Jewish ghettos established by Nazi Germany

Beginning with the invasion of Poland during World War II, the Nazi regime set up ghettos across German-occupied Eastern Europe in order to segregate and confine Jews, and sometimes Romani people, into small sections of towns and cities furthering their exploitation. In German documents, and signage at ghetto entrances, the Nazis usually referred to them as Jüdischer Wohnbezirk or Wohngebiet der Juden, both of which translate as the Jewish Quarter. There were several distinct types including open ghettos, closed ghettos, work, transit, and destruction ghettos, as defined by the Holocaust historians. In a number of cases, they were the place of Jewish underground resistance against the German occupation, known collectively as the ghetto uprisings. The first anti-Jewish measures were enacted in Germany with the onset of Nazism; these measures did not include ghettoizing German Jews: such plans were rejected in the post-Kristallnacht period. However, soon after the 1939 German invasion of Poland, the Nazis began to designate areas of larger Polish cities and towns as exclusively Jewish, and within weeks, embarked on a massive programme of uprooting Polish Jews from their homes and businesses through forcible expulsions. The entire Jewish communities were deported into these closed off zones by train from their places of origin systematically, using Order Police battalions, first in the Reichsgaue, and then throughout the Generalgouvernement territory. The Nazis had a special hatred of Polish and other eastern Jews. Nazi ideology depicted Jews, Slavs and Roma as inferior race Untermenschen ("subhumans") who threatened the purity of Germany's Aryan Herrenrasse ("master race"), and viewed these people and also political opponents of the Nazi party as parasitic vermin or diseases that endangered the overall health of the Volksgemeinschaft, the German racial community. German doctors and public health officials helped advance these racist, political and fearmongering ideas. The German invasion of Poland (Sept.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related concepts (16)

Related lectures (1)

The Holocaust

The Holocaust was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out primarily through mass shootings and poison gas in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chełmno in occupied Poland. The Nazis developed their ideology based on racism and pursuit of "living space" and seized power in early 1933.

Holocaust trains

Holocaust trains were railway transports run by the Deutsche Reichsbahn national railway system under the control of Nazi Germany and its allies, for the purpose of forcible deportation of the Jews, as well as other victims of the Holocaust, to the Nazi concentration, forced labour, and extermination camps. The speed at which people targeted in the "Final Solution" could be exterminated was dependent on two factors: the capacity of the death camps to gas the victims and quickly dispose of their bodies, as well as the capacity of the railways to transport the victims from Nazi ghettos to extermination camps.

Kraków Ghetto

The Kraków Ghetto was one of five major metropolitan Nazi ghettos created by Germany in the new General Government territory during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It was established for the purpose of exploitation, terror, and persecution of local Polish Jews. The ghetto was later used as a staging area for separating the "able workers" from those to be deported to extermination camps in Operation Reinhard.

Neighborhood Stories: Living, Identity, and Memory AR-489: Urban sociology

Delves into neighborhood dynamics, exploring living conditions, identity formation, and collective memory through historical districts and citizen areas.