Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Uprising defeated. 13,000 Jews died, about half of them burnt alive or suffocated. It was the largest single revolt by Jews during World War II. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the uprising is ‘one of the most significant occurrences in the history of the Jewish people’
About Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in brief
Uprising defeated. 13,000 Jews died, about half of them burnt alive or suffocated. It was the largest single revolt by Jews during World War II. The uprising started on 19 April when the ghetto refused to surrender to the police commander SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop. The Jews knew that the uprising was doomed and their survival was unlikely. Marek Edelman, the only surviving ŻOB commander, said their inspiration to fight was \”to pick the time and place of our deaths\”. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the uprising is ‘one of the most significant occurrences in the history of the Jewish people’ In 1939, German authorities began to concentrate Poland’s population of over three million Jews into a number of extremely crowded ghettos located in large Polish cities. The largest of these, the Warsaw Ghetto, collected approximately 300,000–400,000 people into a densely packed, 3 km2 central area of Warsaw. Thousands of Jews died due to rampant disease and starvation under SS-und-Polizeiführers Odilo Globocnik and Ludwig Hahn, even before the mass deportations from the ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp began. The SS conducted many of the deportations during the operation code-named Grossaktion Warschau, between 23 July and 21 September 1942. Approximately 254,000-300,000 ghetto residents died at Treblinka during the two-month-long operation.
On 18 January 1943, the Germans began their second deportation of the Jews within German-occupied Europe, which led to the first instance of armed insurgency within the ghetto. Hundreds of armed fighters of the ŻZW, engaging the Germans in direct clashes, took casualties and the deportation was halted within a few days. Though the Germans also took casualties, the ghetto was saved by the Allies and the Germans took the deportation of 8,000 instead of the planned 4,000. Only 5,000 of the 8,00 Jews were removed by the Germans and instead of being removed, the Jews hid in their so-called ‘bunkers’ The ghetto was liberated by the Allied forces and the Jewish families hid in the ghetto for the rest of the war. In 1945, the Polish government-in-law abolished the ghetto and moved the Jews to Majdanek, a concentration camp for the extermination of Jews near the town of Wrocław, where they were forced to live in squatter camps until the end of the Second World War. The ghetto remained under German control until the fall of Warsaw in 1945, when the Germans moved the remaining Jews to a new ghetto in the city of Poznań, near the Polish city of Gdynia. The Warsaw ghetto was the last Jewish ghetto to be liberated by Allied forces in 1945. The last Jews in the Warsaw ghetto were killed by the German army in the Battle of the Bulge in June 1945.
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This page is based on the article Warsaw Ghetto Uprising published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 10, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
