The Volokh Conspiracy:
Today in history: “Juden...waffen!”
From my article Armed Resistance to the Holocaust, 19 J. on Firearms & Public Policy 144 (2007). (For Polish translation click here).
On January 18, 1943, the Germans rounded up seven thousand Jews and sent them to the extermination camp at Treblinka; they killed six hundred more Jews right in Warsaw. But on that day, an uprising began. In the beginning, the Jewish Fighting Organization had about 600 volunteers; the Jewish Military Association had about 400, and there were thousands more in spontaneous small groups. The Jews had only ten handguns, but the Germans did not realize how under-armed the Jewish fighters were.
After four days of fighting, the Germans on January 21 pulled back from the ghetto, to organize better. Another diary written in the Warsaw ghetto exulted:
In the four days of fighting we had made up for the same of Jewish passivity in the first extermination action of July, 1942. Not only the Germans were shocked by the unexpected resistance, Jews too were astonished. They could not imagine until then that the beaten, exhausted victims could rise against a mighty enemy who had conquered all of Europe. Many Jews who were in the streets of Warsaw during the fighting refused to believe that on Zamenhof and Mila Streets Jewish boys and girls had attacked Germans. The large-scale fighting which followed convinced all that it was possible.
On February 16, 1943, Heinrich Himmler ordered that the Warsaw ghetto be exterminated on April 19. The plan was to give Hitler a Judenrein Warsaw as a present for his April 20 birthday.
On that night of April 19, the Warsaw Jews partook of the Passover Seder. Since September 1939, they had eaten the bitter herbs of slavery. Now, they were drinking the wine of freedom.
The Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, wrote in his diary, “the joke cannot last much longer, but it shows what the Jews are capable of when they have arms in their hands.” The Nazis brought in tanks. The Jews were ready with explosives. First one tank and then a second were immobilized in the middle of the street, in flames, their crews burned alive. [Uprising leader Emanuel] Ringelblum recalled:
Now the fighters as well as the non-combatant Jews who have crawled out of their hiding places have reached the pinnacle of jubilation….According to one eyewitness account, “The faces who only yesterday reflected terror and despair now shone with an unusual joy which is difficult to describe. This was a joy free from all personal motives, a joy imbued with the pride that that ghetto was fighting.”
Another eyewitness describes the confusion in the German ranks: “There runs a German soldier shrieking like an insane one, the helmet on his head on fire. Another one shouts madly ‘Juden…Waffen…Juden… Waffen!’” [Jews…weapons!]
from The History Place:
The Warsaw Ghetto
The Nazis invaded Poland in September of 1939. By October of 1940, they had confined nearly 400,000 Jews in a 3.5 square mile area of Warsaw which normally housed about 160,000. The area was surrounded by a wall 10 feet high and was sealed off on November 15, 1940. Jews were forbidden to go outside the area on penalty of being shot on sight. No contact with the outside world was allowed.
Hans Frank, the Nazi Gauleiter (governor) of occupied Poland, declared in 1941, "I ask nothing of the Jews except that they should disappear."
Thus the Nazis refused to allow enough food into the ghetto to keep the Jews healthy, forcing them to survive on a bowl of soup a day. Soon, 300 to 400 persons died each day in the ghetto from starvation and disease. By July of 1942, about 80,000 Jews had perished.
On July 22, 1942, the SS, on orders from Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, began a massive "resettlement" of the Jews, taking them out of the ghetto to extermination camps (mainly Treblinka) where they were to be gassed. The Jewish Council in the ghetto was ordered to deliver 6000 persons a day for deportation. In just two months, a total of 310,322 Jews were sent to their deaths in Nazi extermination camps. By the end of September only 60,000 Jews remained.
In January of 1943, Himmler ordered the SS to remove the remaining 60,000 Jews from the ghetto by February 15.
However, the remaining Jews knew by now that deportation meant death and chose to resist. A Jewish Fighting Organization, ZOB, had been formed, consisting of 22 groups, each having 20 to 30 men, boys and some women. The group had sent desperate appeals for weapons to anti-Nazi Poles outside the ghetto and were supplied with enough weapons to successfully resist deportation by attacking from rooftops, cellars and attics. As a result, 20 Germans were killed and 50 wounded.
The Jewish resistance, combined with the severe winter weather and a shortage of trains, prevented the SS from meeting Himmler's February deadline.
In the spring, Himmler ordered the SS to conduct a "special action" against the Jews that would clear out the entire ghetto in just three days. By now, the size of the ghetto had been reduced to an area measuring only 1,000 yards by 300 yards.
On Monday, April 19, 1943, the Jewish feast of Passover, over 2000 Waffen SS soldiers under the command of SS General Jürgen Stroop attacked with tanks, artillery and flame throwers. A fierce battle erupted between the heavily armed Germans and 1200 Jews armed with smuggled in pistols, rifles, a few machine guns, grenades and Molotov cocktails.
The first attack by the SS was repulsed by the Jews, leaving 12 Germans dead. The Germans renewed the attack, but found it difficult to kill or capture the small battle groups of Jews, who would fight, then retreat through a maze of cellars, sewers and other hidden passageways to escape capture.
On the fifth day of the battle, an infuriated Himmler ordered the SS to comb out the ghetto "with the greatest severity and relentless tenacity." SS General Stroop decided to burn down the entire ghetto, block by block.
A report filed by Stroop described the scene: "The Jews stayed in the burning buildings until because of the fear of being burned alive they jumped down from the upper stories�With their bones broken, they still tried to crawl across the street into buildings which had not yet been set on fire�Despite the danger of being burned alive the Jews and bandits often preferred to return into the flames rather than risk being caught by us."
The burnings and renewed German attacks continued, but the Jews in Warsaw resisted for a total of 28 days.
On May 16, 1943, amid the relentless German assault, the Jewish resistance finally ended. Stroop sent a battle report stating, "The former Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no longer in existence. The large scale action was terminated at 2015 hours by blowing up the Warsaw synagogue�Total number of Jews dealt with: 56,065, including both Jews caught and Jews whose extermination can be proved."
Polish sources estimated 300 Germans were killed and 1000 wounded.
No comments:
Post a Comment