Once again I have to say that it is most timely that I should talk about this.

Fascist officials announced the Warsaw ghetto on 12 October 1940—intentionally to coincide with Yom Kippur—and the ghetto was officially open four days later. The ghetto’s long‐term goal was the death of its inhabitants. Quoting James Q. Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, page 132:

Dr. Ludwig Fischer, [who] would be named governor of the Warsaw District in [Fascist]‐occupied Poland[,] would serve as the top functionary during the brutal roundup of hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews; the creation of the Warsaw Ghetto (in which, he promised, [that] “the Jews will croak from hunger and misery. There will be nothing left of the Jewish problem but the cemetery”);¹ the eventual savage suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; and the deportation of some three hundred thousand to the death camps.²

From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia:

In October 1940, [Axis] officials decreed the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw. The decree required all Jewish residents of Warsaw to move into a designated area, which [Axis] authorities sealed off from the rest of the city in November 1940.

The ghetto was enclosed by a wall that was over 10 feet high, topped with barbed wire, and closely guarded to prevent movement between the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw. The population of the ghetto, increased by Jews compelled to move in from nearby towns, was estimated to be over 400,000 Jews. [Axis] authorities forced ghetto residents to live in an area of 1.3 square miles, with an average of 7.2 persons per room.

This created a population density far higher than anywhere else in Warsaw.

The Jewish council offices were located on Grzybowska Street in the southern part of the ghetto. Jewish organizations inside the ghetto tried to meet the needs of the ghetto residents as they struggled to survive. Among the welfare organizations active in the ghetto were the Jewish Mutual Aid Society, the Federation of Associations in Poland for the Care of Orphans, and the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training.

Financed until late 1941 primarily by the New York‐based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, these organizations attempted to keep alive a population that suffered severely from starvation, exposure, and infectious disease.

The hunger in the ghetto was so great, was so bad, that people were laying on the streets and dying, little children went around begging…
—Abraham Lewent

Food allotments rationed to the ghetto by the [Axis] civilian authorities were not sufficient to sustain life. In 1941 the average Jew in the ghetto subsisted on 1,125 calories a day. Czerniaków wrote in his diary entry for May 8, 1941: “Children starving to death.” Between 1940 and mid‐1942, 83,000 Jews died of starvation and disease. Widespread smuggling of food and medicines into the ghetto supplemented the miserable official allotments and kept the death rate from increasing still further.

Pictured: Street sales of bread in the ghetto.

Food and medicines were not the only resources in scarce supply, though. Quoting Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto, page 10:

An average of seven residents lived per room, mostly in large buildings of two to four stories constructed around a central courtyard, with shops on the ground level along the street and living spaces above and in the rear wings of the building. An entryway led from the street into the courtyard, where entrances provided access to separate stairwells.

While there were also more spacious residences of relatively luxury, a typical apartment consisted of a kitchen and one or two rooms. Toilets were often communal, and many buildings had no baths so residents had to use public facilities. City utilities had been badly damaged during the shelling, and people through Warsaw faced chronic problems with water, electricity, and waste removal.

Limited electricity caused difficulties in, for example, medical procedures. Quoting Notes From The Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum:

An operation is being performed in the Jewish hospital at the former Treasury Department building on Leszno Street. Officials from the electric company come in. The hospital is 60,000 guilden behind in its payments.

Dr. Borkowski asks five minutes to complete the operation. “It doesn’t matter,” the electric company officials say. “So there’ll be one Jew less.” The operation had to be completed by candlelight.

The scarcity of electricity no doubt contributed to people freezing to death, and the short supply of potable water made it easier for typhoid to develop. Quoting Bea Stadtler The Holocaust: A History of Courage and Resistance, page 58:

Polish winters are long and very cold, and so many Jews froze to death from lack of warm clothing and heat.

Because they were made to live in such crowded conditions, the terrible disease typhoid began to spread. There was little water, and it was not fit for drinking. Sanitary conditions were very poor. Many Jews in the ghetto died from typhoid, and others were sickened through weakness.

Food was so scarce that the Warsaw ghetto was possibly the only one of the Axis’s ghetti where somebody committed anthropophagy. Quoting Helene J. Sinnreich in The Ghetto in Global History: 1500 to the Present:

While there were cases of cannibalism which were known to have occurred in the Warsaw ghetto, I was unable to find any such documented cases in other ghettos.

As if all this were not awful enough, Fascists were more than welcome to regularly ‘mow the lawn’ (to borrow a figure of speech that I heard from another context), meaning direct and deliberate killing of the ghetto’s residents. From Edward B. Westermann’s Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany, page 8:

When the battalion was assigned to guard duty in the Warsaw ghetto, Mehr not only beat Jews with his pistol until they “looked horrible,” but also regularly fired wildly in the ghetto, killing Jews.⁴³

Page 76:

In another example, Josef Blösche and an SS colleague received orders to enter the Warsaw ghetto looking for Jews who failed to appear for a work detail and to “make a little ruckus [Remidemi] and shoot a couple of Jews.”⁶⁴

Page 78:

In postwar testimony, a policeman from PB 61 recalled one incident in the Warsaw ghetto during which a colleague on sentry duty set up a position outside the ghetto and waited for a Jew to cross his line of fire. The witness remembered hearing a shot and then seeing a dead Jew lying inside the ghetto boundary.⁷⁸

[…]

In another example, a policeman in the Warsaw ghetto stopped a Jew and ordered him to patch an opening in the ghetto wall. As the Jew examined the opening, a colleague of the policeman on the other side of the wall shot him.⁸⁰

Page 80:

Similarly, the SS man Josef Blösche rode through the Warsaw ghetto at times on a rickshaw powered by a Jewish prisoner, on which occasions he would use the vehicle as a platform to test his marksmanship and shoot Jews either on the street or those standing at their windows.

Page 83:

During guard duty in the Warsaw ghetto, officers and senior enlisted men of PB 61 promoted “shooting contests” to encourage the murder of Jews.¹¹³

There are plenty more examples, but I think that this suffices.

The works written on the Warsaw ghetto are enough to fill up a bookshelf. Likewise, there are dozens of videos and films that you can watch if you have plenty of time to spare. While normally I like to suggest other works if you want more on a topic, in this case I can’t possibly list them all without testing your patience. For more photographs of this ghetto (some of which are NSFW or NSFL), click here.

While the appalling natures of this and other ghetti are the most obvious reasons for preventing anything like them from recurring, it is important that we ask ourselves why anybody allowed these to exist. The reasons for this are numerous and somewhat complex, and I hope to save that is for another topic.

One reason that’s easy to understand, though, is that it provided a good source of cheap labor for the Fascist bourgeoisie. Quoting Wolf Gruner’s Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938–1944, page 254

A first attempt in summer to widen the circle of forced labor failed because the Jews in the ghetto did not register out of fear that they would be sent to labor camps. Lasting success was only achieved after private companies were allowed into the ghetto.¹¹¹ In [the Third Reich], the chambers of commerce and trade soon openly publicized the workshops in the Warsaw ghetto as a means of stimulating the [Fascist] private sector to invest there.¹¹²

Pictured: Jews working in one of the manufacturing plants (szops) in the ghetto.

In September 1941, 24,000 employees were engaged in the ghetto’s own operations, working for the Wehrmacht, police, and SS, and later for the private companies with workshops there. Nine thousand were employed by Jewish institutions.¹¹³

(Emphasis added in all cases.)