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Concept
Jewish ghettos established by Nazi Germany
Summary
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.
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