Lodz was Poland's second largest city and its second largest Jewish community. At the start of the war, there were over 220,000 Jews in the city. The Germans occupied the city on September 8, 1939, and made the city part of the Warthegau, which was annexed the German Reich. The city was renamed Litzmannstadt in honor of the German General Karl Litzmannstadt who had conquered the city during World War I. Between the start of the war and the closing off of the ghetto on April 30, 1940, about 70,000 Jews had fled the city. Accordingly, about 164,000 Jews were in the ghetto at this date.
On October 13 and 14, 1939, the Germans appointed a Judenrat which in Lodz was referred to as the Altestenrat (Council of Elders), chaired by Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski. Beginning in February, 1940, Jews were removed to the ghetto area. The ghetto was ruled by the "Ghetto- Verwaltung" (Ghetto Government) with its chief Hans Biebow. A special German police squad, leaded by Walter Rudolf Keuck, supervised the ghetto and guarded the Jews. The four square kilometres ghetto area turned into the most densely populated part of Lodz. Around 200,000 Jews (including approximately 38,500 deported Jews from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Luxemburg) vegetated in wretched wooden houses with altogether 31,271 apartments. Sanitary conditions were disastrous: Lack of food, only 725 apartments had running water, no sewers, no coal or wood for heating the rooms, no warm clothes and shoes. Therefore 21% of the ghetto population died of epidemics, starvation or froze to death. By 1942, there were about 90 factories "employing" about 77,000 Jews producing supplies for army and Nazi concerns. According to official statistics, over 43,000 persons died of starvation in the ghetto between 1940 and 1943. Direct extermination of the Jewish population began in 1942. From mid-January to September 1942 about 116,000 victims were sent to the death camp at Chelmno. This left about 89,000 residents in then the ghetto. The ghetto lingered on until final liquidation in June to August 1944. Most of these remaining Jews were sent to Auschwitz.
Rumkowski, the head of the Lodz Judenrat, was an insurance agent and was not part of the leading circles of the Jewish community. He cooperated fully with the Nazis and ran the ghetto in a dictorial manner. He has attracted more attention than any other Judenrat leader. In view of some historians, he was a traitor and collaborator. Others believe that his policies helped extend the life span of the Ghetto, which remained in existence when all other ghettos in Poland had been liquidated. Those who hold the latter opinion point out that the 5,000 to 7,000 survivors of the Lodz ghetto constituted, in relative terms, the largest among all the groups of Holocaust survivors in Poland. Fate was not kind to Rumkowski. When the last of the Jews were to be deported from Lodz, he was the victim of a cruel hoax by his German friends. He was told by Hans Biebow, the head of the German adminstration in Lodz, that he would have to go to a labor camp, but that he would continue to be the head of the Jews, and Biebow gave him a letter to present to the labor camp authorities. Biebow sent him to Auschwitz in a private railroad car with great pomp and circumstance, while the other Jews were crowded into cattle cars.. When he got to Auschwitz, he and his family went to the selection point with everyone else. He presented his letter to the Germans, and they made him stand at the side, and he was later driven away in a car straight to the crematorium, rather than going through the gas chambers.
Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat, Stein and Day Publishers (1977)
Lucan Dobroszycki, The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto 1941-1944, Yale University Press (1984)
Manfred Schulze and Stefan Petriuk, Unsere Arbeit-unsere Hoffnung Getto Lodz 1940-1945 (1995)
Http://www.deathcamps.org/occupation/lodz%20ghetto.html
Http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/pages/t045/t04588.html
Http://history1900s.about.com/library/holocaust/aa070897.htm
Gutman, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Macmillan Publishing Company (1990)
Encyclopedia Judaica, CD-Rom Edition, Keter Publishing
Spector, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust (2001)
Copyright © 2003 Edward Victor