Today's date is May 17, 2021. Yesterday, 78 years ago, the Germans would suppress the uprising and deport the surviving ghetto residents to concentration camps and killing centers. On April 19, 1943, the uprising began after German troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants. As you may know... Jewish insurgents inside resisted these efforts. This became to be known as the largest uprising by Jews during World War and was the first significant urban revolt against German occupation in Europe.
'Photograph from SS General Juergen Stroop's report showing the Warsaw ghetto after the German suppression of the ghetto uprising. Stroop, commander of German forces that suppressed the Warsaw ghetto uprising, compiled an album of photographs and other materials. This album later came to known as "The Stroop Report." The right of this image from the album shows a column of Jews being transported out of the ghetto for deportation. Warsaw, Poland, April–May 1943' (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).
What's known as "The Great Action" occurred from July 22 until September 12, 1942, German SS and police units, assisted by auxiliaries, carried out mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka killing center (on the left). Transfers to the death camp at Treblinka began at a rate of more than 5,000 Jews per day. It's said the Germans killed about 35,000 individuals which is a lot if you put yourself in the eyes of a witness. Most families eventually being separated and most never seeing each other again. By early 1943, the surviving Jews in this ghetto numbered about 70,000 to 80,000 from the previous 265,000 deported in The Great Action.
As these deportations continued a newly formed group, The Jewish Fighting Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa; ŻOB), slowly took effective control throughout this ghetto.
The ŻOB was an underground armed resistance organization, formed by the Jewish in the Warsaw Ghetto. It's said that several individual organizations within the ŻOB (flag on the
left) was formed across occupied Poland as a form of resistance against the Germans.
As part of Adolf Hitler’s “final solution” for ridding the Jews of Europe, the Nazis decided to establish ghettos in areas under German control (which was quite a bit). They had ghettos made (most of the time having the ghetto residents building walls with bricks to contain everyone) in order to confine Jews until they could be executed, almost like a holding spot until the Germans had room to send them to extermination camps usually by trains (seen below) but people also arrived on foot if the camps were close by from their original destination, or occasionally by truck.
The Warsaw ghetto was enclosed first with barbed wire but later with a brick wall 10 feet (3 meters) high and 11 miles (18 km) long, consisting of the old Jewish quarter of Warsaw. The Nazis herded Jews from surrounding areas into this district until and by the summer of 1942. Disturbing enough, nearly 500,000 of them lived within the ghettos 840 acres (340 hectares); many had no housing at all, and those who did were crowded in at about nine people per room. Starvation and disease (especially typhus) killed thousands each month. With it being so crowded it made it far easier and quicker for disease to spread, and with the number of people within this tight area, food was hard to find as it was a high demand and necessity to all. Food was found being sold at high prices usually in small portions. Most ran low on money fast.
Pictured below is a family marching at the head of a column of Jews on their way to be deported during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.
On the 9th of January, 1943, Heinrich Himmler, the chief of SS, visited the Warsaw ghetto. Himmler ordered the deportation, of 8,000 Jews. This caught the Jewish by surprise. These poor Jewish residents had thought the end had come. Throughout their stay in this ghetto, since April of 1942, they were discovering hiding places. And with these new orders to deport 8,000, these Jewish did not report as they were ordered to. But instead went into hiding. The resistance began. their plan as Jewish fighters was to strike quickly, then escape across the rooftops. On the other hand, Germans moved very cautiously to find Jews and refused to go underground. When this German deportation effort ended after a few days, Jews took this as a victory. From then on, the resistance dominated the ghetto. This resistance fortified hideouts and strengthened fighting units in preparation for the next battle. As one ŻOB leader recalled,
We saw ourselves as a Jewish underground whose fate was a tragic one, the first to fight. For our hour had come without any sign of hope or rescue.
The Germans suspended deportations until April 19. On this day Himmler launched a special operation to clear the ghetto in honour of Adolf Hitler’s birthday, April 20. Don't forget that the 19th of April was also the first day of Passover, (Jewish holy days celebrating freedom from slavery in Egypt). Before the dawn of the 19th, 2,000 SS men and German army troops moved into the area with tanks, rapid-fire artillery, and ammunition trailers. Basically going berserk.
Streets of the ghetto remained vacant while most of the remaining Jews hid in bunkers including their headquarters located in Ulica Mila 18, by rearrangement, of course. Many of these bunkers had electricity and running water but unfortunately offered no escape route. The ŻOB and a few independent bands of Jewish guerrillas, with around 1,500 strong, opened fire with a variety of different weapons—pistols, for example, a few rifles, one machine gun, and homemade bombs. While fighting from open windows in vacated apartments these destroyed a number of tanks within the ghetto, killing German troops, and holding off reinforcements trying to enter the ghetto. A very smart and well-thought strategic plan. The Germans withdrew that evening. The next day the fighting resumed once again and casualties rose.
Sadly the SS men and German army troops used gas, police dogs, and flamethrowers in an effort to force the Jews out from their bunkers, leaving the city of Warsaw in smoke for days. On the third day of this fight against the Jewish resistance, the Germans’ tactics shifted on a huge scale. They no longer were entering the ghetto in large groups but instead roamed it in small bands. Then they made a decision to burn the entire ghetto. The fires consumed most of the oxygen below ground and turned the resistance fighters' bunkers basically into suffocating death traps. Further on forcing them to evacuate. Making the German's job complete.
The Germans had planned to liquidate the ghetto in three days. Meaning completely dissolve it. The Jews held out for nearly a month. The Resistance fighters hid in the sewers, even though the Germans did try first to flood them and then force them out with smoke bombs. It wasn't until May 8th, that the Nazis managed to take the ŻOB headquarters bunker. Civilians hiding there surrendered (about 31 historians think), but many of the surviving ŻOB fighters took their own lives to avoid being captured alive; Mordecai Anielewicz, the charismatic young commander of the underground army took his life.
The battle continued until May 16, eventually, and in only a matter of time, the Jewish ran out of weapons and plans. The total casualty numbers during this uprising are not known, but it's thought by historians that the Germans likely lost several hundred soldiers during the 28 days that it took them to kill or deport over 40,000 Jews in resistance and hiding. The German Police General Jürgen Stroop, who had been in charge of this final deportation, officially declared what he called the Grossaktion, finished and over. To celebrate he demolished Warsaw's Great Synagogue, which was a Jewish house of worship (pictured below).
The ghetto was destroyed and what remained was put to an end.
The significance and symbolic recognition of the uprising went far beyond those who fought and died. As Anielewicz wrote to his colleague Yitzhak Zuckerman,
My life’s dream has now been realized: Jewish self-defense in the ghetto is now an accomplished fact.…I have been witness to the magnificent, heroic struggle of the Jewish fighters.
In the end, it's noticed that some aspects of the Warsaw uprising were common to all other ghetto insurrections. More than 300,000 had died at the extermination camps; the rail cars were at the station. The fighters knew that they were bound to lose but there was no longer a choice between life and death, but the honour of the Jewish people was at stake. They chose to die fighting and to inflict casualties on the enemy.' (Britannica)
An SS sergeant interrogating Jews captured during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Of the Jews captured, the Germans shot 7,000 and equal to also 7,000 transported to the death camp at Treblinka, 15,000 went to Majdanek, and the remainder to forced-labour camps in German-occupied territory. The Germans captured 9 rifles, 59 pistols, and several hundred grenades, explosives, and mines of those used in the Jewish resistance. Among the Germans and their collaborators, the stated losses were 16 dead and 85 wounded.
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