Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

From 19 April to 16 May 1943, Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto took up arms against German forces sent to deport the ghetto's last inhabitants to the death camps. Poorly armed and vastly outgunned, they held out for almost four weeks before the SS burned the ghetto to the ground. It was the largest single Jewish revolt of the Second World War and became one of the defining events in the memory of the Holocaust.

After the German conquest of Poland in 1939, the occupiers forced Polish Jews into overcrowded ghettos. In Warsaw some 300,000 to 400,000 people were packed into about 3.3 square kilometres, where thousands died of hunger and disease. Between 23 July and 21 September 1942 the SS carried out a mass deportation, the Grossaktion Warsaw, in which roughly 254,000 to 300,000 people were sent to Treblinka and murdered. Adam Czerniaków, head of the Jewish council, took his own life when he understood what "resettlement" meant.

By late 1942 those left behind knew that deportation meant death. Two armed groups formed: the left-wing Jewish Combat Organisation (ŻOB), led by Mordechai Anielewicz, and the right-wing Jewish Military Union (ŻZW). When the Germans began a second round-up on 18 January 1943, fighters resisted openly and the operation was stopped within days, after about 5,000 people had been deported rather than the 8,000 planned. Over the following weeks the groups smuggled in pistols and explosives, dug bunkers and fighting posts, and killed collaborators.

The final operation began before dawn on 19 April 1943, the eve of Passover. As German columns entered the ghetto, insurgents ambushed them with gunfire, grenades and petrol bombs and forced them back. Heinrich Himmler replaced the local SS commander with Jürgen Stroop, who renewed the assault. Fighters of the ŻZW raised a Jewish and a Polish flag over Muranowski Square that could be seen across Warsaw, and they held the square for several days. Units of the Polish underground Home Army and People's Guard attacked German posts outside the walls in support.

From 23 April, on Himmler's orders to act with greater harshness, Stroop began burning the ghetto block by block and blowing up cellars and sewers. Thousands of civilians and fighters hid in underground bunkers, and the struggle became a month-long "bunker war". On 8 May the Germans surrounded the ŻOB command bunker at 18 Miła Street, where Anielewicz and many others took their own lives. His deputy, Marek Edelman, escaped through the sewers two days later. On 16 May Stroop marked the end of the operation by blowing up the Great Synagogue of Warsaw. Scattered resistance continued into June.

Stroop's report counted 56,065 Jews killed or captured and 16 Germans killed, but historians treat both figures with caution: the resistance believed German losses were far higher, and the historian Israel Gutman, himself a fighter in the uprising, judged the Jewish total exaggerated. At least 13,000 Jews are thought to have died in the ghetto, around half of them burned alive or suffocated. Nearly all survivors were sent to Treblinka or Majdanek. In London, Szmul Zygielbojm of the Polish government-in-exile took his own life in protest at the world's inaction.

The SS built a concentration camp on the ruins. Stroop was later convicted of war crimes and hanged in Poland in 1952. The ghetto revolt is distinct from the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, a general Polish insurrection that came more than a year later. In 1970 the West German chancellor Willy Brandt knelt before the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, a gesture that became a symbol of reconciliation. Edelman later explained that the fighters wanted to deny the Germans the power to choose the time and place of their deaths.

Our 1938 map shows Poland before the German invasion, and the 1945 map shows Europe after the defeat of Nazi Germany.