parallel Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the Ordnungspolizei from Hamburg dealt with the thousands of ghetto inhabitants. On the seventeenth of July 1943, the ghetto was liquidated, with all remaining Jews deported to Treblinka and Majdanek extermination camps; at which time the last 160–200 residents were shot, and the city was officially declared free of Jews . Fewer than 1% of
729-452: Was introduced by Oberleutnant Hartwig Gnade before executions dubbed "mopping up" actions. His first sergeant later said: "I must say that First Lieutenant Gnade gave me the impression that the entire business afforded him a great deal of pleasure." The wave of mass killings lasting non-stop for several days, conducted by the Trawniki battalion of about 350 to 400 men, while the Germans from
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