Poland: The Jews in Poland - World War II

Source Database: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust

Immediately after the Germans overwhelmed Poland in September 1939, a wave of riots and murders followed, perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen that accompanied the German forces and that continued their murder operations under the military administration that existed for about two months. The Aktionen of the Einsatzgruppen struck Poles too, but even in their first blows, the Jews were singled out.

The German-held part of Poland was divided between the area incorporated into the German Reich and the Generalgouvernement. On the eve of the war Poland had a Jewish population of 3.3 million. After the division of Polish territory between the Germans and the Soviets in September 1939, the area annexed to the Reich and that constituting the Generalgouvernement contained 2.1 million Jews, whereas the Soviet part had 1.2 million. From early September 1939 to February and March 1940 there was an ongoing flow of refugees from the German-controlled part to the eastern, Soviet-held part. Several sources estimate that 300,000 Jews, mostly young males, took this route. Some of the refugees, however, returned from the east to their homes in the west after a short stay, either because they were tired of living as refugees, or because they wanted to be reunited with the families they had left behind. The migration of Jews from one place to another within German-held territory was caused in September 1939 by the flight from the advancing German forces, and later, by the persecution to which they were exposed and their expulsion from the northwestern parts of Poland that were annexed to the Reich. After this phase, and until the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the German-occupied part of Poland had a Jewish population of 1.8 million to 2 million, of whom 1.5 million were in the Generalgouvernement.

During the prewar German-Polish confrontation, which lasted from March to the end of August 1939, Hitler had missed no opportunity to threaten Poland, stating that the Poles would not be spared. After his January 1939 speech in which he predicted the liquidation of European Jewry if a war were to break out, Hitler did not concern himself with the Jews of Poland and did not threaten a special line of action against them. It was not clear whether the anti-Jewish policy that was being pursued against the entire Jewish community in the Reich, aimed at eliminating the Jews from the different spheres of German life and forcing them to emigrate, would also be applied in occupied Poland. At any rate, the Jews of Poland did not experience the interval that the Jews of Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia had had before the outbreak of the war to emigrate to free countries. The few possible exit routes that did exist were blocked when the war began, and in the summer of 1940 Jews were forbidden to emigrate from Poland--a ban that was introduced inside Germany only in October 1941. One of the reasons given for the earlier application of the ban on emigration in Poland was to save whatever few emigration prospects that were available for the Jews of the Reich. No more than two thousand to three thousand Jews were able to leave Poland legally, most of them persons of means or with good connections.

The first instructions on the policy to be applied to the Jews in Poland were issued by Reinhard Heydrich, in a special letter addressed to the Einsatzgruppen chiefs dated September 21, 1939, when the fighting in Poland was drawing to a close. These instructions were based on talks in which Hitler apparently took part, and were worked out in discussions between Heydrich and his aides. The directive makes it clear that the policy on the Jews was to be implemented in two stages: an immediate operational stage, and a long-range stage defined as a "final aim" (Endziel). The latter was not elaborated, except for a warning to the Einsatzgruppen chiefs that the very existence of such a "final aim" must be kept strictly secret, and that they were to bear in mind that the measures being taken in the immediate operational stage were a preparation for that "final aim."

There were three immediate measures, as follows:

  • 1. The expulsion of the Jews from the northwestern districts to the area that was designated to form the Generalgouvernement, and their concentration in the large cities, near major rail junctions;
  • 2. The establishment of Ältestenräte (councils of elders) or Judenräte (Jewish councils) in the Jewish communities, to consist, insofar as possible, of "influential personalities and rabbis," where such people were still to be found. The councils were to be made "fully responsible ... for the exact and punctual execution of all directives issued or yet to be issued," to prepare censuses of the Jewish population in their jurisdiction, and to make arrangements for housing Jews expelled from their homes and for evacuating Jews from the countryside to larger towns;
  • 3. The taking into consideration of German economic interests, especially the requirements of the army, by the German officials in charge of the expulsions and evacuations. Jews whose continued presence was economically essential were to be left in place until further notice.

Heydrich's instructions to the Einsatzgruppen chiefs were not fully honored by the civil administration that took the place of the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied territories. A large part of the Jewish population in the northwestern districts (Danzig, West Prussia, and the Warthegau), who were first in line for expulsion, were indeed deported to the Generalgouvernement. But only a part of the Jews of Lódz and the Lódz district were included in these deportations, while the Jewish population of Zaglebie and Eastern Upper Silesia, numbering some 100,000, stayed where they were, and for a time their living conditions were far superior to those of the Jews in the rest of the occupied territories.

On November 25, 1939, Hitler officially announced the end of the military administration and the establishment of the Generalgouvernement, with Hans Frank as its head. Its administration was subject to instructions from Berlin, while on-the-spot decisions were to be made by German officials. Frank began his term of office by issuing a series of anti-Jewish orders. In the late autumn, decrees were published that, among other things, ordered all Jews aged ten and above to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David on the right sleeve of their inner and outer garments as of December 1; prohibited Jews from changing their place of residence without express permission from the local German administration; and introduced forced labor for the Jews. Even while the fighting was still raging in Poland, Jewish stores and Jewish-owned enterprises had to be marked with a Star of David. In January 1940 Jews were barred from traveling by train except by special permit. These decrees had the object of humiliating the Jews, restricting their freedom of movement in the Generalgouvernement, and isolating them from the rest of the population. They were the marks of a regime far more oppressive than that operating in the Reich and in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

From its very inception, the anti-Jewish campaign was not confined to official decrees and bans. There was a variety of other manifestations that were no less severe and sometimes far worse, such as roundups of Jews on the streets by Germans in uniform for various temporary jobs, assaults on Jews, especially bearded Jews wearing traditional garb, taking goods from Jewish homes and the shelves of Jewish stores without paying for them, and confiscating Jewish apartments.

The Judenrat

On November 28, 1939, Frank issued his own version of the establishment of Judenräte in the Generalgouvernement. According to his order, each Judenrat was to be elected by the members of the respective Jewish community, a practice that hardly existed anywhere. Within a short time, Judenräte were established in all parts of German-occupied Poland.

The Judenrat served as the German authorities' main instrument for implementing their policy on the Jews. Most of the Judenrat members (some of whom had been forced to accept the appointment), as well as the Judenrat chairmen, believed that they would be able to serve the interests of their community and protect it as best they could under the existing circumstances. This was not the first time in Jewish history that Jews had had to represent their co-religionists before hostile authorities. In the past, Jewish representatives in such difficult assignments had often been able to mitigate the decrees issued by their oppressors, and evidently they hoped that this time too they would be able to play such a role. The Judenrat was the only institution permitted to appear on behalf of individual Jews and the Jewish community, and the only channel of communication between the Jews and the authorities in a situation in which the Jews had lost all traces of their civil and legal status.

Each Judenrat operated on its own, in its respective community, and without any umbrella organization or other type of coordinating body. It was only in the urban region of Zaglebie; in Silesia; and, to a lesser extent, in Radom, that a regional Judenrat existed which supervised the local community or local ghetto Judenräte. The Judenrat chairmen and members, to some extent, had previously been public figures and members of Jewish community boards in Poland. The Judenrat chairmen, who had a great deal of power, generally belonged to one of two categories. In some ghettos, such as those of Warsaw (Adam Czerniaków), Kraków (Marek Biberstein), and Lvov (Dr. Joseph Parnes), they tried to deal with the affairs of their community in the same way as this had been done in the past. They were unable to do so because of the nature of the demands put upon them and the orders given to them by the Germans, and because of the enormous range of the tasks for which they were responsible. These tasks, especially after a ghetto had been established, also included responsibilities that ordinarily had been in the hands of the municipal government authorities (as for housing, employment, and sanitation) and had never been the concern of the traditional Jewish community boards. The Judenräte also had to establish a Jewish police, a function in which they had had no experience and that was alien to Jews. In most places this police force had a grim role to play during the deportations.

In contrast to the Judenrat chairmen who did their best to maintain a traditional pattern of internal Jewish life and to implement German orders only to the extent that they could not be evaded, there was a second category of Judenrat chairmen. Those in this group believed that they had to take the initiative and seek ways to alleviate the situation, and, at a later stage, to try and save the Jews, or at least some of them, by coming to an understanding with the Germans. These chairmen generally sought to make the Germans believe that Jewish labor was indispensable. This category included Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski in Lódz, Moshe Merin in Zaglebie, and, in the east, Jacob Gens in Vilna and Efraim Barasz in Bialystok. The Germans gradually disposed of those Judenrat chairmen who refused to carry out decrees designed to inflict grave harm upon the Jews. The role of some of the Judenräte chairmen in the Selektion process and the final liquidation of the ghettos remains an issue of serious debate and even condemnation. These men took it on themselves to decide who would live and who would die, hoping that by sacrificing some the rest would be saved.

Forced Labor and Pauperization

Chronologically, the history of the Jews of Poland under German occupation is divided into two distinct periods. The first was from the outbreak of war to the middle of 1941, at which point the Germans launched their mass murder campaign, after their attack on the Soviet Union and the conquest of territories in the east. In the Generalgouvernement and the areas incorporated into the Reich, the first phase lasted until early 1942, and in parts of Zaglebie and Silesia, until the second half of that year. Once the German administration was installed in the respective occupied areas, the Jews there were inundated with decrees and regulations. These had the purpose either of humiliating them and isolating them from the rest of the population, or of robbing them of their belongings and making them into a population group that would be confined to hard labor only. For this work they received no remuneration at all or, at best, nominal pay that was completely inadequate for the necessities of life.

In the earliest days of the occupation, Jews were rounded up in city streets for casual jobs such as carrying loads, performing tasks in military barracks, and cleaning the streets of the rubble piled up during the air raids. The random seizures and the assaults on Jews brought Jewish life outside the home to a virtual standstill. As a result, the Judenräte in the large cities offered to supply the Germans with a fixed quota of workers, on condition that the random roundups in the streets be discontinued. This was the beginning of the Jewish labor gangs, who were not paid for their work by the Germans but by the Jewish community.

The confiscation and liquidation of Jewish and Polish factories and businesses in the areas annexed to the Reich began as early as September 1939, when the administration was still in the hands of the military. Most of the property that was seized was taken over by Haupttreuhandstelle Ost (Main Trustee Office East), operating on behalf of Hermann Göring's Four-Year Plan. In January a regulation was published in the Generalgouvernement ordering every business enterprise whose owners were absent or which was not run efficiently to be handed over to German trusteeship. The "inefficiency" provision served as a pretext for confiscating even the largest Jewish industrial plants and businesses. From 1939 to 1942, some 112,000 Jewish-owned businesses and shops and 115,000 workshops were confiscated. Only retail shops were left in Jewish hands, mostly small groceries and small workshops. Jews were permitted to withdraw no more than 250 zlotys a week from their bank accounts, and to possess no more than 2,000 zlotys in cash (in January 1940 the black-market rate for the United States dollar was 100 zlotys). These regulations made it impossible for Jews to engage in economic activities. Later, the regulations on the possession of cash were relaxed, but the Jews remained wary of being caught with sizable sums.

In January 1940 the Jews were ordered to register their property with the local authorities. In addition to factories, business enterprises, workshops, and houses, goods and valuables found in homes and in warehouses were also confiscated. Jews who had goods secreted away ran the risk of being betrayed or being robbed of their property. Taking part in the plunder drive were Germans in and out of uniform, and with or without formal authorization. Jews who did not possess the kind of property that was officially subject to confiscation were not safe from being robbed; in some cities, furniture, pianos, books, valuables, and artworks were removed from Jewish apartments, and the apartments themselves were requisitioned.

Most of the Jewish breadwinners in Poland who were salaried workers--laborers, business employees, clerks, teachers, and most of the professionals--were left without work or any alternative source of income. They had a hard time surviving on their savings and the proceeds from the sale of valuables they owned. From the very beginning of the occupation, refugees and the very poor suffered from hunger. On October 26, 1939, Frank issued a decree according to which every Jewish male of working age was subject to forced labor, as directed by the SS and police chief in the Generalgouvernement, Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, who was put in charge of implementing the decree. This became the basis for sending Jews to labor camps. At first many volunteered for the camps, assuming that persons engaged in physical work would receive the food they needed and a minimum standard of living conditions. When the true--and dreadful--situation in the camps became known, volunteering came to an abrupt end and forced recruitment took its place. By early 1941 some two hundred Jewish labor camps were in operation, with tens of thousands of Jews forced to work there. The work consisted of flood control, road construction, and construction of defense works and buildings, as well as agriculture. Because of the intolerable working conditions, in terms of food, housing, sanitary facilities, and medical care, the workers in the camps were sapped of their strength, epidemics broke out, and a high mortality rate was recorded.