They suspended deportations until April 19, when Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler launched an operation to clear the ghetto in honor of Hitler’s birthday, April 20. German troops, on the other hand, moved cautiously and would not go down to cellars. Jewish fighters could strike quickly and then escape across the rooftops. Making use of the many hiding places that they had created since April, Jews did not report as ordered. Ghetto residents thought that the end had come. On January 9, 1943, the Nazis ordered the deportation of another 8,000 Jews to the death camp. A newly formed group, the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa ZOB), slowly took effective control of the Warsaw ghetto.

As the deportations continued, despair gave way to a determination to resist. Only some 55,000 remained in the Warsaw ghetto. Between July and September 1942, the Nazis shipped about 265,000 Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka.

In July 22, 1942, the Nazis began sending more than 5,000 Jews per day to the death camp at Treblinka. Starvation and disease (especially typhus) killed thousands of people each month. Many of them had no housing at all, and those who did were crowded in at about nine people per room. The Nazis herded Jews from surrounding areas into this district until by the summer of 1942 nearly 500,000 of them lived within its 840 acres (340 hectares). The ghetto comprised the old Jewish quarter of Warsaw. The Warsaw ghetto was enclosed at first with barbed wire but later with a brick wall 10 feet (3 meters) high and 11 miles (18 kilometers) long. The ghettos were used to confine Jews until they could be executed. As part of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s “final solution” for ridding Europe of Jews, the Nazis established districts called ghettos in areas under German control. The revolt lasted from April 19 until it was crushed by the Germans on May 16.ĭuring World War II, Nazi Germany seized control of much of eastern Europe, including Poland. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was an armed rebellion of Jews in Warsaw, Poland, against Nazis in 1943, to keep the Nazis from sending more Jews to be killed at the Treblinka death camp. © National Archives/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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