APRIL 19, 1943THE WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005188
On April 19, 1943, the Warsaw ghetto uprising began after German
troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its surviving
inhabitants. By May 16, 1943, the Germans had crushed the uprising and
left the ghetto area in ruins. Surviving ghetto residents were
deported to concentration camps or killing centers.
Background
Between July 22 and September 12, 1942, the German authorities
deported or murdered around 300,000 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. SS and
police units deported 265,000 Jews to the Treblinka killing center and
11,580 to forced-labor camps. The Germans and their auxiliaries
murdered more than 10,000 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto during the
deportation operations. The German authorities granted only 35,000
Jews permission to remain in the ghetto, while more than 20,000 Jews
remained in the ghetto in hiding. For the at least 55,000-60,000 Jews
remaining in the Warsaw ghetto, deportationseemed inevitable.
In response to the deportations, on July 28, 1942, several Jewish
underground organizations created an armed self-defense unit known as
the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa; ZOB).
Rough estimates put the size of the ZOB at its formation at around 200
members. The Revisionist Party (right-wing Zionists known as the
Betar) formed another resistance organization, the Jewish Military
Union (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy; ZZW). Although initially there was
tension between the ZOB and the ZZW, both groups decided to work
together to oppose German attempts to destroy the ghetto. At the time
of the uprising, the ZOB had about 500 fighters in its ranks and the
ZZW had about 250.
While efforts to establish contact with the Polish military
underground movement (Armia Krajowa, or Home Army) did not succeed
during the summer of 1942, the ZOB established contact with the Home
Army in October, and obtained a small number of weapons, mostly
pistols and explosives, from Home Army contacts.
In October 1942, SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the liquidation of
the Warsaw ghetto and deportation of its able-bodied residents to
forced labor camps in the Lublin District of the Generalgouvernement.
In accordance with this order, German SS and police units tried to
resume mass deportations of Jews from Warsaw on January 18, 1943. A
group of Jewish fighters, armed with pistols, infiltrated a column of
Jews being forced to the Umschlagplatz (transfer point) and, at a
prearranged signal, broke ranks and fought their German escorts. Most
of these Jewish fighters died in the battle, but the attack
sufficiently disoriented the Germans to allow the Jews arranged in
columns at the Umschlagplatz a chance to disperse. After seizing
5,000-6,500 ghetto residents to be deported, the Germans suspended
further deportations on January 21.
Encouraged by the apparent success of the resistance, which they
believed may have halted deportations, members of the ghetto
population began to construct subterranean bunkers and shelters in
preparation for an uprising should the Germans attempt a final
deportation of all remaining Jews in the reduced ghetto.
April 19, 1943-May 16, 1943
The German forces intended to begin the operation to liquidate the
Warsaw ghetto on April 19, 1943, the eve of Passover. When SS and
police units entered the ghetto that morning, the streets were
deserted. Nearly all of the residents of the ghetto had gone into
hiding places or bunkers. The renewal of deportations was the signal
for an armed uprising within the ghetto.
ZOB commander Mordecai Anielewicz commanded the Jewish fighters in the
Warsaw ghetto uprising. Armed with pistols, grenades (many of them
homemade), and a few automatic weapons and rifles, the ZOB fighters
stunned the Germans and their auxiliaries on the first day of
fighting, forcing the German forces to retreat outside the ghetto
wall. German commander SS General Jürgen Stroop reported losing 12
men, killed and wounded, during the first assault on the ghetto.
On the third day of the uprising, Stroop’s SS and police forces began
razing the ghetto to the ground, building by building, to force the
remaining Jews out of hiding. Jewish resistance fighters made sporadic
raids from their bunkers, but the Germans systematically reduced the
ghetto to rubble. The German forces killed Anielewicz and those with
him in an attack on the ZOB command bunker on 18 Mila Street, which
they captured on May 8.
Though German forces broke the organized military resistance within
days of the beginning of the uprising, individuals and small groups
hid or fought the Germans for almost a month.
To symbolize the German victory, Stroop ordered the destruction of the
Great Synagogue on Tlomacki Street on May 16, 1943. The ghetto itself
was in ruins. Stroop reported that he had captured 56,065 Jews and
destroyed 631 bunkers. He estimated that his units killed up to 7,000
Jews during the uprising. The German authorities deported
approximately another 7,000 Warsaw Jews to the Treblinka killing
center, where almost all were killed in the gas chambers upon arrival.
The Germans deported almost all of the remaining Jews, approximately
42,000, to the Lublin/Majdanek concentration camp, and to the
Poniatowa, Trawniki, Budzyn, and Krasnik forced-labor camps. With the
exception of a few thousand forced laborers at Budzyn and Krasnik,
German SS and police units later murdered almost all of the Warsaw
Jews deported to Lublin/Majdanek, Poniatowa, and Trawniki in November
1943 in “Operation Harvest Festival” (Unternehmen Erntefest).
Even after the end of the uprising on May 16, 1943, individual Jews
hiding out in the ruins of the ghetto continued to attack the patrols
of the Germans and their auxiliaries.
The Warsaw ghetto uprising was the largest, symbolically most
important Jewish uprising, and the first urban uprising, in
German-occupied Europe. The resistance in Warsaw inspired other
uprisings in ghettos (e.g., Bialystok and Minsk) and killing centers
(Treblinkaand Sobibor).
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