Lodz Ghetto

   After Warsaw, Lodz was the second-largest city in Poland and included the country’s second-largest Jewish population. Like Warsaw, Lodz was an important center of Jewish culture and commerce, and more than 50 percent of the city’s Jewish population engaged in industry. The Germans occupied Lodz on 8 September 1939 and renamed the city Litzmannstadt in honor of the German World War I general Karl Litzmann. German documents concerning the Lodz ghetto refer to it as the “Litzmannstadt ghetto.” The brutal treatment of Jews began immediately after the German occupation of the city. The Germans next promulgated a series of decrees on 18 September 1939 that crippled its economic life. Jewish business establishments were confiscated, and Jews were forbidden from using public transportation. Bank accounts were blocked, and the amount of cash holdings was restricted. From 15–17 November, the Germans destroyed all of the city’s synagogues, and Jews were ordered to wear a yellow armband.

   As was the case in other occupied Polish cities, the Germans established a Judenrat (Jewish Council) in Lodz in October 1939, which was followed in December with the establishment of the Lodz ghetto. Between 1941 and 1942, some 38,500 Jews from outside Lodz, including Jews from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, were crowded into the ghetto, which by the beginning of 1941 numbered about 205,000 Jews. Although the Lodz ghetto was the last to be liquidated by the Germans, the living conditions were, at all times, deplorable. As in the Warsaw ghetto, the Jews endured insufferable hunger and were victims of illness because of the overcrowded conditions. Approximately 43,500 Jews, or 21 percent of the population, died from starvation and disease.

   The Germans began the process of moving Jews from the ghetto to forced labor camps between December 1940 and June 1942, when 7,200 Jews were sent to a labor camp in the Poznan area. But in the beginning of January 1942, 55,000 Jews from the Lodz ghetto were deported to the Chelmno death camp, where they were gassed. This first deportation of Jews was followed by a second during the summer of 1942. About 20,000 of the children, and those deemed too sick to work, were “resettled” in Chelmno. The final series of Aktions against the Jews occurred between September 1942 and May 1944, and differed from the earlier deportations insofar as most Jews were not sent to Chelmno. Rather, the Germans turned the ghetto into a forced labor camp, with 90 percent of the Jews employed in factories. By August 1944, however, German plans for the ghetto changed, and the 77,000 remaining Jews were sent to Auschwitz to be gassed.