The idea of creating a closed Jewish district in Warsaw was already considered in the autumn of 1939. It was not realized then due to the plans to concentrate Warsaw Jews in the Lublin district. When the plan turned out to be unrealistic, as the idea to send all the Jews to Madagascar, the Germans started searching for a place in Warsaw where they could create a Jewish ghetto. The decision fell to establish the ghetto in the northwest part of the Śródmieście district, where since the 19thcentury the vast majority of Warsaw Jews lived. This entire part of the city was deemed to be an ‘isolated epidemic area’ and the German authorities warned that people remaining in the neighbourhood risked contracting typhus. Therefore, in April 1940 they built the first walls to isolate the Jews from rest of the city’s inhabitants. Surrounded by walls, this city quarter to a large extant corresponded to the borders of the future ghetto.

The ghetto was officially founded on 2 October 1940 by a decree of Warsaw District Governor Ludwig Fischer. The Jewish population was ordered to resettle in the ghetto within a few weeks, immediately after the eviction of the Polish inhabitants from the designated area. Thus, 138,000 Jews and almost as many Poles (113,000) were forced to leave their homes and resettle.

On 16 November 1940, the Warsaw ghetto was completely isolated from the rest of the city. It was surrounded by a three-metre-high brick wall, extended upwards by another metre with barbed wire. The Germans forced the Jewish religious community to build this wall and made them pay for all its construction costs. The ghetto was guarded on the outside by German police and Polish ‘blue’ police and on the inside by the Jewish Order Service, commonly called the Jewish police. The Warsaw ghetto was virtually deprived of all public greenery, as its borders excluded the Jewish inhabitants from access to parks, gardens or other green spaces.

At the beginning of 1941, the ghetto covered an area of 307 ha. Concentrated within this space were almost 400,000 people. Therefore, the population density was 146,000 persons per 1 km², creating extremely difficult living conditions. In the summer of 1941, the population in the ‘Jewish quarter’ rose even more, peaking at almost 460,000, when Jews from the western part of the Warsaw district were also resettled there. Thus, the Warsaw ghetto became the largest concentration of Jews not only in the General Government, but also in the whole of occupied Europe.

The first stage of liquidation of the ghetto began on 22 July 1942 and lasted until 21 September 1942. In that time approx. 300,000 Jews (80% of the inhabitants of the ghetto) were transported to Treblinka extermination camp. Because of the sheer scale of this crime, it was called the ‘great action’ (Grossaktion). The next attempt to liquidate the ghetto took place in January 1943. But this time faced the armed resistance of Jewish fighters. The operation was interrupted, and therefore this time only 5,000 Jews were deported to Treblinka. The final liquidation was not completed until the fall of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which broke out on 19 April and lasted until 16 May 1943. The ghetto’s surviving inhabitants were deported to various extermination camps or to Majdanek concentration camp, whereas the ‘Jewish quarter’ was demolished.

It is estimated that the total number of Warsaw ghetto victims reached approx. 400,000 people. Of these 300,000 were murdered in the gas chambers of Treblinka extermination camp, and 100,000 were killed or died of hunger and diseases in the ghetto.

• Using the Warsaw ghetto as an example, describe the problems of living in ghettos within large cities.
• What were the biggest problems the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto had to face?