During the Second World War, the German occupying forces in eastern Europe created some 1100 to 1200 Jewish ghettos in which an estimated 600,000 to one million people perished just as a result of the atrocious living conditions. The establishment of the ghettos was often preceded by a massacre, especially of intellectuals and men, the main purpose of which was to weaken the community and intimidate the rest of the Jewish population. More Jews died in raids and mass murders. The vast majority of ghetto inhabitants were killed in mass shootings or died in the concentration camps.
The ghettos built by the Nazis as ‘Jewish residential quarters’ were very different from their historical predecessors, due not least to their coercive character. Most of the Jews in the area were rounded up and crammed into open or enclosed residential districts that were much too small, the intention being to isolate them from the rest of the population. In addition to the loss of privacy, everyday life in the ghettos was dominated by hunger and disease. Food was scarce, the hygienic conditions catastrophic. To this was added the constant fear of deportation and the emotional strain of losing friends and family members. These living conditions were entirely in keeping with the ideas propounded by Heinrich Himmler, who in November 1939 said: “It is high time for this riff-raff to be herded together in ghettos, then bring in epidemics and let them rot” (cited in Michman, p. 70).
The German occupiers required the ghettos to be ‘self-administered’ by ‘Jewish councils’; this was a grotesque distortion of the actual balance of power. The councils were supposed to act as intermediaries between the ghetto inhabitants and the German rulers, but their conflicting interests meant that this undertaking was doomed to failure. The Jewish councils were allowed only the minimum scope for action, since all decisions relating to work, food supplies, ‘selection’, and the continuation or liquidation of the ghetto were made by the Germans, and the Jewish councils were merely the recipients of German orders. Despite the gravest self-doubt, the Jewish councils undertook this responsibility in the hope that they would at least be able to make living conditions in the ghetto more bearable. Most Jewish councils in this predicament found themselves in dire straits: the chairman of the Jewish council at the Warsaw ghetto, Adam Czerniaków, took his own life in July 1942 after the SS called on him to select 5000 ghetto inhabitants for deportation to Treblinka Extermination Camp every day. Others, such as Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, ‘Chief Jew’ of the Litzmannstadt (Łódź) ghetto, who had bowed to SS orders and attempted to secure the ghetto’s survival by sacrificing children, the elderly, those unfit for work, and pregnant women, was himself murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Camp after the ghetto was liquidated. The ‘collaboration’ of the Jewish councils was a highly contentious topic in the ghettos and also led to controversy regarding the relevant historiography. In recent years, the hopeless situation of the ghetto inhabitants has become a topic of particular interest to historians, who have used ghetto chronicles and victims’ diaries to study everyday life, resistance, and cultural activities in the ghettos.
Contrary to earlier assumptions, the German occupiers did not plan the establishment of ghettos in advance; there is no evidence to suggest that general ghettoization was a policy dictated by the Nazi leadership. Instead, it was fear of the detested ‘eastern Jews‘ that moved the local officials to create ‘Jewish residential quarters’, especially in the early days. These were meant to stop the ‘vagrant activity’ of the Jews and prevent them from ‘infiltrating’ the rest of the population. The initiative of the occupying local authorities also played a significant role. The local population reaped the benefits of the ghettoization, since it created more living space for non-Jews and facilitated the looting of Jewish property. Local businesses and authorities were also glad to make use of the forced labor provided by the ghetto inhabitants.
The first ghettos were established at the end of 1939/beginning of 1940 (e.g. in Petrikau/Piotrków Trybunalski). Others followed in 1940, including the two largest: Warsaw in the General Governorate (up to 500,000 inhabitants) and Litzmannstadt in the annexed Warthegau region (more than 200,000 inhabitants). Most of the ghettos were constructed in the occupied eastern territories from 1941 on, e.g. in Minsk, Riga, Wilna, Kaunas, Lemberg (Lviv), and Białystok. However, this development was by no means consistent: although cities such as Kyiv, Simferopol, and Dnepropetrovsk were home to a large Jewish population, no ghettos were ever built there.
Between mid-1942 and October 1943, most of the ghettos were liquidated by acts of murder, while a few such as Riga and Kaunas were also turned into concentration camps. The German invasion of Hungary in March 1944 was followed by the establishment of a large number of new ghettos; however, these merely served as provisional, short-term assembly points. Around 438,000 Jews from these ghettos were taken to Auschwitz between May and July 1944.
In 2002, Germany passed a law compensating former ghetto workers. This enabled survivors and their relatives to apply for a so-called ‘ghetto pension’.
