World War II: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

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At 7:30 on the morning of April 19, 1943, SS Brigadeführer (brigadier general) Jürgen Stroop was just washing up for the day when his nominal commander, SS Oberführer (senior colonel) Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg, burst into his room in the Bristol Hotel in Warsaw. Near panic, Sammern-Frankenegg reported that the German operation initiated earlier that morning, to deport the last Jews in the Warsaw ghetto to concentration camps for extermination, was not going according to plan. The Germans had, in fact, encountered such spirited armed resistance that they had been driven out of the ghetto.

Calmly lighting a cigarette, Stroop contemptuously dismissed a suggestion by Sammern-Frankenegg to call in bomber aircraft from Krakow. That the first German assault had been ignominiously thrown back by members of what the Nazis regarded as a subhuman race, armed only with infantry weapons, was bad enough. To commit more weaponry to the assault would only humiliate the Third Reich in the eyes of the world. Taking personal charge of the operation, Stroop resolved that he would subdue the Jews with the resources at hand–but those would soon prove not to be enough.

Following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Gestapo, ordered all Polish Jews to be placed in segregated areas. Food and medical supplies for the residents of these crowded ghettos were strictly rationed by the Germans, in amounts calculated to be inadequate, with the ultimate goal of slowly killing off the Jews by hunger or disease.

In the summer of 1940, Heydrich, under the pretext of containing an outbreak of typhus among the Jews in Warsaw, established a special section in the Polish capital, enclosed by a brick wall 10 feet high and 11 miles in circumference. The cost of the wall’s construction was paid by the Judenrat, the 24-member Jewish Council, which was placed in charge of Jewish affairs inside the ghetto. In September 1940, more than 80,000 non-Jewish Poles living in the ‘infected area’ were ordered to leave, and over the next month Gestapo agents removed about 140,000 assimilated Jews from the economic and cultural life of the city and moved them into the ghetto. In all, some 360,000 Jews, one-third of Warsaw’s population, were thus herded into a 3.5-square-mile area. On November 15, the ghetto’s 22 entrances were closed, effectively sealing it off from the rest of the city.

While the Judenrat worked against heavy odds to equitably distribute the ghetto’s meager allotment of rations, more Jews were shipped in from Lodz, Krakow and other cities. Jews fought for jobs, including work in the labor battalions organized by the Nazis. Those unable to find work sold jewels, clothing or whatever else they possessed in order to obtain food. From 300 to 400 people died daily. More than 43,000 starved to death during the first year, and 37,000 more in the first nine months of 1942. Even those statistics, however, were viewed by SS commander Heinrich Himmler, in his capacity of Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums (Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of German Nationhood), as being insufficient to satisfy his program for the racial ‘purification’ of Germany and Europe.

On July 22, 1942, Himmler ordered all Jews not already in concentration camps to be deported to the camps by the end of the year. This operation was christened Operation Heydrich, as a memorial to the late Gestapo chief, who had died in Prague on June 4 of wounds incurred from a bomb thrown under his car on May 29 by a Czech resistance fighter.

The German authorities placed responsibility on the Judenrat to deliver 6,000 Jews daily to the rail spur north of the ghetto, known as the Umschlagplatz (’transfer station’). The Germans insisted the deportees were being resettled in labor camps, but Jewish resistance fighters, joining the exodus to reconnoiter and then escaping and returning to the ghetto, revealed the truth to an incredulous populace. A small number of the most able-bodied Jews were, indeed, put to work in forced labor camps, they reported, but for the vast majority of ‘evacuees’ the final destinations had names like Auschwitz and Treblinka. In those camps, the arriving Jews were herded into shower rooms where they were killed by a cyanide gas called Zyklon B. The bodies were then incinerated in ovens. It was a program of efficient, systematic extermination on an industrial scale.

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, World War II

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