Jewish Ghettos Were Death Factories

Reincarnated by the Nazis, Jewish Ghettos of World War II were fundamentally different from their predecessors in Europe in XVI-XIX centuries. The latter were places to live in; the former were places to die in. Slow death factories.

In the early modern era, European Jews were confined to ghettos and placed under strict regulations as well as restrictions in many European cities. The ghetto system began in Renaissance Italy in July 1555 after Pope Paul IV issued the (in)famous bull Cum nimis absurdum.

The bull revoked all the rights of the Jewish community and placed religious and economic restrictions on Jews in the Papal States, renewed anti-Jewish legislation and subjected Jews to various restrictions on their personal freedom.

The most visible of these restrictions was the requirement of Jewish communities to reside in closed neighborhoods known as ghettos. The bull established the Roman Ghetto and required the Jews of Rome, who had existed as a community since before Christian times and numbered about 2,000 at the time, to live in it. The Ghetto was a walled quarter with three gates that were locked at night.

However, not all consequences of the bull were negative for the Jewish community. Following the formation of the ghetto system, there was a sharp decline in incidents such as pogroms, forced expulsion, and accusation of ritual murder that were common during the medieval period.

Paul IV’s successor, Pius IV, enforced the creation of other ghettos in most Italian towns, and his successor, Pius V, recommended them to other bordering states. In the 19th century, with Jewish emancipation, Jewish ghettos were progressively abolished, and their walls taken down.

The Papal States ceased to exist on September 28, 1870 when they were officially incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy, but the requirement that Jews live in the ghetto was formally abolished only in 1882, though after 1870 this requirement was seldom, if ever, enforced.

Initially, the Nazis viewed Jewish ghettos as strictly instrument of control – in their (incorrect) opinion the only way to contain the existential (to Germany) threat of the Jewish “fifth column” in Poland (numbering over 3,350,000) was to confine them to ghettos. Permanently.

The first ghetto (Piotrk;w Trybunalski Ghetto) was set up on October 8, 1939, just over a month after the German invasion of Poland (and two days after the end of the Polish campaign).

Within a few months, the most populous Jewish ghettos in World War II, the Warsaw Ghetto and the Lodz Ghetto, had been established. Ultimately, the Nazis created over 1,000 ghettos – mostly in Central and Eastern Europe.

In many cases, the Nazi-era ghettos did not correspond to historic Jewish quarters. For example, the Krak;w Ghetto was formally established in the Podg;rze district, not in the Jewish district of Kazimierz. As a result, the displaced ethnic Polish families were forced to take up residences outside.

Later, Nazis decided that ghettos by themselves can be a highly efficient method of “final solution to the Jewish question” – if they become “slow death factories”. To facilitate this transformation, the Nazis began with creating brutal (and highly crowded) “living conditions”.

In Warsaw, the Jews, comprising 30% of the city overall population, were forced to live in 2.4% of the city’s area, a density of 7.2 people per room. In the ghetto of Odrzyw;;, 700 people lived in an area previously occupied by five families, between 12 and 30 to each room.

The Jews were not allowed out of the ghetto, so they had to rely on smuggling and the starvation rations supplied by the Nazis: in Warsaw this was 1,060 kJ (253 kcal) per Jew, one-third of the ration of the Pole and one-tenth of the German.

With the crowded living conditions, starvation diets, and insufficient sanitation (coupled with lack of medical supplies), epidemics of infectious disease (such as typhus) became a major feature of ghetto life.

In the Lodz Ghetto some 43,800 people died of ‘natural’ causes (one out of five victims of the Holocaust), and 92,000 in the Warsaw Ghetto (one out of four). Hence, Jewish ghettos established by the Nazis were genuine death factories (killing centers) and thus a part of a “Holocaust Avalanche”.

Ultimately, Jewish ghettos became (literally) concentration camps and/or transit camps where Jews were concentrated before being shipped to the killing centers in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor or Chelmno. In the interim, some ghettos were used as forced labor camps.

Almost 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto alone to Treblinka death factory over the course of 52 days. Jewish populations of the ghettos were almost entirely killed.

On June 21, 1943, Heinrich Himmler issued an order to liquidate all ghettos and transfer remaining Jewish inhabitants to concentration camps. A few ghettos were re-designated as concentration camps and existed until 1944.