Ghettos under the Nazis


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The term "ghetto" originated in sixteenth-century Venice where it was used to refer to the Jewish quarter. As medieval restrictions on Jewish residence spread across Italy and beyond to central and western Europe, the word "ghetto" followed, referring to the section of the city where Jews were forced to live. The following article chronicles the Nazis' use of the medieval concept of ghettos to isolate Jews during World War II.


warsaw ghetto uprisingThe ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe--primarily Poland--were often closed off by walls, barbed-wire fences, or gates. Ghettos were extremely crowded and unsanitary. Starvation, chronic food and fuel shortages, and severe winter weather led to repeated outbreaks of epidemics and to a high mortality rate. Ghettoization, however, was seen as a temporary situation, and in many places the ghettos existed only for a brief time. With the implementation of the "Final Solution" in 1942, the Germans began to destroy the ghettos through deportation of the Jewish occupants to forced-labor and extermination camps.


The Warsaw ghetto was the largest ghetto established in Poland. Approximately 450,000 Jews were crowded into an area of 1.3 square miles that was the Warsaw ghetto. Other major ghettos were located in Krakow, Bialystok, Lvov, Lublin, Vilna, Kovno, Czestochowa, and Minsk. Conditions in the ghettos were appalling. For example, the majority of the apartments in the Warsaw ghetto were unheated during winter, and the Nazis determined that the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto could survive on an official food allocation of 300 calories per day (compared with 634 calories for the Poles and 2,310 for the Germans).


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