1943
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is crushed
As a prelude to mass deportations and extermination, the German government in occupied Poland moved the Jewish population into packed and disease-ridden urban ghettos. From there they were told they would be put on trains to labour camps in the East but in fact, these journeys led only to places whose names live on in infamy: Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz and Majdanek.
By early 1943 the remaining Jews of the ghetto in Warsaw knew what their fates would be — about 200,000 had already been deported — and began to resist sporadically. When German forces entered the ghetto in strength on Passover in April large-scale fighting began to take place. Various Jewish groups, separated by ideology but united in determination to go down fighting, had collected weapons, built strong-points and bunkers, and made alliances with Polish resistance fighters outside the ghetto.
For weeks they prevented the SS and Gestapo units aided by Jewish ghetto police and Polish police from proceeding with the deportations until finally the Nazis resorted to burning down the ghetto, building by building. Some fighters escaped through tunnels to the outside where they joined the larger anti-German resistance, some committed suicide, and some surrendered. On May 16, the SS commander Jürgen Stroop (later executed for war crimes) announced the end of the uprising, marked by demolition of the synagogue, though minor incidents continued for weeks. German casualties were light but 13,000 Jews perished and a further 57,000 were deported. Stroop, who would late write a lengthy account of the battle praised the Jewish fighters. “The Jews surprised me and my officers with their determination in battle. And believe me, as veterans of World War I and SS members, we knew what determination in battle was all about. The tenacity of your Warsaw Jews took us completely by surprise. That’s the real reason the Großaktion lasted as long as it did.”
The next year, Warsaw would rise again in rebellion and again the Nazis would crush the resistance.
