Восстание в Варшавском гетто (1943)

the subsequent general uprising of 1944

Jewish insurgency against Nazi Germany in German occupied Poland during World War II

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (; powstanie w getcie warszawskim; link=no) was the 1943 act of Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto in German occupied Poland during World War II to oppose Nazi Germany's final effort to transport the remaining ghetto population to the gas chambers of the Majdanek and Treblinka extermination camps. After the Grossaktion Warsaw of summer 1942, in which more than a quarter of a million Jews were deported from the ghetto to Treblinka and murdered, the remaining Jews began to build bunkers and smuggle weapons and explosives into the ghetto. The left wing Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) and right wing Jewish Military Union (ŻZW) formed and began to train. A small resistance effort to another roundup in January 1943 was partially successful and spurred Polish resistance groups to support the Jews in earnest. The uprising started on 19 April when the ghetto refused to surrender to the police commander SS Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop, who ordered the destruction of the ghetto, block by block, ending on 16 May. A total of 13,000 Jews were killed, about half of them burnt alive or suffocated. Stroop reported 110 German casualties, including 17 killed. The uprising was the largest single revolt by Jews during World War II. The Jews knew that victory was impossible and survival unlikely. Marek Edelman, the last surviving ŻOB commander who died in 2009, said their inspiration to fight was "not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths". According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the uprising was "one of the most significant occurrences in the history of the Jewish people".

In 1939, German authorities began to concentrate Poland's population of over three million Jews into a number of extremely crowded ghettos located in large Polish cities. The largest of these, the Warsaw Ghetto, collected approximately 300,000–400,000 people into a densely packed, 3.3 km2 area of Warsaw. Thousands of Jews were killed by rampant disease and starvation under SS und Polizeiführer Odilo Globocnik and SS Standartenführer Ludwig Hahn, even before the mass deportations from the ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp began. The SS conducted many of the deportations during the operation code named Grossaktion Warschau, between 23 July and 21 September 1942. Just before the operation began, the German "Resettlement Commissioner" SS Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle called a meeting of the Ghetto Jewish Council Judenrat and informed its leader, Adam Czerniaków, that he would require 7,000 Jews a day for "resettlement to the East". The first armed resistance in the ghetto occurred in January 1943.

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