The Ghetto: A Very Short Introduction by Bryan Cheyette

Author:Bryan Cheyette [Cheyette, Bryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192538000
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2020-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

Łódź ghetto (1940–4)

The foremost industrial city of Łódz´, a major centre of textile production, was located in the Warthegau zone of the expanded German Reich. Before the war nearly a third of its population, around 230,000 people, were born Jewish and had lived there for nearly 150 years. Given that the racial vision of Nazism was to ‘Aryanize’ the expanded Reich the creation of a ghetto in Łódz´ was particularly unpopular among the local German rulers. ‘Aryanization’ or racial purification could only be achieved with mass deportations to Lublin and Nisko in Eastern Poland (favoured by Adolf Eichmann) to create a ‘reservation’ or Reichsghetto. Later the fantasy of deporting Jews to the Island of Madagascar or the Soviet Gulag was thought of as a means of creating a judenrein (or Jew-free) Poland. But such a vast population transfer was unattainable in the early months of the war.

Friedrich Übelhör, responsible for establishing a ‘closed ghetto’ in Łódz´ in December 1939, made it clear that this was to be a purely interim undertaking as 300,000 Jews had already fled eastward into the Soviet zone with another 400,000 trapped in the Warthegau:

The establishment of the ghetto is of course a transitional measure. I reserve to myself the decision concerning the times and the means by which the ghetto and with it the city of Łódz´ will be cleansed of Jews. In any event, the final goal must be that we completely burn out this plague spot.

But such a ghetto, for an estimated 220,000 Jews in Łódz´ in January 1940, could not be formed quickly. By the time it was formed, three months later, 57,000 Jews and Roma had escaped either into the countryside where they were nearly all shot or had travelled eastwards where their fate is unknown. There was a delay until the end of April 1940 caused by Übelhör’s widespread consultations concerning the boundaries of the ghetto walls, the resettlement of Poles and Germans who already lived there, traffic issues, the control of epidemics, sewage, corpse disposal, food, and heating.

After months of internal discussion, local officials persuaded Übelhör and Arthur Greiser, the Reich Governor of the Warthegau, to move all the Jewish residents of Łódz´, and surrounding areas, into the slum districts of Baluty and the Old Town where 60,000 Jews already lived. These neglected areas had a high percentage of wooden houses, over a century old, on narrow, unpaved, and unlit alleyways. Both districts were densely populated, prone to typhoid outbreaks, with little or no modern infrastructure (central heating, water, drains, and toilets). Added to the slum districts was suburban Marysin, where the ghetto authorities located themselves and their institutions, and was an enclosed area of 1.6 square miles. Out of a total of 31,000 mainly one-room apartments only 725 had running water. Most did not have electricity but, in any case, lights were forbidden from 8pm to 6am.

From February to March 1940, 100,000 Jews living elsewhere in Łódz´ were ordered to leave their homes for the squalid ghetto. The

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.