History of Ghettos, Part Three/Final

No series of three articles can cover such an extensive subject as the history of ghettos, and no single article can begin to cover the terrible confinement of Europe's Jews in ghettos by the Nazis during World War Two. By the time World War Two started in September 1939, Germany, which included Austria since March 1938, had seen its Jewish population decline since Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, as many Jews had emigrated. Those who hadn't left were soon to experience an even worse nightmare of Nazi rule. Unfortunately too, some Jews who had left Germany simply crossed nearby borders into countries soon to be overrun by Hitler's armies, which were then followed by Heinrich Himmler's SS units. The Nazi and Soviet conquest of Poland* gave Germany nearly half of Poland, including many Polish Jews, but a part of Poland's substantial Jewish population remained out of Nazi control in Soviet occupied eastern Poland. That all changed beginning in late June 1941, as Hitler sent his forces against his former Soviet ally. Hitler's armies achieved multiple penetrations of Soviet lines and quickly captured the Soviet-occupied part of Poland. Not only that, many Jews lived in the western areas of the Soviet Union, including Lithuania, White Russia, and the western Ukraine, all areas brought under Nazi domination.

With millions of Jews now under their control, the Nazi leaders forced Jews into numerous ghettos, often in Poland, or in other eastern European areas. A section of Warsaw was the largest Nazi-created Jewish ghetto in Europe, being established in late 1940; that is, well before Hitler launched his attack on the Soviet Union. This ghetto contained some 400,000 Jews, but occupied an area of less than one and a half square miles. The internal affairs of the ghetto were under a Jewish Council (German: "Judenrat"), and Jewish leaders, for a time, tried to cooperate with Nazi officials, and a whole system of Jewish administration was set up, including the operation of hospitals, schools, and music performances. To add to the terrible congestion, some Gypsies were also sent into the ghetto. Gypsies were another group targeted by the insane and evil Nazi racial theories. Food was chronically in short supply and disease was rampant, with many thousands of people dying within the ghetto. Perhaps as many a quarter of a million ghetto inhabitants were sent to and murdered in the infamous Treblinka extermination camp during 1942.** As the remaining Jews learned from Polish and Jewish Resistance fighters the fate of the former inhabitants of the ghetto, they chose to fight. Various weapons were smuggled into the ghetto by the Resistance, and during the first part of 1943 Jewish resistance to the Nazis intensified, but the Nazis had all of the firepower, and the "Warsaw Uprising" ended with thousands dead, and tens of thousands sent to be murdered in nearby Nazi extermination camps. The area of the ghetto was essentially leveled.

The Polish city of Lodz lies about 85 miles southwest of Warsaw. It was in an area of Poland that was annexed to Germany by Hitler after the conquest of Poland. It was then renamed "Litzmannstadt" by the Nazis.*** The city contained more than 200,000 Jews, besides a substantial Polish majority, and a relatively small German minority. The Nazis erected a fence with barbed wire around a portion of the city in the spring of 1940, sealing off the area, thus beginning the actual "Lodz Ghetto," with between 150,000 and 175,000 Jews and some Gypsies. Similar to Warsaw, a Jewish Council ruled the ghetto, and in Lodz, the leader of the council cooperated with the Nazis, even manufacturing goods for Hitler's armies. The council administered the ghetto, enforcing  its policies with its own Jewish police force.**** With Jews working long hours seven days a week, and with limited rations, disease and starvation overran the population, and perhaps 40,000, or even as many as  50,000, people died as a result. Gradually the Nazis emptied the ghetto of people unable to work in the war industry there, including children, and they were sent to nearby extermination camps and murdered. By the summer of 1944 the ghetto was emptied of its Jewish and Gypsy population.

As I noted, there were numerous ghettos set up by the Nazis, but too many to cover in this article. For those interested in reading more, you might want to search for Vilnius Ghetto in Lithuania or Theresienstadt in (then) northern Czechoslovakia, for example. Also, you can check out the Jewish Virtual Library website.

* Hitler and Stalin had agreed upon a conquest and division of Poland in a pact signed in August 1939.

** Treblinka was located some 55-60 miles northeast of Warsaw.

*** Karl Litzmann was a German general in World War One who led German forces to a major victory over the Russian army in the Lodz area in late 1914. He later became a Nazi official and he died in the mid 1930s. Lodz was renamed by the Nazis in his honor, but of course, the city's name reverted to "Lodz" after the Nazi defeat. 

**** The policy of collaboration with the Nazis was obviously very controversial, and the Nazi authorities granted better food and supplies to Jewish leaders than to other Jews. The Jewish leader later died in Auschwitz. Some Jewish survivors credited his efforts to work with the Nazis and to produce war goods for keeping the ghetto's population from early annihilation (probably true), while other survivors felt his own strict enforcement policies were essentially as bad as the Nazis.  

WORD HISTORY:
Barrio-This word meaning "a Spanish speaking district or quarter of an American city," or "a ward or district of a city" in Spanish speaking countries, goes back to Semitic "brr," which had the notion of "open land area." This gave its Arabic offspring "barri," with the same basic meaning. The Arabic speaking Moors, a term generally applied to North African Berbers, invaded and conquered much of Spain beginning in the 700s A.D. They brought the term with them and it was borrowed into Spanish as "barrio," then with the meaning "suburb, district outside a city proper," which tied in with the original sense of "open area."  American English borrowed the word prior to 1850, and it later came into even greater use when it was applied to the Spanish-speaking area of Harlem in New York City, also known as "Spanish Harlem."