Ghettos in Europe during the Holocaust

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In the Holocaust, Nazi Germany set up ghettos across Europe. These were separate, closed-off areas where the Nazis forced Jewish people to live, apart from everybody else. Some Roma people, Greeks, and Soviets were also forced into ghettos.^[1]

Nobody was allowed to leave the ghettos without special permission. Living conditions were so terrible that they killed many people. Tens of thousands of Jews died in ghettos from starvation, disease, freezing to death, and the terrible conditions.^[2] In some ghettos, one in every five people died.^[2][3] Eventually, the Nazis used the ghettos to collect people before deporting them to concentration camps.^[4][5]

The Nazis established around 1500 ghettos during the Holocaust. They liquidated nearly all of these ghettos between the 1930s and 1945. Sometimes this meant sending everyone to concentration camps and shooting people who resisted.^[5] In other cases, the Nazis executed all of the people inside the ghetto.

1. ↑ "Ghettos in Poland". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 2024-10-19.
2. ↑ ^{2.0 2.1} "Warsaw Ghetto". Yad Vashem. Retrieved 2024-10-14.
3. ↑ "Lodz". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 2024-10-14.
4. ↑ Cite error: The named reference :0 was used but no text was provided for refs named (see the help page).
5. ↑ ^{5.0 5.1} "Nazi Germany and the Establishment of Ghettos". The National WWII Museum | New Orleans. 2023-10-19. Retrieved 2024-09-09.