From the outbreak of World War II, in September 1939, the Nazis unleashed a wave
of persecution and violence specifically directed against
Polish Jewry. (Their initial conquest of the Western half
of Poland gave them control over 2,100,000 Jews, whereas
the area of Poland occupied by the Soviets had 1.2 million
Jews.) Shortly after the invasion, the Germans began forced
expulsions of Jews from the areas slated to be incorporated
into the Third Reich to the areas designated as the General
Government. They also began establishing Jewish councils
to carry out German directives regarding the Jewish population.
Once the General Government, headed by Hans Frank, was established on November
25, 1939, it introduced compulsory forced labor for Jews
and obligated all Jews above age ten to wear a white armband
with a blue Star of David. The Jews’ freedom of movement
was also severely restricted. The Judenrats (Jewish councils)
were forced to assume responsibility for housing, employment,
and sanitation in the ghettoes which were established by
the Nazis, as well as to create a local Jewish police force.
From the very outset the Nazis sought to humiliate the Jews,
isolate them from the rest of the population, systematically
rob them of their possessions, and exploit them as a source
of cheap labor. This was primarily achieved by ghettoization
which began in some cities as early as late 1939.
The ghettoes were an important step
in the Nazis anti-Jewish policies which steadily escalated,
and in effect served as interim prisons until the launching
of the Final Solution. The conditions in the ghettoes depended
on a variety of local factors, but the most populated ghettoes
– such as Warsaw (500,000 inhabitants) and Lodz (165,000)
– had the worst conditions. Mass starvation, epidemics, horrific
sanitary conditions, and mass unemployment resulted in thousands
of deaths per month even before the Nazis began to systematically
mass murder Polish Jewry. Thus, for example, the mortality
rate in the Warsaw Ghetto was 90 deaths per 1,000 inhabitants
in 1941 and 140 in 1942.
The Nazis’ attack on the Soviet Union
on June 22, 1941 signaled the beginning of the implementation
of the Final Solution in Poland. Accompanying the Wehermacht
as it moved into the area of eastern Poland were the Einsatzgruppen
(mobile killing units), which began the systematic mass murder
of the Jews. Shortly thereafter, on December 7, 1941, the
Nazis put into operation the first death camp, in which mass
gassings of inmates took place, at Chelmno, northwest of
Lodz. By May 1942, a total of 55,000 Jews in 66 transports
were deported to the camp, where they were immediately murdered
in gas vans.
In the fall of 1941, the Nazis began
preparations to launch what they later called “Operation
Reinhardt,” their plan to annihilate all of Polish Jewry.
In order to carry out the mass murders, three additional
death camps were built: Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor. Belzec
was the first to begin operation, on March 17, 1942, and
it was the camp to which the Jews of Galicia were deported
to be murdered. By November 10, 1942, over 250,000 Jews had
already been sent there. In the first half of 1942, the Jews
of the Lublin district were deported to Sobibor, whereas
the Jews of the districts of Warsaw, Radom and Bialystok
were deported mostly to Treblinka. The largest deportations
in Poland took place in the Warsaw Ghetto from July 22, until
mid-September 1942 and encompassed 300,000 Jews who were
sent mostly to Treblinka, where they were gassed upon arrival.
Nazi SS and police personnel together with Ukrainian and
Latvian security police, and with the assistance of Jewish
ghetto police, carried out these actions. Invariably, these operations were presented as steps to resettle the Jews outside
the ghettoes, an attempt to delude them as to the Nazis’
true intentions.
Initially, some of the Jews whose
work was considered productive or essential to the German
war effort or economy were spared deportation to the death
camps. These postponements, however, usually proved to be
only temporary, although such considerations did apparently
delay the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto, for example, until
the late summer of 1944.
The liquidation of the ghettos in
Poland continued throughout 1943 and by early 1944, all their
inmates had been deported, mostly to the six death camps
of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Majdanek, Treblinka, Belzec,
and Sobibor. Some of those fit for work who were deported
to Auschwitz and Majdanek, which were also labor camps, were
sent to do forced labor, whereas the others were gassed shortly
after their arrival. Some Jews were initially deported to
labor camps, but in early November 1943, all the labor camps
in the Lublin district were liquidated and the others followed
shortly thereafter. In fact, the mass murders were only halted
in November 1944, when the Germans’ desperate military situation
prompted SS-chief Henrich Himmler to attempt to use the surviving
Jews as a bargaining chip in his negotiations with the Western
allies for a separate peace treaty, and Himmler therefore
ordered the stopping of the mass murder of Jews at Birkenau.
In all, approximately three million
Polish Jews were murdered during the Holocaust
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