The Jewish Ghettos of Nazi Germany

Why don't Jews explore life in the ghettos of Chernivtsi, Proskurov, Kremenchug, Vinnytsia, Zhmerinka, Kamenets-Podolsky, Minsk and dozens of other cities? Is it because the Jewish Judenrats and the Rabbinate collaborated with the Nazis, and the Jews were terrorized not by the Germans at all, but by their own Jewish police?

Jewish ghettos... For many inhabitants, these are terrible places for a very short stay of Jews, where they either died, quickly and painfully, or just as briefly expected to be sent to the gas chamber.

However, the ghetto and the concentration camp are different concepts. A ghetto is formally a part of a city where certain categories of citizens lived, separated by nationality. In this case, we are talking about Jews.

They were there for a long time. And therefore they had their own administration and even their own police. Moreover, the police and administration were not German, but Jewish. The administration was called the Judenrat (ie, the Jewish Council), formally the police, the Jewish service of order, was subordinate to it.

From the very beginning, the Judenrat did not inspire confidence in the German administration, although it directly executed its orders. The police, on the other hand, became a structure more trustworthy and even stronger in some places than the administration, subjugating the latter.

Educated people initially came to the police. In some ghettos, there was even a strict selection process for recruitment. However, soon the only condition affected was good physical training, which her future work.

The Jewish police became a good assistant to the occupying authorities. They sent their brothers to concentration camps, took away their property and money, organized raids, arrested "unreliable", collected excessive taxes, made sure that no one left the territory of the ghetto. Jewish police officers shot the prisoners of the ghetto with their own hands. So in the Oshmyany ghetto, Jewish policemen were involved in the execution of more than 400 people.

However, they did not receive freedom. They were not sent on vacation to resorts. Moreover, they were often also subject to deportations to concentration camps and extermination, they were only arrested and killed last.

True, the representatives of the Jewish people themselves try to speak softly about this moment in the history of the Second World War. In the police, they say, there were quite a few Gestapo agents who morally corrupted the Jews. The very activities of the ghetto police are divided into periods: 1) 1939-spring 1941. - the period of the first deportations to labor camps, when relations between ghetto prisoners and policemen were quite normal; 2) spring 1941-summer 1942 - the period of deportations to labor camps and the beginning of deportations to death camps, when relations between prisoners and the police began to escalate; 3) from July 1942 - a period of mass deportations to concentration camps, when relations between the police and prisoners were extremely tense.

In each period, allegedly different people served in the police. In the latter - only those who pursued one goal - to survive. At the same time, many examples are given when the policemen helped their fellow Jews, being members of underground organizations. However, in general, the Jewish police are the same collaborators, the same as all other policemen. Among them were underground workers, and those who served the occupying authorities well.

After the war, some of the policemen were arrested and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, some were sentenced to death. But many former ghetto policemen left for their "historical homeland" and successfully lived to old age. At the same time, the former "guardians of order in the ghetto" did not always have forged documents. But they were forgiven because of the "extremely harsh living conditions in the ghetto"...

In total, about 1000 ghettos were created in Europe, in which at least a million Jews lived. In the "Handbook of camps, prisons and ghettos in the occupied territory of Ukraine (1941-1944)", prepared by the State Archives Committee of Ukraine in 2000, over 300 ghettos are mentioned - this means that there were 300 Judenrats in Ukraine, each of which included 10 -15 influential Jews and rabbis, and dozens or even hundreds of Jewish policemen (there were 750 Jewish policemen in the Lvov ghetto).

Ghettos are residential zones that existed on the principles of Jewish self-government in German-controlled territories, where Jews were forcibly moved in order to isolate them from the non-Jewish population. The self-governing body of the ghetto was the Judenrat (“Jewish Council”), which included the most authoritative people in the city or town. For example, in Zlochev (Lviv region), 12 people with a doctorate degree became members of the Judenrat. The Judenrat provided economic life in the ghetto, and the Jewish police kept order there.

Most often, in the context of the Holocaust, they mention the Warsaw ghetto formed in 1940, the maximum number of which reached about 0.5 million people. Jews worked on German orders both inside and outside the ghetto. The upper layer in the ghetto was made up of successful merchants, smugglers, owners and co-owners of enterprises, senior officials of the Judenrat, and Gestapo agents.

They arranged magnificent weddings, dressed their women in furs and gave them diamonds, restaurants and nightclubs with exquisite food and music worked for them, thousands of liters of vodka were imported for them.

“The rich came, hung with gold and diamonds; in the same place, at tables laden with dishes, under the pops of champagne corks, “ladies” with brightly painted lips offered their services to military profiteers, - this is how Vladislav Shpilman describes the cafe in the center of the ghetto, whose book “The Pianist” formed the basis of the film of the same name by Roman Polansky. “In the rickshaw carriages, graceful gentlemen and ladies sat, spread out, in expensive woolen suits in winter, in French silks and expensive hats in summer.”

There were 6 theaters, restaurants, cafes in the ghetto, but the Jews had fun not only in public institutions, but also in private brothels and card clubs that arose in almost every house ...

Bribery and extortion in the Warsaw ghetto reached astronomical proportions. Members of the Judenrat and the Jewish police made fabulous profits on this. For example, in the ghetto, the Germans were allowed to have only 70 bakeries, while in parallel there were another 800 underground ones. They used raw materials smuggled into the ghetto. The owners of such underground bakeries were heavily bribed by their own police, Judenrat and gangsters.

Many smugglers who got caught became Gestapo agents - they reported on the hidden gold, on the activities of gangs. Such were the smugglers Kohn and Geller, who took over the entire transport business inside the ghetto and, in addition, traded smuggling on a large scale. In the summer of 1942 they were both killed by competitors.

The Warsaw ghetto was a nationwide center for illegal foreign exchange transactions - the ghetto black exchange determined the dollar exchange rate throughout the country. One miraculously surviving Jew recalled that they traded land in Palestine!

It is extremely interesting why the Jews call the "uprising" carried out by the Germans in April 1943, the cleansing of the Warsaw ghetto, drowning in unsanitary conditions, debauchery and corruption? Why are they afraid to tell the truth about who and against whom there "rebelled"? After all, the German raid was provoked by Jewish thieves armed to the teeth, racketeers and smugglers, thereby endangering the civilian population - the elderly, women, children.

Jewish militants “revolted” not at all against the Germans, as the legend, but killed their Jewish police and almost the entire Judenrat inside the ghetto, they killed theater artists, journalists - 59 out of 60 (!) employees of the Zhagev newspaper died at the hands of Jewish mafiosi (Torch). They brutally took the life of one of the leaders of the ghetto, sculptor and prominent Zionist 80-year-old Alfred Nossig. The bandits terrorized the population of the Warsaw ghetto, imposing almost all of them with a reketir tax. From those who refused to pay, they abducted children or took them to their underground prisons on the street. Mila, 2 and on the territory of the Tebens enterprise - and there they were brutally tortured.

Gangs of robbers took everything indiscriminately from both the poor and the rich: they took off watches, jewelry, money, not yet worn out clothes, and even food hidden for a rainy day.

These Jewish gangs terrified the ghetto. Often in the silence of the night, a shootout began between the gangs themselves - the Warsaw ghetto turned into a jungle: one attacked the other, at night the screams of the Jews, who were attacked by robbers, were heard. The bandits robbed the cash desk of the Judenrat three times in broad daylight, taking away the money that went to feed homeless children, treat typhus patients and other social needs. They imposed on the Judenrat an indemnity of a quarter of a million zlotys, and the department of supply of the Judenrat with an indemnity of 700,000 zlotys.

The Judenrat paid the contribution on time, but the supply department refused. Then the Jewish gangsters kidnapped the son of the cashier of the department and kept him for several days, after which they received the required amount.

But only after the bandits began to attack the German patrols, the Germans, who endured all these outrages for a long time, intervened, and began a "raid against thieves and bootleggers." Jewish policemen took an active part in the action - they, as people who know the area well, helped the German assault groups a lot when combing the quarters.

Not Germans, but Jewish gangsters destroyed the ghetto by blowing up houses and setting them on fire with Molotov cocktails. Hundreds of innocent people died in the fire of a grandiose fire. The Germans tried to put out the fire, but to no avail - the bandits set fire to new buildings.

Here is how one of the militants, Aaron Karmi, tells about an unsuccessful attempt to mine the building: “And they still didn't lay mines there ... Three of our guys went down to the basement to blow it up. And what? They stick out there with their tongue stuck to their asses. And here I am spinning ... and it was a tragedy!

One of the militants, Kazik Ratheiser, confessed many years later: “What right did we, a small group of youth from ZOB (one of the gangs), have to decide the fate of many people? What right did we have to riot? This decision led to the destruction of the ghetto and the death of many people who might otherwise have survived.”

How did the "rebellion" end? The ghetto was completely destroyed, all the inhabitants of the ghetto were sent to labor camps - almost all of them survived. The Germans did not even shoot the militants captured with weapons.

On the Internet, photos of rebel girls in caps are popular. Far right - Malka Zdroevich, she was captured with a weapon, but she was not shot, but sent to work in Majdanek, of course, she "miraculously survived the Holocaust."

An even more popular photo shows a group of Jews being led out of a basement. In the foreground is a boy in short pants with his arms raised, behind him is a German soldier in a helmet with a rifle in his hands. This boy - Zwi Nussbaum - an ENT doctor living near New York, and a German soldier - Josef Blosche - was tried in East Germany after the war and executed on charges of participating in an action for suppression of the "uprising" in the Warsaw ghetto .

The commander of the "uprising" - Mordechai Anilevich, together with his headquarters, committed collective suicide in the basement at 18 Myala Street, where the headquarters of one of the gangs was located.

A few words about the portrait of the leader of the uprising: gang members recall that when Anilevich ate, he covered the bowl with his hands. They asked: “Mordka, why are you covering the bowl with your hands?” He answered: "I'm so used to the brothers not being taken away."

He was the son of a fishmonger from the Warsaw suburbs, and when the fish were not taken for a long time, his mother made him paint the gills with paint to make it look fresh.

In early May, the leaders of another gang discovered a passage through the sewer and left the ghetto (perhaps they would have left earlier, but did not know about this pipe) - they left, leaving scattered groups of their militants who were in other places .

According to the memoirs of one of the members of the leadership of this gang, at the same time they refused to take with them several peaceful Jews who asked for help ... The Germans destroyed the last gang of criminals on June 5 on Muranovskaya Square . The thieves, racketeers and smugglers who fled outside the ghetto formed new gangs that robbed the Polish peasants.

General Bur-Komorowski, commander of the Polish underground Home Army, on September 15, 1943, issued an order expressly ordering the destruction of marauding Jewish criminal groups, accusing them of banditry. Perhaps someone will continue to look for malicious intent and guilt of the Germans in the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, but let them think about why the Germans did not touch hundreds of other ghettos, where there was no corruption, smuggling, racketeering, unsanitary conditions , Red Cross parcels were not stolen, businesses were operating?

As an example, we can cite the Teresienstadt ghetto, comparable to Warsaw in terms of the number of people, where German and Czech Jews maintained exemplary order. The Theresienstadt Jewish Council of Elders has repeatedly informed Red Cross inspectors that they are enjoying surprisingly favorable conditions, given that Germany was heading for defeat in the war and world Jewry was the first to call for its destruction.

---

Предлагаем посмотреть другие страницы сайта:
← Polish Fascism or What Poland Hides from the Second Rzeczpospolita | Day of destruction of Slavic writing and culture on May 24 →