World War II Day by Day

Warsaw, Occupied Poland • April 19, 1943

In October 1940, a little over a year after Nazi Germany’s con­quest of its east­ern neigh­bor Poland, German Governor-General Hans Frank estab­lished a Jewish ghetto in Poland’s capital, Warsaw, moving some 90,000 Jews from all over Poland into the ghetto. (Poland’s Jewish com­munity numbered 3.5 mil­lion at the time.) The largest of the ghettos in Poland, the Warsaw Ghetto occupied a tiny sec­tion of the city, just 3.5 sq. miles/9 sq. kilo­meters (2 per­cent of the city’s area), but it con­tained 30 per­cent of the city’s population.

Initially gates allowing entry and exit were guarded by a mixed force of Ger­mans, Poles, and Jews. Then on Novem­ber 16, 1940, the Germans perma­nently sealed off the ghetto from the rest of the capi­tal, first with barbed wire and wooden fences, then with 11‑ft-high brick walls topped with broken glass. No longer were resi­dents allowed to leave the ghetto even for work. Hunger, dis­ease (espe­cially typhus), and over­crowding were endemic: each apart­ment building in the ghetto housed on average 400 people, and each room crammed with 6 or 7 people. No fresh fruits, vege­tables, meat, fish, or milk were delivered from the out­side. Food allo­cations, dis­tributed through the ghetto’s Juden­rat (Jewish Coun­cil) were roughly 200 calo­ries per day per person. “Natural wast­age” (natuer­liche Personal­redu­zierung) was the German euphe­mism for this hideously slow death.

Over several months, in a massive set of deportations known as Gross-Aktion Warschau (July 23 to Septem­ber 12, 1942), some 300,000 out of 350,000 ghetto residents were sent 60 miles to the north­east of the capital, to the Treb­linka death camp. (Treb­linka was one of six death camps estab­lished on Polish soil. The others were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chełmno [Kulm­hof], Beł­żec, Sobi­bór, and Majda­nek.) In January 1943 Jewish resis­tance groups—princi­pally Zydowska Organi­zacja Bojowa and Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy, whose wea­pons were supplied by the non-Jewish Polish under­ground Home Army (Armia Krajowa)—repulsed German troops sent to deport more ghetto residents. When the Germans entered the ghetto again on this date, April 19, 1943—coin­ci­den­tally the first day of Pass­over—resis­tance flowered into a full-scale rebellion—the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Poorly armed Jews fought 2,000 tank-sup­ported SS troops, who, while having a man­power and fire­power advan­tage, were none­the­less stunned by the fero­city of the Jewish fighters. (The SS, short for Schutz­staffel, was a major para­mili­tary orga­ni­za­tion sepa­rate from the German Army, or Wehr­macht). Under the com­mand of Reichs­fuehrer-SS Hein­rich Himm­ler, the Waffen-SS was noto­ri­ous for com­mitting “crimes against human­ity” and geno­cide, especially as directed toward Jews, whom they considered Untermenschen (racially inferior people).

The Germans and their Ukrainian auxiliaries initially with­drew from the ghetto after suffering 200 casual­ties. Despite impos­sible odds, ghetto resi­dents held out against the enemy for close to a month. SS-Brigade­fuehrer (Maj. Gen.) Juergen Stroop, the city’s police com­mander, ordered the system­atic burning of the ghetto, house by house, street by street. Four weeks from the start of the up­rising, Stroop was able to report to his superiors: “There is no more Jewish quarter in Warsaw.” Jewish survi­vors of the up­rising were sent to either forced-labor camps or the Treb­linka death camp. Treb­linka is second only to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Jews mur­dered in Nazi death camps (900,000 vs. 1.5 mil­lion). Between deaths in camps and the uprising, at least 300,000 Warsaw Jews lost their lives during the Nazi period.

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Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, April 19 to May 16, 1943

Left: Captioned “Forcibly pulled out of bunkers” (“Mit Gewalt aus Bunkern her­vor­geholt”), this black-and-white photo­graph is among 52 sub­mitted in an SS report by Juergen Stroop, Warsaw’s vir­u­lently anti-Semitic police chief, to Reichs­fuehrer-SS Hein­rich Himmler. Taken between April 19 and May 16, 1943, the photo is one of the best-known images from World War II. (Josef Blosche [far right, facing camera] earned the nick­name “Franken­stein” by ghetto inhab­i­tants due to his pen­chant for raping women and beating men.) Stroop kept a personal copy of the report (“Stroop-Bericht”), dis­covered at war’s end, in his home office in Wies­baden, Germany. Stroop surren­dered to the U.S. Army in May 1945, was extra­dited to Poland, tried in the Warsaw Crimi­nal Dis­trict Court in 1951, and hanged at Mokotów Prison on March 6, 1952.

Right: Guarded by troops armed with submachine guns, Stroop (center in field cap) and high-ranking SS officers watch ghetto apart­ments burn street by street. As Stroop put it in his report to Him­mler, the inten­tion of the blazes was to “smoke out the Jews and bandits.” About half of the 13,000 Jews who died in the Warsaw Up­rising were burned alive or suffo­cated in their under­ground cellars, bunkers, and tunnels. Facil­i­ta­ting their anni­hi­la­tion were one- and two-man port­able flame­throwers (German, Flammen­werfer), criti­cal in house-to-house fighting and as a means of imple­menting Germany’s “scorched earth” policy in the East, and for “repri­sals.” Some 70,000 Flammen­werfer were pro­duced during the war and dis­persed to units of the Wehrmacht, SS, and police.

Left: This photo in the “Stroop-Bericht” shows ghetto resi­dents being led from a bunker where they had been hiding and marched to a trans­fer point (Umschlag­platz). There they would be sealed in freight cars with little water and poor ventilation and deported to death or labor camps.

Right: Two ex-Soviet POWs known as “Askaris” (Swahili, soldiers) in Hilfs­ein­heiten  (auxiliary units) used by the SS in sup­pressing the Warsaw Ghetto Up­rising stare past the bodies of Jews killed during the month­long revolt. Jews who resisted forci­ble depor­ta­tion by hiding were often killed on the spot when discovered.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 1943