Chris Christian

Introduction and Thesis

Of all of the atrocities committed against the Jewish people throughout history, none can compare in magnitude, brutality, or is beholden of such hate as the Holocaust throughout the Second World War. It is also startling when taken into consideration of the fact the Jewish people met such hate with so little resistance, one could also say apathy, to their own fate. Through much of the Holocaust, the deportations, the concentration and death camps, the slave labor squads, the fear, torture, and death that surrounded all of these elements, almost nowhere except in Warsaw does one find resistance.

The rising in the Warsaw ghetto was not a nationalist movement on behalf of the Polish nation. It was not initiated by any patriotic sentiment, nor was it undertaken on the behalf of any state. The Jews in the ghetto did not rise on behalf of their Jewish faith, as many in the ghetto differed on particulars regarding this faith. The Jews who formed their own combat organizations for the uprising were desperate people caught in an unbelievably desperate situation, whose struggle for survival up until that point went on largely unaided and unheeded by any outside force or influence. These Jews, these people, human beings like we are human beings, were imprisoned in the ghetto by an outside force and left to die. Hate would be met by fear and then this fear would turn to anger. The rising was an attempt to strike back at an oppressor, to meet the hate with anger and hate. The goal was to hit back, as much as they were capable of doing so despite their desperate circumstances and against all odds.

Creation and Purpose of the Ghetto

The Warsaw ghetto was a creation of the Nazi leadership in occupied Poland. Occupied as early as the end of 1939, Poland’s new Nazi masters started to implement measures against the Jews just as they had similarly done to previously annexed countries, such as Czechoslovakia and Austria. The ghetto in Warsaw itself was evidently created to provide the Germans with a cheap, easy way to dispose of Poland’s Jewish population at the beginning of the war. “The Warsaw Ghetto was officially created on October 2, 1940 by a decree issued by Dr. Ludwig Fischer, Governor of the Warsaw Distrikt.”¹ The German plan was to deposit Jews from around Poland into the ghetto, especially Warsaw’s own numerous Jewish population, and allow them to die of hunger, exposure, and extreme poverty by isolating the Jews. Emmanuel Ringelblum, a ghetto resident and leader in the uprising, in his notes from the ghetto asserts his own belief the ghetto served as a collection point for all of Poland’s Jews. “What was their motive in introducing the Ghetto? One opinion has it that they wish to concentrate all the Jews of Poland in four places: Warsaw, Crakow, Kielce, and Radom.”² Ainsztein, in his book about the ghetto uprising, later supports this assertion and adds the Nazi’s purpose, which Ringleblum could have only guessed at from inside the ghetto:

The chief purpose of the Nazi policy of starvation was of course, the annihilation of the Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto. Ludwig Fischer, the Warsaw District Governor, stated … “The Jews will die from hunger and destitution, and a cemetery will remain of the Jewish question.” … At a meeting of Governor-General Frank’s [the governor of Nazi occupied Poland] cabinet held on October 15 and 16, 1941, SS Brigadeführer Wiegand, the Warsaw Distrikt SS and Police Leader, pointed out that hunger prevented the Jews from thinking of resistance and [this view] met with Frank’s whole hearted agreement. ³

Not only was the method of isolated starvation assumed to be effective enough for the Nazis, but they also assumed that in such a state, the Jews caught in the ghetto would be unable to plan any sort of resistance to being imprisoned in the ghetto.

Population and Setting

Ainsztein provides us with population figures for the Warsaw ghetto both prior to the Great Liquidation, a period in which mass deportations of the ghetto’s population to the Treblinka death camp took place, and after this period just prior to the uprising. For now it is important to note the population figure prior to the mass deportations, along with who made up this population, and what conditions they faced at the ghetto’s onset. Prior to the Great Liquidation, Ainsztein reports “it is certain at its peak the ghetto population exceeded 500,000 — some put it as high as 550,000 — and that this total included in April 1941 as many as 150,000 refugees, many of them from Łodz, and entire communities deported by the Germans from the provincial towns and townlets of the Mazowsze Region [a region in central Poland].”⁴ The space comprising the ghetto at this time was not large, and would get smaller within the next two years as deportations took place until the rising occurred. By this time the ghetto was “[s]urrounded by a wall sixteen kilometers long and 3 meters high, which was topped by broken glass and barbed wire.”⁵ As Ainsztein has asserted, the population was mixed by region and even religious faith, but was predominately ethnically Jewish. For the Nazis, eligibility for transfer to the ghetto was based on ethnicity: “the ghetto became a concentration camp for Jews and also for several thousand Poles of Jewish origin that [sic] is for people who had cut off their connections with the Jewish people by becoming Christians or whose only link with the Jewish was a single Jewish grandparent.”⁶

The whole population was conveniently overseen by the “Jewish Police” on the Nazi’s behalf. Vladka Meed, a Jewish underground member who aided the uprising in the ghetto, provides insight on the Jewish Police’s role in the ghetto:

The Jewish police were now very important people in the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazis relied on them to carry out their roundups, to control employment cards, and to load unemployed Jews into the wagons and transport them to the waiting railway cars. Obviously no one was very fond of the police; even in better days they had been known to badger and harass people in their daily lives by insisting on rigid adherence to the Nazi regulations, now they had become even more hostile and aggressive.⁷

The Nazis used the Jewish police inside the ghetto to do their dirty work for them, creating division and tension within the ghetto.

Food Rationing in the Ghetto

As time progressed, in an isolated state, the ghetto began to experience food shortage, just as the Nazis had planned. The Nazis had complete control over rationing to the ghetto, as well as the economic situation inside the ghetto. The Nazis purposely made food acquisition almost impossible on a day-to-day basis for people inside the ghetto. The Jews who legally resided in the ghetto were allotted two kilograms of bread (4 lbs.) and 250 grams of sugar (one-half pound) per person per month. This bread was usually of poor quality, containing sawdust or potato peelings. Any attempt to supplement the allotted food ration by purchasing extra food was almost impossible because the prices were fixed unfairly for Jews versus Poles and Germans. The Jew paid 5.9 zlotys per calorie, the Pole 2.6 zlotys, and German 0.3 zlotys. Typically a German received 2,310 calories a day, a Pole 634 calories, and a Jew in the ghetto, only 184 calories daily.⁸ The effects of the manipulation of rationing are made apparent in Janusz Korczak’s (Jewish doctor who headed a children’s orphanage in the ghetto) diary, where he touches on the monthly weigh-in results for the orphans at his orphans’ school:

The day began with weighing the children. The month of May has brought a marked decline. The previous months of this year were not too bad and even May is not yet alarming. But we still have two months or more before the harvest…. And the restrictions imposed by official regulations, new additional interpretations and overcrowding are expected to make the situation still worse.⁹

The population of the ghetto would face gradual starvation just as the Nazis had planned.

Class Divisions in the Ghetto

Food shortage and rigged economics also enabled the Nazis to count on various segments of the ghetto population to cooperate with them more fully. The divisions between the cooperative few and left out majority clearly became class divisions. Those who were on the Germans’ good side got to eat, the rest did not. As Ainsztein asserts, the several thousand Jews who ran workshops for the Germans, and several hundred smugglers or others who had deals with the Nazis or Poles, were viewed by the rest of the ghetto population as corrupt. They were able to afford the high prices for food, even on luxuries like grapes and oranges.¹⁰ Further divisions arose between German Jews and people of Jewish origin who were not practicing or orthodox in their views concerning their faith. “The divisions inside the ghetto were further exacerbated by the presence of 6,000 Poles of Jewish origins, many of them renegades and Judaeophobes, and German Jews, who showed a general propensity for regarding themselves as being in temporary exile from their fatherland. A number of them were used by the Gestapo as informers.”¹¹ Jewish cooperation was an absolute necessity for the Nazis in intelligence gathering, as it was only through cooperative contacts with those inside the ghetto that roundups could effectively take place in order for Jews to be deported.

Effects of Epidemics in the Ghetto

Another significant tool in the Nazis’ arsenal against the Jews, conveniently heightened by conditions in the ghetto, were epidemics, particularly of typhus. Ringleblum expressed his concerns in regard to typhus’s increased appearance within the ghetto and the amount of deaths he had heard the typhus had been responsible for:

Another subject that has been absorbing our attention for a long time, is that of epidemics, particularly typhus. … Instead of combating typhus, the “sanitation columns” [columns of laborers who disinfected the ghetto] spread it … the lice move freely all through the Ghetto. The overwhelming majority of typhus cases (some people maintain that there are about four or five thousand such) are concealed. The German health department speaks in terms of some 14,000 cases. The houses [where the typhus cases are concealed], are not disinfected; the lice carry the typhus from there all over Warsaw.¹²

The typhus, along with starvation, was expected by the Nazis to do their work for them, but in case starvation and disease were not enough the Nazis had another alternative, deportation.

Labor in the Ghetto

Deportation ultimately meant death at a death camp outside the ghetto and Warsaw. The main grounds for deportation, besides being Jewish, or suspected of being Jewish, included being unemployed. If you weren’t able to retain legal employment in some fashion useful to the Nazi war machine you faced the fearful and uncertain prospect of being deported. Vladka Meed (a member of a Jewish resistance group in the ghetto) spent much of her time throughout the Great Liquidation searching for legal work along with all of the rest of the population in the ghetto. The obstacle they faced in acquiring work in order to avoid deportation was the Germans were more interested in deporting as many Jews as possible, as opposed to employing as many as possible, therefore the Germans made it almost impossible for Jews in the ghetto to acquire jobs.

Every Jew who wished to remain in Warsaw, or in other words simply wished to survive, must be legally employed. “Each morning after the curfew had ended, lines formed at the closed factory gates. The earlier you got there, the closer you got to the door, the better your chance of being admitted. Those not waiting in line scurried about in search of a job — any job — the key to survival. Every day new workshops were opened — sometimes without a permit.”¹³ The Germans used employment cards to control the number of legal employees possible throughout this period.

They also controlled the work areas themselves. The number of work places available was tightly controlled despite early Jewish attempts to open workshops in order to provide work for everyone possible. The Jews also attempted to forge employment cards to sell to one another. Meed describes the effects of the forged cards: “As soon as anyone put a few sewing machines into a couple of vacant rooms and began issuing employment cards, Jews stormed the doors. We snatched at straws. Scalpers forged employment cards and sold them at exorbitant prices. A job was a precious commodity to be sold to the highest bidder.”¹⁴ The reason jobs were bought and sold was because there really weren’t enough jobs to go around. Scalpers and forgers made money to supplement their rations by selling employment cards. Business and workshop owners would have been interested in producing a product for the Germans to buy from them and provide jobs at the same time. The goods they produced earned these business and workshop owners the money they needed to buy extra food and survive.

The German answer to these Jewish counter tactics was liquidation of Jewish workshops and factories, which were replaced by a few tightly-controlled German factories. Meed’s account describes this liquidation:

Private Jewish factories were systematically liquidated and their workers deported. Some employment cards, including many of those issued by the Judenrat [German appointed council over the Jewish population in the ghetto], were no longer recognized by the Germans. The cards I had obtained became worthless within a few days. Only persons employed in German factories were eligible to remain in the ghetto. All other Jews were now required to appear at the point of embarkation when ordered to do so.¹⁵

The Nazi goal was to employ as few Jews as possible in these German factories and workshops and to deport as many Jews as possible without jeopardizing the German establishments.

The Great Liquidation

Meed was present in the ghetto throughout the Great Liquidation period, which roughly began in late July and early August of 1942 and did not end until mid-September of 1942. It was a harrowing time for her as she searched for work, experienced the loss of her sister and mother, as well as many friends, all of whom were sent to their deaths at Treblinka. Meed accounts the systematic liquidation of the ghetto, which was preceded in each stage by decrees declaring when and where in the ghetto specific populations were expected to move to the Umschlagplatz, the point of embarkation to Treblinka:

The “Little Ghetto” [the smaller southern portion of the ghetto] was to be “liquidated”; all Jewish inhabitants of the southern section beginning with Chlodna Street [a street on the north end of the “Little Ghetto”] were ordered to vacate their homes within the 24-hour period between August 9 and 10, 1942. Only those without employment, including relations of those working for the German firms, were ordered to report to the Umschlagplatz on Stawki Street. Anyone without a job found in the Little Ghetto after the deadline would be shot on sight.¹⁶

After liquidation of this small southern section of the pre-uprising ghetto the Germans targeted the industrial sectors of the ghetto, liquidating the competing Jewish firms, so only the German ones with their Jewish slave workers remained. This move was also preceded by a decree “ordering everyone to vacate certain streets by August 20. German workshops were to be concentrated in certain sectors, where the workers would be provided with living quarters. Employees of German enterprises were not permitted to leave the areas assigned to them. If they were found elsewhere, they would be ‘resettled.’”¹⁷ Without any Jewish firms to supply unemployed Jews with jobs more Jews in the ghetto would be unemployed and therefore useless to the Nazis. Any Jew in the ghetto who was unemployed was a prime target for potential deportation.

Meed also asserts the Jews of the ghetto had some ideas as to where the deportations ultimately led. Word leaked into the ghetto about Treblinka and similar death camps and the fact these camps were the destinations for deportees. Meed describes the general attitude at first amongst the Jews as being solely a nervous fear, almost anxious, in regards to “resettlement” and “deportation.” Most seemed inclined to take measures to avoid being caught and ride it out:

Hour by hour, the Nazi dragnet spread out, until it had reached nearly every house in the ghetto. Gone was the illusion that the deportations would soon end; no longer was there talk of a limit of sixty or seventy thousand Jews. At first we had counted the days, hoping forlornly that the deportations would shortly be over. But now we accepted as fact that the harsh decree would not be rescinded.¹⁸

Meed and her fellow Jews met the deportations with an “every man for himself” attitude, an attitude stifled by the time of the rising. Soon after the first several roundups, people in the ghetto began to figure out what was really going on from escapees who had jumped from the trains. There were even people specifically sent to find out what was going on and where everyone was being brought. Ringleblum notes Treblinka as a destination for deportees along with what was happening there: “Treblinki — the news about the gravediggers…the Jews from Stok who had escaped from the wagons…the unanimous description of the ‘bath,’ the Jewish gravediggers with yellow patches on their knees. — The method of killing: gas, steam, electricity.”¹⁹ Rumor was spread throughout the ghetto concerning where deportation really lead, and with this rumor went fear.

Aftermath of the Great Liquidation

The idea of resistance would sadly not begin to enter in the minds of those trapped in the ghetto until the Great Liquidation began to come to an end. This caused a considerable problem for them regarding the number of people available for resistance. When the Jews of the ghetto did begin formulating plans for resistance, they realized their numbers were now much fewer than they had been before the Great Liquidation, subsequently it was debated amongst them whether resistance could be effectively undertaken at all. Ainsztein reports The Great Liquidation officially ended on the twelfth of September in 1942. It is estimated roughly 310,332 Jews had been rounded up and sent to their deaths at Treblinka. Besides these, it is believed 5,961 Jews were murdered outright inside the ghetto during the Great Liquidation. On the Day of Atonement it is believed an additional 2,196 people died, after having been packed into cattle trucks and driven straight to Treblinka’s gas chambers. The Germans conducted a census of the ghetto in October of that year in which 35,639 Jews registered, but it is believed there were probably really as many as 60,000 Jews still left alive in the ghetto.²⁰ This new population figure shows a big difference from the previous population figure of roughly 500,000 in April of 1941. Ainsztein believes on top of these figures, one could add a further 10,000 people. These additional 10,000 people factor in later refugee additions that arrived in the ghetto in November and December, along with additions in the form of escapees from the death camp trains. This would mean the population would have been at roughly 70,000 people just before the uprising.²¹ The Warsaw ghetto was also significantly smaller in size after the Great Liquidation. Scholars like Ainsztein generally divide it into three separate areas for this time prior to and throughout the uprising. There was the central ghetto or Rhestghetto (German for Remnant Ghetto). There was also the Brush Workshops, an area unto itself due to its being comprised of the Brush workshops and the living quarters found in the quadrangle formed by four separate streets. There was also the Factories Area, where the firms of Toebbens, Schultz, Roerich and Schilling were situated, along with their living quarters and factories.²² The smaller size of the ghetto, viewed from a military standpoint, would make any military operation’s window of opportunity smaller for the Jewish fighting organizations than it would for the might of the German war machine. It also stood to benefit the Jews, however, as it was easier to figure out what was going on in different parts of the ghetto, and made defensive operations and getting from place to place easier.

Formation of Resistance Organizations

There were two main fighting organizations in the ghetto. By the end of October 1942, the various parties that had laid aside their political and religious differences to form the Anti-Fascist Bloc had met and formed the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (Jewish Fighting Organization or ZOB). The ZOB was composed of members of Hashomer Hatzair, Dror, Gordonia, Akiba, Poale Zion (various Jewish political and religious groups) and even members of communist groups. The Anti-Fascist Bloc also formed a unified controlling committee for the ZOB, the Zydowski Komitet Narodowy (Jewish National Committee or ZKN).²³ For this paper’s purposes it is only necessary to focus on the ZOB fighting unit, as it was the largest and most important of the two. Despite being made up by political entities and members of various political groups, it was clear from the ZOB’s written declaration concerning its function that neither formation was pursuing any set political end. The formation of combat groups was done to provide Jews with an alternative to meekly meeting their deaths and make the Nazis pay for their actions. The declaration on ZOB function and purpose ran as follows: “(1) Resistance in case of another deportation under the slogan: ‘We will not surrender a single Jew.’ (2) Terrorist actions against the Jewish Police, the Jewish Communal authorities and the Werkschütze (factory police). (3) An active struggle against the workshop managers, foremen and known and secret Gestapo agents in the name of the defense of the Jewish masses) [sic].”²⁴ Essentially, for these organizations and their members, one another’s defense mattered before any state, political ideal, religious faith, or specific tenet of Judaism. Resistance would be carried out by those who wanted to make the enemy pay as dearly as possible on the behalf of as many others as it was possible for these groups to do so.

Arms Acquisition

Having formed a secret army of dedicated volunteers, the ZOB needed arms to carry out its operations. Arms could only be acquired by purchase, usually through underground contacts from the Polish underground resistance forces. In order to purchase arms the Jews in the ghetto needed cash. Ainsztein reports the ZOB first acquired its cash resources through donations from wealthy backers in the form of cash, jewels, and other goods. As these donations proved to be not enough, the ZOB resorted to confiscation of such items from the corrupt ghetto police, smugglers, and oppressive factory owners.²⁵ The ZOB even resorted to threats and violence to get its funding: “When Maksymilian Lichtenbaum, the Chairman of the Judenrat [governing council for Jews overseen by the Nazis] who was known for his hostility to the underground organizations, refused to pay a contribution of 50,000 zlotys, the ZOB took his son hostage and released him only after his father paid up.”²⁶ While Ainsztein provides only one such example, probably only known to him due to its audacity and daring, he does indicate how much was collected for arms purchase from the Polish resistance, putting it at about 10,000,000 zlotys by the time of the rising.²⁷ Although a considerable sum in Poland during those days, it had little purchasing power, especially if such money was in the hands of Jews. According to Ainsztein, standard prices for arms differed between what the Polish Home Army paid and what the Jews paid, with the Jews shelling out more for each weapon and the ammunition available for sale than did their Gentile Polish counterparts. Typically, for example, the Home Army paid roughly 3,000 zlotys for a pistol and a clip of ammunition, for the same the Jews were asked up to ten or even twenty thousand. The Home Army paid less for rifles (4,000 zlotys, for the Jews 20,000-25,000), grenades (100 zlotys, for the Jews 1,000-1,500), and heavy machine guns (12,000 zlotys, for the Jews 40,000).²⁸ The impressive sum gathered by the ZOB dwindled rapidly, with little received in return for their money.

Previous Jewish Apathy

It is a reasonable question to ask, why did the Jews in the ghetto not resist from the outset, or at least when the Great Liquidation began in earnest? The answer is not simple, but some explanation can be provided by Alexander Donat, who was trapped in the ghetto with his family and was present during the rising in 1943. Donat survived to face the tragedy that befell the ghetto after its first successes in resistance. Donat and his wife and son miraculously survived the Great Liquidation, the rising, and the rest of the Holocaust to be equally miraculously reunited after having been separated. Donat describes the general Jewish response to the Nazis in the ghetto:

The feeling we had for the Germans cannot be oversimplified into hatred. Hatred we felt, but the chief emotion was terror. We couldn’t think of the Germans as human beings. They were mad dogs unaccountably loosed from the chains of history and morality. You don’t hate a beast of prey, you feel loathing and terror. We feared the Germans with a dreadful, paralyzing panic stronger than the fear of our own deaths.²⁹

This absolute terror can explain, to some extent, one’s apathy toward suspected or certain death, as well as the deaths of those around him, to the point hiding or avoiding the Germans and the terror they brought seemed preferable to resistance. As things normalized in the ghetto after the Great Liquidation, this feeling acquiesced, being replaced by more hate and anger. Meed accounts for this dramatic change in attitude amongst those who survived the deportation period: “A spark had been smoldering even during the ‘peaceful’ days of the ghetto. Now it began to glow, slowly, tentatively at first, then ever more fiercely: ‘If it is our fate to die anyway, then let us die with dignity! Let us resist and make the enemy pay dearly for our lives!’”³⁰ This spark did in fact glow, and the anger made people determined such a thing as the Great Liquidation would not occur to them again without a fight.

Preliminary Resistance and Defiance

Before actual pitched battles took place, the ZOB thought it expedient to attempt elimination of certain key players in their enemy’s system of operations. They selected targets they could reasonably hit. On August 25, 1942, Israel Kanal, a member of Akiba, (a group part of the Anti-Fascist Bloc) also at this time a member of  the ZOB, broke into the head of the ghetto police’s home, a notorious man named Szerynski, and shot him in the shoulder with a revolver. Szerynski survived the shooting, but later committed suicide in the hospital during his recovery.³¹ Along with this assassination attempt, later in September, on the sixteenth, members of Hachmer Hatzair and Dror, (groups part of the Anti-Fascist Bloc) now incorporated into the ZOB, fired several warehouses full of war materials the Jews of the ghetto had been making for the Germans.³² Meed accounts on both occurrences, as such things were followed closely by the population in the ghetto: “…cases of arson in the German warehouses were becoming more frequent…. More electrifying was the attempt on the life of Yosef Szerinski, commandant of the Jewish Police, a man utterly detested in the ghetto.”³³ Meed also accounts for another assassination attempt: “An attempt to kill Schmerling, a German collaborator of the Jewish Police, also failed. But the first signs of active Jewish resistance had emerged.³⁴ And so they had, but further momentous action would not take place until January of 1943:

On the night of January 17^th, acid was thrown at a German Werkschützmann [factory policeman] at Hullmann’s furniture shop. The guards there arrested a young worker, Zandman, who belonged to the Fighting Organization [ZOB]. They found a bottle of acid on him, and were about to turn him into the Gestapo when a group of masked men…entered the shop. At gun point, they bound the guards and destroyed their records, then left with Zandman….”³⁵

These are just some of the examples of Jewish preliminary resistance and defiance.

Nazi Response to Defiance

Fiercer resistance occurred as deportations were again attempted by the Germans, and actual battles occurred between ZOB groups and police, German soldiers, or guards. Meed describes one such battle:

That was when the shooting began. The mass of deportees fell upon the German troopers tooth and nail, using hands, feet, and elbows. There was shooting and a pitched battle ensued. The Germans were caught off balance, became confused. By the time they realized the seriousness of the situation, and had increased their fire, practically all of the group of deportees had escaped and found shelter in the nearest buildings.³⁶

This was the first battle of the rising, successful in that most of the deportees had escaped, so caught by surprise were the Germans at the fact they were actually being resisted. Ainsztein argues this action by the deportees sparked reaction by the Nazis. It would be decided complete liquidation of the entire ghetto would now be certain and necessary. Himmler (head of the SS) chargeed Krueger (head of SS in Poland) with the task of deporting all the remaining Jews in the ghetto. Krueger appointed Dr. Ferdinand von Sammen-Frankenegg with the completion of this task directly. SS and police commanders developed a plan that called for low amounts of force to be utilized in their efforts to keep German interests in the ghetto safe.³⁷ Ainsztein further argues this plan, with its use of low force measures for deporting the remainder of the ghetto did not sit well with Krueger. Krueger ended up selecting a special expert on partisan warfare to aid Frankenegg. Krueger selected SS Brigadenführer Jurgen Stroop to utilize brutal force in the ghetto to perform the roundups. Stroop had gained his experience by going through the ranks of the SS, starting out as a sergeant, and serving as Colonel of Police in the Sudetenland (eastern region of Czechoslovakia) after the German annexation of Czechoslovakia. Stroop saw experience in initiating terrorist activities to cow submission of dissidents in Poznan-Poland (a city in Poland) after its occupation.³⁸  For these reasons Stroop was selected, his expertise in terror more fully in line with Krueger’s concept of the deportations. Sammern-Frankenegg’s new plan (formed with Stroop’s assistance) was much different, undertaking the appearance of a full-scale military operation. “After surrounding the ghetto walls with machine-gun positions and stopping the movement of trams in the ‘Aryan’ streets bordering the ghetto walls, Sammern-Frankenegg planned to move into the ghetto with a strong force, establish himself with his men in Zamenhoff Street and from there send small detachments into the other streets with orders to round up the inhabitants.”³⁹ The new plan was simple and direct and conducted accordingly.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

The subsequent resistance faced by the Germans occurred from the onset of the new rounds of deportations. The Jews were cognizant of what was about to take place in the ghetto. The Nazis were seemingly incompetent enough to let the Jews know their plans by various means. The Jewish intelligence was effective in determining German plans, but only because the Germans were betrayed by those working for them, and because they remarkably betrayed themselves. Ainsztein makes this claim about the Nazi intelligence failure:

Jewish intelligence sources outside the ghetto were able to discover what was being prepared by the Germans because not only the special extermination force, but the entire German garrison in Warsaw had been alerted to deal with a possible general uprising…. Furthermore, the Polish friends of the ZZW [a smaller Jewish combat organization that often collaborated with the ZOB] had their agents in the Polish police, which had been mobilized to take part in the liquidation of the ghetto, and from there they were able to get detailed information on the plans of the Nazis.⁴⁰

The Germans also betrayed themselves and their intentions further when, as Donat accounts, Himmler himself came to the ghetto. “On January 9, Heinrich Himmler [head of SS] and his staff inspected the Ghetto. An armed group of SS officers led by Police Chief Odilo Globocnik, protected by small armored cars bristling with machine guns, escorted the SS Chief as he raced through the streets. His inspection took only minutes, but we all knew what it meant: Himmler had last visited the Ghetto in July.”⁴¹ Donat fell ill during much of the period before the rising, but he sums up the events that had occurred in January in his memoirs. Donat points out the changes in the attitudes of the Jews in the ghetto about how to face the threat they constantly faced from day to day.

Six thousand people perished in the January roundups, but this time the Germans paid in killed and wounded. We were a changed people now. We had no more illusions about German plans for us. … Ghetto dwellers made proud pilgrimages to places where blood on the snow marked scenes of successful Jewish resistance. The self-pity and resignation which had marked us after the cauldron was burned away; we were now living torches of revolt.⁴²

Up until this point, the resistance staged by the Jews in the ghetto was mostly defiant in nature. This resistance did save lives and live up to the stated purpose of the ZOB, but it was not resistance against an organized foe. The resistance quickly became such, as the Germans became determined to stifle such defiance with brutal force. Under Stroop, the Germans implemented their plan to deport and exterminate the remaining population of the ghetto. Jewish intelligence gatherers outside the ghetto walls, as well as sources from the police, warned the ZOB about this attack launched on April 19, 1943.⁴³ Gutman reports the German force during the campaign, met with the uprising of the ghetto’s inhabitants, amounted to 2,054 troops and 36 officers daily throughout the uprising. They were accompanied by 381 SS troops, 335 Ukrainian troops, and Polish policemen. They were armed with rifles, light and sub machine guns, heavy guns, an artillery piece, and three armored cars.⁴⁴ Gutman also provides figures for the Jewish forces. The forces made up by the Jewish resisters amounted to roughly 750 combatants from the ZOB and other organizations that operated in concert. These forces met the Germans with revolvers; each fighter carried a few hand grenades, and carried about ten to fifteen rounds of ammunition. They had at their disposal ten rifles, some two thousand Molotov cocktails (a hand-thrown incendiary, usually of homemade make), and a couple of submachine guns captured from the Germans.⁴⁵ The Germans were surprised by the resistance they encountered, usually in the form of surprise attacks by stubborn Jewish defenders firing from buildings or makeshift bunkers. Donat describes the attack on the ghetto:

They [the Germans] put rows of Ghetto police [Jewish Police] in the front ranks, convinced that the defenders would not fire on fellow Jews…. Our fighters let the Jewish police go by, but when the German troops passed, they let loose a barrage of bullets, grenades, and Molotov cocktails…. One homemade incendiary set a tank afire, burning the crew alive, and spreading panic and disorder among the Germans.⁴⁶

Donat also describes how the Germans had to bring artillery to bear: “The field artillery…opened fire on the Ghetto from no man’s land, and the shelling continued throughout the day.”⁴⁷ Donat also accounts for the second repulse of German forces, this time by well-armed Jewish fighters of the ZZW (a small combat organization acting in concert with the ZOB), who met the Germans with fire from a well-positioned machine gun and with rifles and grenades. This attack occurred  the second afternoon of the uprising, and resulted in the Germans withdrawing in the early evening with heavy casualties.⁴⁸ Having faced the Jewish combat groups twice in an effort to enter the ghetto in force, the Germans had to withdraw to more secure areas on the fringes of the ghetto. The Germans decided instead of facing the armed groups of Jews in a street-by-street encounter, they would simply burn them alive in the ghetto. Donat describes how the Germans went about this: “Wehrmacht [German Army] engineers were brought in and moved methodically from house to house, [as they had been captured from Jewish defenders] drenching the ground floors and wooden staircases with gasoline and setting fire to them while simultaneously hurling explosives into cellars and basements.”⁴⁹ The Jews of the ghetto would face extermination by fire. Donat also movingly and sarcastically describes the Warsaw populations’ reaction to the final end of the ghetto. The rising was winding down to its final moments, and by Easter Sunday, April 23,1943 the ghetto was in flames:

Mass over, the holiday crowds poured out into the sun drenched streets. Hearts filled with Christian love, people went to look at the new unprecedented attraction that lay halfway across the city to the north, on the other side of the Ghetto wall, where Christ’s Jewish brethren suffered a new and terrible Calvary not by crucifixion but by fire. What a unique spectacle! Bemused, the crowds stared at the hanging curtains of flame, listened to the roar of the conflagration, and whispered to one another, “But the Jews — they’re being roasted alive!” There was awe and relief that not they but the others had attracted the fury and the vengeance of the conqueror.⁵⁰

Conclusion

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the defiant resistance prior to the uprising were direct reactions to brutal Nazi hate. The Jews of the ghetto did not rise on behalf of Poland. They did not rise on behalf of their Judaism. Their Jewish religion and, more importantly for the Nazis, their Jewish ethnicity were simply the reasons they were imprisoned there. The Jews of the ghetto rose to strike back at an oppressor. As Meed had earlier asserted, the Jews rose to die, but to die with dignity and make their enemies pay.

The Jews of the ghetto banded together despite their differences. They overcame political differences with the formation of the Anti-Fascist Bloc. They unified despite religious differences concerning Judaism. This is evident in the formation of both the Anti-Fascist Bloc and the ZOB statement of purpose, which underlined its function to protect all Jews in the ghetto. The Jews of the ghetto were unified because of their oppression, stayed unified throughout the conflict to which they had committed themselves, and died in unity with dignity and weapons in their hands.

Endnotes

Bibliography