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For Teachers Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust. Wise — International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.
Even today there is no clear definition of what constituted a ghetto at that time. It is sometimes not easy to define whether there was a ghetto or not in a particular location, particularly if the situation in question only lasted for a short time. Some ghettos were huge like the ones in Warsaw or Lodz, but there were also small ghettos with only a few dozen inmates.
Living conditions differed extremely. In some cities more than one ghetto was established, sometimes due to lack of space in one designated area, sometimes in order to separate the workers from those unfit to work and sometimes in order to separate the local population from Jews deported from Germany as was the case in Riga and Minsk.
Instead, the establishment of ghettos depended on local initiatives and developments. In the larger ghettos which existed for a longer period of time, social structures developed and many Jews tried to organize their lives under these completely new circumstances. On the one hand, there were the Jewish Councils or Councils of Elders, established on German orders to organize Jewish life under occupation and — above all — to fulfil German commands.
On the other hand, there were also many initiatives from within the community to organise life under these terrible new conditions with the objective of resisting physical and psychological destruction.
People tried to handle a life as normal as possible under these abnormal circumstances. In some ghettos, a rich cultural and social life developed, including schools, concerts and theatres. In contrast to concentration camps, families continued to live together in the ghettos, even if they now existed under totally changed circumstances than they had known before. Thus, family and private life still existed there, which is — with all the changes that took place over time — quite well documented for some of the ghettos.
Whereas in , the Nazi government counted about There were no plans for ghettoisation, as the occupiers on the contrary hoped to get rid of all the Jews in their sphere of control. They hoped to accomplish this by provoking their mass escape to Soviet territories and by deporting the remaining Jews to reservation territories, either in the Eastern part of the Polish territories or on the French colonial island of Madagascar. His goal was only to ensure the concentration of Jewish communities in well-connected cities to control them and make their future deportation easier.
Heydrich also ordered the establishment of Jewish Councils as the central organ designated to fulfil German orders and organize Jewish life. The establishment of the Jewish Councils was not necessarily linked to the emerge of ghettos in their respective towns: There were many places in occupied Poland where a Jewish Council was established, but the Jewish population continued to live in their homes and no ghetto was created at all.
This was often the case in smaller communities. It depended on the local administration as to whether, when and under which circumstances ghettos were established. In the Radom District of the General Government in Poland orders to separate the Jewish population were issued soon after occupation started.
Similar orders in Pulawy in the Lublin District even though this ghetto was dissolved again by the end of the year also led to the establishment of a ghetto at this early stage. The two largest ghettos in occupied Eastern Europe were the ones in Warsaw in the so called General Government and Lodz the city, which was annexed to the German Reich, was renamed Litzmannstadt in and became part of Reichsgau Wartheland.
They were closed ghettos: the one in Lodz was sealed off with a fence, the one in Warsaw with walls. Preparations for the Lodz ghetto already started in late By confining all Jews in a closed district, officials also wanted to extort all valuables from them in exchange for food. On 30 April the ghetto was closed. It then became the first ghetto where Jewish labour was exploited on a large scale: The Wehrmacht, but also many German companies benefited from cheap Jewish labour.
In the end, the ghetto in Lodz turned out to be the ghetto in occupied Poland which existed for the longest period of time. Throughout and , most of the smaller communities in the Reichsgau Wartheland were ghettoised as well — the majority of them were in the Eastern part of the Reichsgau, as Jews in the western part had been expelled further east in the first months of the occupation.
The ghetto in Warsaw was not established before November even though this ghettoisation was preceded by several earlier plans which did not work out. In Lodz and Warsaw just as in many other places, the act of moving the Jews to the designated area was quite complicated as far too many people had to find housing in an area that was almost always much too small.
The Jewish Councils had to organize this complicated task. During the war and subsequently their behaviour and enforced cooperation with the German administration have been the subject of many, sometimes heated discussions [see b Jewish Administration ].
A new wave of ghettoisation which occurred in spring can partly be explained by the preparations for the attack on the Soviet Union: Already earlier, the lack of housing had been one possible reason for the establishment of ghettos; now German soldiers were supposed to be accommodated in apartments or houses formerly owned by Jews. In March, ghettos were established in Krakow and Lublin, one month later in Kielce, Radom and Czestochowa; ghettoisation was ordered throughout many communities in the Krakow and Radom Districts.
In smaller towns, this tended to result in open ghettos. Sometimes ghettoisation was limited to the order to the Jews not to leave the limits of their villages. But even after this period, ghettos had not yet been established throughout the General Government. The most important ghettos were those in Lublin, Opole, Piaski and Zamosc. In the Krakow district, most ghettos were also not established before and The motives for ghettoisation varied during this first period: Jews were supposed to be isolated from the rest of the population and concentrated to make their future resettlement easier.
A reason frequently cited by German officials was the alleged danger of diseases spread by Jews. The fear of typhus caused a more systematic wave of ghettoisation in the fall of Ghettoisation was alo a lucrative strategy of enrichment: Jews were forced to leave many of their belongings behind when they had to move to the designated area within a very short time frame and had to sell everything they could beneath its actual value.
In occupied Poland some ghettos were only established much later, in , when deportations to the annihilation centres had already started, in order to serve as assembly points of the future victims.
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