The Nazis used ghettos to isolate and contain the Jewish population of occupied Europe. This section explores when the Nazis began using ghettos, the different types of ghettos, how the ghettos were run, and what life was like for those imprisoned in them. The ghetto opened in February , just five months after the invasion of Poland. The first Jewish settlement to be called a ghetto was established in Venice in This ghetto was extremely different from the places that we now — following the Holocaust — associate with the word ghetto.
In Venice, Jews from the nearby mainland were granted refuge in Venice after fleeing from a besieging army. Prior to this point, an organised Jewish community had not been permitted to exist in the city. After granting refuge to Jews, the leaders of the city ordered that they must live on a single island, known as the Ghetto Nuovo , or the new ghetto.
Whilst very different to the Nazi ghettos, the ghetto in Venice was still extremely cramped and overcrowded, and the residents lacked freedom of movement. Although this is the first recorded incident of a Jewish settlement being called a ghetto, it was not the first Jewish settlement that was confined to a specific area in a town or city by authorities.
These ghettos primarily existed to ensure that Jews and other occupants of the city remained segregated. This added to growing antisemitic stereotypes prevalent at the time. New ghettos continued to be established across Italy until the end of the eighteenth century.
By the early nineteenth century, the term ghetto had become common across Western Europe. Ghettos for Jews were established in places like Frankfurt and Prague as well. Following the Enlightenment , ghettos across Europe were legally abolished as Jews gained equal rights for the first time, including the freedom to live wherever they pleased. However, despite ghettos no longer existing as physical places in pre-war Europe, the idea of them, who they held, and what they represented, remained.
The use of the term ghetto soon also spread as a derogatory way to refer to other non-Jewish, unenclosed, communities and settlements. One example can be seen in the United States of America where the term ghetto was used to describe spaces where communities of African-American people had settled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The Nazis used ghettos to confine, exploit, and persecute the Jews of Poland and eastern Europe. Here, Stroop offers an insight into why the Warsaw Ghetto in particular was created.
This document is a translation used in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. The Nazis held extremely antisemitic and racist beliefs. As a result of their antisemitic ideology, following the invasion of Poland the Nazis developed ghettos to segregate and control Jews. Historically, ghettos had been used to segregate Jewish communities from the rest of the population across Europe. The Nazis also introduced ghettos due to their false theories that Jews spread diseases and therefore should be segregated to protect the rest of the population.
This was in line with their racist and eugenic beliefs. This order from Himmler, issued on 21 June , highlights the escalation of policy against Jews following the Wannsee Conference — from ghettoisation to extermination. Following the invasion of Poland in September , three million Jews came under Nazi control. This presented a problem for the Nazis, as they wanted their newly acquired land to be free of Jews in line with their antisemitic beliefs.
In response, the Nazis segregated the Jews from the rest of the population, and ghettos were developed to forcibly detain them. Did all Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe live in ghettos? What was the SS? Who was Heinrich Himmler?
In many places, ghettoization lasted a short time. Some ghettos existed for only a few days. Others lasted for months or years. The Germans saw the ghettos as a provisional measure to control and segregate Jews while the Nazi leadership in Berlin deliberated upon options for the removal of the Jewish population.
With the implementation of the " Final Solution " the plan to murder all European Jews beginning in late , the Germans systematically destroyed the ghettos. The Germans and their auxiliaries either shot ghetto residents in mass graves located nearby or deported them. Jews were deported to killing centers. German SS and police authorities also deported a small minority of Jews from ghettos to forced-labor camps and concentration camps. Jews responded with a variety of resistance efforts.
Ghetto residents frequently smuggled food, medicine, weapons, or intelligence across the ghetto walls. These and other such activities often took place without the knowledge or approval of the Jewish councils. On the other hand, some Jewish councils and some individual council members tolerated or encouraged the smuggling because the goods were necessary to keep ghetto residents alive. The Germans generally showed little concern in principle about religious worship, attendance at cultural events, or participation in youth movements inside the ghetto walls.
The Germans generally forbade any form of consistent schooling or education. In the very beginning, my mother and several other women organized a clandestine school for children who were below the age of work, and it was a wonderful thing because we had something to look forward to — Charlene Schiff.
In some ghettos, members of Jewish resistance movements staged armed uprisings. The largest of these was the Warsaw ghetto uprising in spring There were also violent revolts in Vilna, Bialystok, Czestochowa, and several smaller ghettos.
In Hungary, ghettoization did not begin until the spring of after the German invasion and occupation. In less than three months, the Hungarian gendarmerie, coordinating with German deportation experts from the Reich Main Office for Security, concentrated nearly , Jews from all over Hungary except for the capital city, Budapest.
The emancipation of the Jews of Italy starting in the late 18th century led to the dismantling of these ghettos, culminating in the dissolution of the last surviving ghetto in Europe—the ghetto of Rome—in But the word was harder to get rid of.
These areas were densely crowded but legally voluntary and more mixed between Jews and non-Jews in reality than in popular perception. As places of mass starvation and disease, and eventually of deportation to the death camps and killing fields, however, the Nazi ghettos bore little in common with the original Italian ghettos beyond the name. Such laws were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in A report on Segregation in Washington —published the same year that the Supreme Court banned judicial enforcement of restrictive covenants in Shelley v.
To any Nazi victim.
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