| Ghetto uprisings | |
|---|---|
  Top: members of theUnited Partisan Organization (FPO) in theVilna Ghetto, one of the first armed resistance organizations established in the Nazi ghettos during World War II. Bottom: captured Jews duringWarsaw Ghetto Uprising led by the Germans for deportation todeath camps. Picture taken at Nowolipie street, near the intersection with Smocza | |
| Location | German-occupied Europe |
| Date | 1941–43,World War II |
| Incident type | Armed revolt |
Theghetto uprisings duringWorld War II were a series of armed revolts against the regime ofNazi Germany between 1941 and 1943 in the newly established Jewishghettos across Nazi-occupied Europe. Following the German and Sovietinvasion of Poland in September 1939,Polish Jews were targeted from the outset. Within months insideoccupied Poland, the Germanscreated hundreds of ghettos in which they forced the Jews to live. The new ghettos were part of the German official policy of removing Jews from public life with the aim ofeconomic exploitation.[1] The combination of excess numbers of inmates, unsanitary conditions and lack of food resulted in a high death rate among them.[2] In most cities theJewish underground resistance movements developed almost instantly, although ghettoization had severely limited their access to resources.[3]
The ghetto fighters took up arms during the most deadly phase ofthe Holocaust known asOperation Reinhard (launched in 1942), against the Nazi plans to deport all prisoners – men, women and children –to camps, with the aim of theirmass extermination.[3]
Armed resistance was offered in over 100 locations on either side of Polish-Sovietborder of 1939, overwhelmingly in eastern Poland.[4][5] Some of these uprisings were more massive and organized, while others were small and spontaneous. The best known and the biggest of all Jewish uprisings duringthe Holocaust took place in theWarsaw Ghetto between 19 April and 16 May 1943,[6] andin Białystok in August. In the course of theWarsaw Ghetto Uprising 56,065 Jews were either killed on the spot or captured and transported aboardHolocaust trains toextermination camps beforethe Ghetto was razed to the ground.[7][8][9] At theBiałystok Ghetto, following deportations in which 10,000 Jews were led to theHolocaust trains, and another 2,000 were murdered locally, the ghetto underground staged an uprising, resulting in a blockade of the ghetto which lasted for a full month.[10] There were other such struggles, leading to the wholesale burning of the ghettos such as inKołomyja (now Kolomyia, Ukraine),[11] and mass shootings of women and children asin Mizocz.[12][13]
The uprisings erupted in five major cities, 45 provincial towns, 5 major concentration and extermination camps, as well as in at least 18 forced labor camps.[14] Notable ghetto uprisings included:[15]
To some extent, the final liquidation of other ghettos was also met with armed struggle:
By the end of 1940, the forced-labor program in theGeneral Government had registered over 700,000 Jewish men and women who were working for the German economy in ghetto businesses and as labor for projects outside the ghetto; there would be more.
{{cite book}}:|work= ignored (help)A few hundred Jews remained in their ghetto hideouts. In order to make certain that not a single one of them would remain alive, the chief of the Gestapo ordered the ghetto burnt down to the ground, thus finishing the process of making Kolomyja "completely judenrein."
