The persecution of Jews reached its most destructive form in the policies of Nazi Germany, which made the destruction of Jews a high priority, starting with the persecution of Jews and culminating in the killing of approximately 6,000,000 Jews during World War II and the Holocaust from 1941 to 1945.[39] Originally, the Nazis used death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, to conduct massive open-air killings of Jews who lived in the territories that they conquered. By 1942, the Nazi leadership decided to implement the Final Solution, the genocide of the Jews of Europe, and increase the pace of the Holocaust by establishing extermination camps for the specific purpose of killing Jews as well as other undesirables such as people who openly opposed Hitler.

This was an industrial method of genocide. Millions of Jews who had been confined to disease-ridden and massively overcrowded ghettos were transported (often by train) to death camps, where some of them were herded into a specific location (often a gas chamber), then they were either gassed or shot to death. Other prisoners simply committed suicide, unable to go on after witnessing the horrors of camp life. Afterward, their bodies were often searched for any valuable or useful materials, such as gold fillings or hair, and then their remains were either buried in mass graves or burned. Others were interned in the camps and during their internment, they were given little food and disease was rampant.

Escapes from the camps were few, but they were not unknown. The few escapes from Auschwitz that succeeded were made possible by the Polish underground which operated inside the camp and local people who lived outside. In 1940, the Auschwitz commandant reported that "the local population is fanatically Polish and … prepared to take any action against the hated SS camp personnel. Every prisoner who managed to escape can count on help the moment he reaches the wall of the first Polish farmstead.

Nazi Persecution in the Ghettos

From 1939, the Nazis established ghettos in many cities with 'barbed wire, and electric wire, and watchtowers'. Ghettos were segregated areas where the Nazis forced Jewish people to live in crowded and unsanitary conditions. In this article, hear from survivors about what life was like in these ghettos.

This article and audio clips contain descriptions of violence, death and distressing scenes.

From 1939 until 1941, the Nazis established over 1,000 ghettos to control and segregate Jewish people from the rest of society. The policy continued until they decided to carry out the ‘Final Solution’, the plan to murder the entire Jewish population in Europe. Thus, ghettoisation was a provisional measure while the Nazis were formulating these plans. They uprooted thousands of Jewish people from their homes and forced them to move into certain areas that were designated as exclusively Jewish.

What types of ghettos did the Nazis establish?

Some ghettos were classed as ‘open’ because they had no walls or fences surrounding them, although they still had restrictions on who could enter and leave. However, the majority of ghettos were ‘closed’, with walls, fences and barbed wire keeping people inside. The Nazis also created ‘destruction’ ghettos, which were sealed off before the prisoners inside were deported or killed.

The Schutzstaffel (SS) supervised the administration of the ghettos, with Jewish Councils called Judenräte established to govern day-to-day running. These Councils were made up of Jewish people but controlled by the SS, with members forced to comply with the Nazis’ demands and orders.

What was it like to be deported to a ghetto?

Initially, the Nazis forced some Jewish people to move into a Judenhaus (a Jewish house) before moving them into ghettos. Ruth Frade Foster’s parents were moved from their home into a Judenhaus, where they lived in two rooms, before being deported to the ghetto in Riga, Latvia. In this clip, Ruth describes how a police officer and Gestapo officer removed her and her parents from a Judenhaus on 10 December 1941. 

RUTH FRADE FOSTER:

“And it was on a Saturday morning, the 10th of December ‘41, that the police came. One policeman and a Gestapo man came to us. And the policeman cried like a child, that he had to take us away. The Gestapo man put a seal on the door, and we were taken to the town hall, where already the family Grunberg and their daughter were waiting, and an uncle and aunt of mine. We were taken by train to Osnabruck. This policeman, Brandt was his name, he accompanied us. And he cried all the way. And my mother was only upset, not because we were deported, but this was the first time her life that she was on a train, or that she rode on a Shabbat. So we arrived in Osnabruck, we were in a big Gymnasium, with lots of people. We were lying on straw. there were lots of women with small children, lots of old people, lots of sick people, they were all lying about, without proper sanitation. We all had food, we were not given any food, but we all had food taken from home. I can't tell you exactly how long we were there, but we definitely spent one or two nights there. Then we came on to a train to Bielefeld. No sooner did we travel, it was fairly cold, but it got colder and colder as you came towards the Baltic. And the toilets froze, and there was no sanitation, there was no water. And small children and babies and - it was terrible. We had a few people who died of heart attacks. Some tried to commit suicide. And it was - it was terrible. We went via Konigsberg, Memel, Riga. And arrived at the railway station, Riga Chirotava, which I think it's a goods railway station, not a proper... Just for goods. There we were greeted by SS, in big leather coats and big dogs. That's why I'm still afraid of dogs, even if it's a poodle. So we dragged along, it was quite a long march, in this cold, and we came to the Riga ghetto, which was a part of the old town of Riga, where there were old wooden houses. It was with barbed wire, and electric wire, and watchtowers. And this was like a ghost town. The streets were empty, there was nothing to be seen then, it was dark by then. And we were just driven into these empty houses”. 

While many people like Ruth were deported to ghettos outside of their home towns, this was not everyone’s experience. When the Nazis invaded countries such as Poland, they often established ghettos within areas of many towns and cities, and forced Jewish people to move into these areas. This happened to Jack Kagan and his family, who were forced to move to the ghetto that the Nazis created in the Peresika suburb of Novogródek (then Poland, today Belarus). In this clip, Jack describes how the Einsatzgruppen, the paramilitary death squad section of the SS, and the local police arrived in the town and randomly selected some people to move into the ghetto and others to be murdered. 

JACK KAGAN:

“As morning arrived, they moved to the courthouse. They have assembled early morning; as I mentioned before it was a very cold day. We stood right through the day; in the evening the doors have been opened. It's a big courthouse, it was a very big building, I think a five-storey building, and then there were other buildings in front, and for 5,000 people to push in into three buildings, you can imagine what it was. The night we were standing up, there was no room to sleep, with the parcels, some were sitting on it. Early morning, lorries arrived, the doors have opened, the Nazi arrived, and started a selection. You came out, he asked you, the head of the family, your profession, how many children. To the left, it's to go out to the yard; to the right it's to stand in the corner of the entrance of the building. Came to our turn, my uncle went in front, he said, 'What is your profession?' He said a saddle maker. 'How many children?' Two children. To the left. Came to my father. 'Your profession?' Again, saddle maker, two children. To the right. That means it was no rhyme or reason whom to select to death and whom to life. Because he went in front, two children, saddle maker, the same profession. We were the lucky ones, he left us to remain alive, and them to death. So my uncle Moishke, Shoshke, Berol, and Leizer went out to the yard. They sent out four and a half thousand, four thousand people on lorries, took them outside the town into graves, into prepared graves, and massacred them, they shot them. That was Einsatzkommando.”

Holocaust Death Camps

Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young.

The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz.

From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.

Nazi Germany used six extermination camps, also called death camps (Todeslager), or killing centers (Tötungszentren), in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million people – mostly Jews – in the Holocaust. The victims of death camps were primarily murdered by gassing, either in permanent installations constructed for this specific purpose, or by means of gas vans. The six extermination camps were Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Extermination through labour was also used at the Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps. Millions were also murdered in concentration camps, in the Aktion T4 or murdered directly on site.

The idea of mass extermination with the use of stationary facilities, to which the victims were taken by train, was the result of earlier Nazi experimentation with chemically manufactured poison gas during the secretive Aktion T4 euthanasia programme against hospital patients with mental and physical disabilities. The technology was adapted, expanded, and applied in wartime to unsuspecting victims of many ethnic and national groups; the Jews were the primary target, accounting for over 90 percent of extermination camp victims. The genocide of the Jews of Europe was Nazi Germany's "Final Solution to the Jewish question".

Watch this excellent video on The Warsaw Ghetto and Treblinka Extermination camp.