Łódź Ghetto: Encyclopedia II - Łódź Ghetto - Establishment of the Ghetto

Łódź Ghetto - Establishment of the Ghetto

When German forces occupied Łódź in September 1939, the city had a population of 672,000 people, over one-third of them (233,000) Jews. Łódź was annexed directly to the Warthegau region of the Reich and renamed Litzmannstadt. As such, the city was to undergo a process of Aryanization: the Jewish population was to be expelled to the Generalgouvernement and the Polish population was to be reduced significantly and transformed into a slave labor force.

First mention of the establishment of a ghetto appears in an order dated 10 December 1939, which spoke of a temporary gathering point for local Jews to ease the deportation process. By 1 October 1940, the deportation was to have been completed, and the city was to have been Judenrein (free of Jews).

This set in motion a long series of anti-Jewish measures (as well as anti-Polish measures), by which Jews were stripped of their businesses and possessions, and forced to wear the yellow badge. Since the invasion, many Jews, particularly the intellectual and political leadership, fled to the area of the General government or eastward to Soviet-occupied Poland. On 8 February 1940, Jewish residence was limited to specific streets in the Old City of Łódź and the adjacent Batuny Quarter, the areas that would later become the ghetto. A Nazi-sponsored pogrom on 1 March in which many Jews were killed, expediated the relocation, and over the next two months, wooden and wire fences were erected around the area to cut it off from the rest of the city. Jews were formally sealed into the ghetto on 1 May of that year.

Because so many Jews had fled the city, the population of the ghetto upon its creation was 164,000. Over the coming years, Jews from Central Europe and as far away as Luxembourg were deported to the ghetto, and there was also a small Romany population that was resettled there (see: Porajmos).

To ensure that there was no contact between the Jewish and non-Jewish population of the city, two German police units were designated to patrol the perimeter of the ghetto. Within the ghetto itself, a Jewish police force was created to ensure that no Jews attempted to escape. Any Jews caught outside the ghetto could, by law, be shot on sight. On 10 May orders went into effect prohibiting any commercial contact between Jews and non-Jews in Łódź under similarly severe penalties.

In other ghettos throughout Poland, a thriving underground economy based on the smuggling of food and manufactured goods managed to emerge between the ghetto and the outside world. In Łódź, however, this was practically impossible, and Jews were entirely dependent on the German authorities for food, medicine, and other vital supplies. To further exacerbate the situation, the only legal currency in the ghetto was a specially created ghetto currency. Faced with starvation, Jews eagerly traded their remaining possessions and currency for this scrip, thereby abetting the process by which they were dispossessed of their few remaining belongings.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Establishment of the Ghetto", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki