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The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

"We will be killed. It is fitting that we should be killed. But our honour will be victorious"

Yitzhak Zuckerman

On 16th February 1943 Himmler ordered the extermination of the Warsaw Ghetto. His words make it clear that he also saw this as a blow against the city of Warsaw itself which, as he put it, "has always been a centre of agitation and rebellion."

Prior to eliminating the ghetto the Nazis planned to move their factories to Lublin, along with the 'productive' Jews attached to them. The German factory owners put up posters telling the workers that this was not a deportation to death. The Jewish Fighting Organisation (ZOB) retaliated with posters telling the workers not to move, and with acts of sabotage against the factories.

Everyone in the ghetto started making underground bunkers to hide from the Germans when they came. The best of these bunkers had access to water mains, electricity and a resident doctor. These bunkers were not part of the ZOB strategy.

The ZOB killed collaborators and effectively took over the ghetto from the Judenrat. They even succeeded in extracting 250,000 zloties from the Judenrat for the purchase of weapons. ZOB members could walk around the Ghetto safely. From January to April the Germans were forced to walk in numbers, and never entered the ghetto at night. They called the ghetto 'Mexico', presumably a name indicating a 'lawless' place.

The ZOB's 22 combat units each had between 12 and 20 members, with an average age of 20 to 24. 14 of these units consisted of Hechalutz, Zionist pioneers who had been preparing for eventual emigration to Palestine. The youngest combat member was 12, the oldest 40. Mordechaj Anielewicz was in overall command and sector commander in the General Ghetto. Yitzhak Zuckerman commanded in the Large Shops and Marek Edelman in the Brushmakers' Shops. They planned to use positions in the upper storeys of houses, allowing for movement from building to building through the attics. By April 1943 all ZOB members had pistols.

The right-wing Zionist ZZW had a plan to get their forces out of the ghetto if necessary, but the ZOB did not. They feared that fighters might leave if that option existed, and in any case a good number of them wanted to die fighting.

The Nazi attack came on 19th April 1943, which was Passover. The fighters were given the password 'Jan-Warsaw'. The SS commander, von Sammern-Frankenegg, had clearly prepared for some opposition (he had a very large force at his disposal compared to that used in the Great Deportation in 1942), but had seriously underestimated the strength and determination of the Jewish fighters. His superiors do not seem to have had great confidence in him, as they had sent SS General Jürgen Stroop to Warsaw to back him up.

The average number of Nazi troops engaged in the coming fighting would be 2,090 (this figure includes personnel used to cordon off the ghetto, a number of whom were Polish police and firemen). The ZOB had 500 fighters, the ZZW perhaps 250. The Germans had vastly superior weapons, including artillery, armoured cars and at least one captured French light tank.

The Germans attacked at 6.00 a.m. They met with heavy resistance. A ZZW unit in Muranowska Street flew a blue and white Jewish flag and a red and white Polish flag from their position. Surprised by the level of resistance the Germans withdrew in disorder. von Sammern-Frankenegg told Stroop that he intended to ask for divebombers, but Stroop (who was soon to replace von Sammern-Frankenegg as German commander) instead sent the troops back in, this time using streetfighting tactics. Even this was not a great success, however, and the first day of the German Grossaktion only managed to catch 580 Jews.

The Germans feared that the Polish underground would rise up. All German forces in the Generalgouvernement were put on standby. Ironically the Polish Home Army (AK) also feared a spontaneous Polish rising, which in their view would be premature. Some in the AK also feared that the Ghetto Rising was being led by Soviet parachutists.

The fighting continued, although the ZOB's pistols were not much use against the Germans' rifles and machine guns. Home-made grenades and electrically triggered mines were more useful, but there were not enough of them. On 20th April a ZZW unit in the Brushmakers' Shops suffered heavy losses. The Germans wanted the skilled workers here to leave voluntarily, but had little success, though they did manage to remove a number of workers from the Large Shops. Both the AK and the Communist People's Guard (Gwardia Ludowa or GL) carried out token attacks on Germans near the eastern boundary of the ghetto on the 20th, but the ghetto fighters received no real help from outside.

The ZZW started to implement its evacuation plan, but most of their fighters were caught later. The ZOB introduced hit-and-run tactics, intended in part to protect civilians in bunkers. It is the stand of the population in the bunkers, virtually none of whom surrendered willingly, that has given the Rising the status of a true popular revolt. Conditions in the bunkers became appalling.

The Germans started systematically burning the ghetto, forcing civilians to jump to their deaths. Stroop seems to have been genuinely surprised at the existence of the bunkers. In a sort of grim parody of rescue work his men used dogs and sound detectors to find them. They then used flame-throwers and gas to drive the people out. On 8th May Mordechaj Anielewicz and his staff committed suicide when the bunker they were in (at 18 Mila Street) was surrounded.

The fighting continued, however. Some gentile Poles referred to it as 'Ghettograd' (after Stalingrad), but others were happy to see Warsaw at last empty of Jews.

On 16th May Stroop officially ended the Grand Aktion by blowing up the Tlomackie synagogue. Despite this theatrical gesture his troops were still fighting and clearing bunkers in late May. The Polish underground reported "exchanges of fire day and night, especially during the night of May 30th, and during the day of May 31st" as Jewish fighters attempted to break out of the ghetto, the ZOB having at last decided to try to save some of its people. Sporadic fighting continued into the autumn, and numbers of fighters managed to escape, especially through the sewers and the Okopowa Street cemetery. Sometimes they were helped to escape by Polish Socialists, the GL or the AK.

The total number of dead is hard to calculate. Stroop claims to have lost only 16 killed and 85 wounded. This seems very low. Jewish sources put the figure at about 400 dead and 1000 wounded and Polish sources put the figure even higher. Both of these are probably overestimates. Stroop's figures for Jewish fatalities add up to more than the probable population of the ghetto in 1943, and are hard to understand. In any case they hardly matter. Although several thousand Jews, including at least 80 fighters, managed to escape to the 'Aryan' side, the vast majority of the ghetto's population had been killed. The surviving buildings of the ghetto were then torn down and the area used as an execution ground for prisoners from the Pawiak, including Emanuel Ringelblum.

For this operation, which a senior Wehrmacht officer later referred to as a "Murder Expedition" (though this did not stop army engineers taking part in attacks on bunkers), Stroop was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class (an award that would doubtless have horrified the German patriots who invented that decoration during the Napoleonic Wars).

Militarily the Uprising had failed. It had not saved the Jews of Warsaw, most of the young fighters had been killed and comparatively few Germans had died at their hands. In some ways it proved that the passiveness of the Jews in 1942 had been less illogical than one might think. But symbolically the Uprising was massively important. Some 750 Jewish fighters had driven the Nazis to near panic and then held them at bay for a considerable time. The Uprising wiped away the image of Jews as passive victims and had a great influence on the birth of the state of Israel. It also provided the world with a striking example of resistance against the worst possible oppression.