Warsaw Jewish Ghetto Is Destroyed

Warsaw Jewish Ghetto Is Destroyed

“The Warsaw Ghetto Is No More” was the title of a report sent to Adolph Hitler about the eradication of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, after the ghetto fighting effectively ended on May 15, 1943. The report surfaced after World War II during the Nuremberg Trials, wherein the Americans and other victorious allies tried high-level Nazis for war crimes. It was prepared by SS Brigadefuehrer Jurgen Stroop, who was also the major-general of police and the leader of the action against the ghetto.

After the Nazis conquered Poland in 1939, they forced hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews to settle in a tiny portion of Warsaw that was then walled up to prevent escape. The Jews lived in cramped quarters and suffered terrible deprivation while they awaited “resettlement”—the Nazi euphemism for being shipped to concentration camps and near-certain death. By the spring of 1943, less than 60,000 people were left in the ghetto, and the Nazis decided to use their military and police forces to simply eradicate them (and the ghetto) on the spot. The Jews fought back, using the few weapons that they had managed to obtain, but were overwhelmed. Most of them were killed.

In his report, Stroop relates how the Jews and the “Polish bandits,” as he calls the resistance fighters, put up a fierce and well-orchestrated struggle over the course of a month prior to their defeat. While the SS thought they had built air-raid shelters beneath the ghetto, the resistance had actually constructed a complex network of “cellars, dug-outs, and passages” through which many of them escaped “into the Aryan part of the city of Warsaw.” Stroop's forces were relentless, however, “using all our force and energy by day and night” to drive the people from their hiding places so they could be executed. At one point, Stroop “decided to destroy the entire Jewish residential area by setting every block on fire,” and he coolly describes how those who chose to jump from burning buildings tried to crawl “with their broken bones” to unaffected buildings across the street. Many others died while hiding in the sewers, whether from exposure and deprivation or from being “exterminated” by Stroop's forces, who were ordered to blow them up. Stroop reported that, in the end, 56,065 “exterminations” could be proven, although the numbers of those who died in explosions or fires “could not be ascertained.”

After the conclusion of the ghetto operations, the Nazis blew up the Warsaw synagogue on May 16, 1943.