From late 1939 German authorities concentrated Jews in designated districts of towns and cities, first in occupied Poland and from 1941 in the occupied Soviet territories, sealing many of them with walls or fences and appointing Jewish councils to administer them. Ghettos served as holding pens and labour pools: inhabitants were set to work for German firms and the army while receiving rations far below subsistence. Overcrowding, hunger and epidemic typhus killed hundreds of thousands, with the Warsaw ghetto alone recording more than 80,000 deaths from starvation and disease before the deportations began. From 1942 the ghettos of the General Government were emptied to the killing centres of Operation Reinhard, and the last large ghettos in Poland and Lithuania were destroyed in 1943 and 1944. Armed resistance broke out in Warsaw in April 1943 and in Bialystok, Vilna and other ghettos. Theresienstadt, established in November 1941, was used both as a transit ghetto and as a propaganda showpiece.
German occupation authorities, with Romanian and other allied administrations, confined Jewish populations in closed districts before deporting them
The Polish census of 1931 and later community registers give about 3.3 million Jews in pre-war Poland, roughly 10 per cent of the population; Warsaw's ghetto alone held over 400,000 at its peak and Lodz about 164,000. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has documented at least 1,143 ghettos in German-occupied eastern Europe, extending into the occupied Soviet territories, Romanian-administered Transnistria and, in 1944, Hungary, so the population confined was drawn from a wider pool than Poland alone.
These figures count deaths inside the ghettos from starvation, cold, disease and shooting. They are part of, not additional to, the Holocaust entry's total of about six million Jewish dead: the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's breakdown of that total puts 800,000 to 1,000,000 deaths in ghettos, labour camps and concentration camps together, alongside about 2.7 million in the killing centres and about 2 million in mass shootings. Ghetto inhabitants later deported and murdered in the killing centres are counted there, also within the Holocaust total. Estimates rest on Jewish council burial records, German administrative returns and postwar reconstruction; the ghettos of the occupied Soviet Union, many of which existed only weeks before their inhabitants were shot, are the hardest to count.
Sealed confinement, starvation rations, compulsory labour and the shooting of those who left without permission are documented in German ordinances, Jewish council records and the diaries and archives kept in the ghettos themselves, notably the Oneg Shabbat archive of Warsaw.
Poland