Ghetto

The first ghetto was set up by the occupiers in October 1939 in Piotrków Trybunalski. In all more than a thousand were created, almost all of them in occupied Poland, the Baltic states and the occupied Soviet territories; the largest, in Warsaw and Łódź, held hundreds of thousands of people. Some were enclosed by walls or fences, others were open, but leaving without permission was punished – from 1941 in the General Government by death. Internal administration was in the hands of German-imposed Jewish councils (Judenräte). Overcrowding, hunger and epidemics caused enormous mortality.

From 1941 the ghettos became part of the 'Final Solution': their inhabitants were shot or deported to extermination camps. Most were liquidated in 1942–1943, the last large one, in Łódź, in the summer of 1944. Several saw armed resistance, the best known being the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943.