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Being the second biggest town in Poland, Lodz also had the country’s second largest Jewish community. The Jewish citizens of Lodz engaged in the fine arts’ and cultural life of the town, there were some Jewish textile manufacturers, and the Jewish population had conformed to the Polish culture to a high degree, was “acculturated”.
The German assault on Poland in September 1939 resulted in the annexation of Lodz, i.e. its being incorporated into the Reich as part of the “Reichsgau Wartheland” district in November 1939. The town was Germanized and “Lodz” turned into “Litzmannstadt” on 11th April 1940 – “owing” its new name to the German General and Nazi dignitary Karl Litzmann.
Following out instructions given in the “express letter sent by the Chief of the Security Police Heydrich to the Chiefs of the task forces in Poland answerable for the Jewish question on the occupied territory” on 21st September 1939, these latter, or their lower ranks, put up and opened ghetto after ghetto to hold in custody Poland’s Jewish population. The first ghetto was erected at Piotrkow in the autumn of 1939; the gates of the Lublin ghetto were opened wide to Jewish people in March 1941 and then closed off hermetically. While the ghettos in the towns of Krakow and Radom and in their vicinity were also put up in 1941, the ghettoization of the Jews in Upper Silesia was not started before 1942, in some places of the region not until 1943. Not all the ghettos had solid stone walls like the one in Warsaw, some of them were surrounded by wooden, others by barbed wire fences. Many a ghetto was completely sealed off with guards letting in and out only work commandos; others stood open to Jews at a definite and to Poles at any hour. The most rigid rules had been contrived for, and were applied to, the Lodz ghetto, where it was virtually impossible to pass the ghetto border to and fro.
As of November already, the Jews were coerced into clearly marking themselves as such by wearing an armband with the Star of David (“Judenstern”). In February 1940, the old town centre of Lodz, its slums Baluty and its suburb Marysin were officially declared a ghetto, with the town’s Jews being forced to “resettle” to this area by March, before it was sealed off in April. In turn, non-Jewish residents of these quarters were urged to move out. The approximately 164,000 Jews living in the ghetto in its incipient stage had to share about 48,000 rooms. A German ghetto administration was formed – headed by the Bremen business manager Hans Biebow (1902-1947) and consisting of German policemen and a so-called Jewish self-government. Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski (1877-1944), the “Eldest of the Jews living in the Litzmannstadt ghetto”, presided over this “Jews’ Council”. The management board laid into his hands took care of the ghetto residents’ vital and everyday life needs (labour office, registration office, school management, a centralised system of grocery shops and a Jewish ghetto police as well as an own ghetto currency). Despite all these real or authentic measures taken in favour of the ghettoized Jews, the Jews’ Council and the self-government were meant to keep up appearances staging a seemingly autonomous Jewish life similar to that “displayed” in Warsaw or Theresienstadt. In reality, both of them were wholly dependent on the instructions given by the German administration.
Profiting by the important role Lodz played in textile manufacturing, the Nazis developed the ghetto into a centre of forced labour in this economic segment. Between 1940 and 1944, the Lodz ghetto saw the establishment of close to 90 plants and companies where Jewish forced labourers had to either produce textiles in particular for the German army, but also for German private entrepreneurs (Neckermann, Leineweber, etc.), or reprocess old clothes and worn uniforms. The goods manufactured for the German army made up about 90 percent of the overall ghetto production. In view of these facts, the “Eldest among the Jews” Rumkowski had hoped that the ghetto’s residents fit to work – benefiting from their efficiency and productivity in line with their key phrase “Our only route to survival is work” – might succeed in saving all ghetto inmates from mass deportation and liquidation. To aggravate things, though, the ghetto became desperately overcrowded owing to another Nazi deportation action pouring forth about 40,000 people – coming from Austria, Bohemia, Luxembourg and Germany among other countries as well as from ghettos in other Polish provinces that had been liquidated. And to cap it all, the Nazis had sent – in a clean one-off sweep in November 1941 – approximately 5,000 Sinti and Romanies from Austria to the ghetto where they were kept in solitary confinement in a separate “gypsies’ camp”.
To manage or organise the Lodz ghetto as place of concentrated, of intense forced labour, the Nazis applied the clear criterion of “utility”. In plain: Within the first nine months of the year 1942, the German administration deported more than 70,000 Jews to extermination camp Chelmno where they were murdered directly on their arrival. Among those falling victim to deportation action were particularly all those who, considered under the aspect of use, were, in fact, unproductive and inefficient, while, if looked on with the eyes of humanity, could be seen to be in bare need above all of care, protection and help – i.e. the old and sick ones and children under the age of ten. Having ceased to be a reception centre for Jews now, the Lodz ghetto solely served to exploit human labour. Although their right to exist had hitherto been a provisional one only, Heinrich Himmler decided to wholly take it from the people kept here when he, early in May 1944, gave orders to liquidate the Lodz ghetto. By mid-July 1944, more than 7,000 persons were murdered in Chelmno; in August, over 65,000 ghetto residents were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau; Rumkowski turned out to be one of those murdered there. “Surely, there was not a single “Eldest among the Jews” who could cope with the permanent conflict of interest between collaboration with the Germans and care for the Jews without personally suffering mental or emotional wounds and having to take loss of life. There cannot be even a shadow of doubt about the fact that the Jew Rumkowski had every intention of protecting and safeguarding the Jews kept in the Litzmannstadt ghetto. In his view, he managed to do so best by making concessions to the Germans in three respects – imposing on the Jews to work hard for German economic interests, introducing rigid discipline among them in order not to give the Germans any grounds to interfere or encroach, and being harsh on himself doing his duty – something the Germans, owing to their “Fuehrer system”, were perfectly familiar with … Every minor “eldest” in any concentration camp block whatever had shown more distinct traits of despotism than this ghetto chief. And all and any other accusation brought forward against him just ignores the difference that is between an inciter and an (forced) executor.” (Wolf Oschlies http://www.zukunft-braucht-erinnerung.de/holocaust/osteuropa/455.html)
600 Jews were staying behind forming a sort of “commando to clear up” and were joined by another 270 Jews who had survived living in hiding. On 19th January 1945, Lodz was freed by the Red Army. Merely 5,000 of the initially about 200,000 ghetto residents had come through.
Among other things, ITS keeps nominal compilations on persons who, having been deported from Germany, Luxembourg, Vienna and Prague to the Lodz ghetto (in the 1941/1943 years), passed away here, and lists on ghetto residents who were committed to the ghetto-own prison. Historical documents (e.g. correspondence relating to the Litzmannstadt ghetto 1944; official announcements; appeals) are also available at ITS.
Beyond that, ITS preserves documents on the so-called “Polen-Jugendverwahrlager Litzmannstadt” (Litzmannstadt camp taking custody of Polish children and adolescents) which was run from 1941 to 1944. Children deported from all Polish provinces and orphans had been put in this “Camp taking custody of Polish children and adolescents”; those among them found to be “racially valuable” were sent from here to the Reich for adoption. Between 12,000 and 13,000 children were forced into passing through the camp, the youngest ones being merely a few months or two years old only, while most of them were aged between 8 and 14.
(Michael Hepp, Denn ihrer ward die Hölle. Kinder und Jugendliche im "Jugendverwahrlager Litzmannstadt" (For they lived through hell. Children and Adolescents in the “Litzmannstadt Camp taking custody of children and adolescents”), in: Mitteilungen der Dokumentationsstelle zur NS-Sozialpolitik (Announcements of the Documentation Agency on Nazi social policy), April 1986, copy 11/12, pp. 49-71)
(Selective) Literature
Avraham Cytryn, A Youth Writing Between the Walls: Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2005
Sascha Feuchert, Erwin Leibfried, Jörg Riecke (Hrsg.): Die Chronik des Gettos Lodz/Litzmannstadt. Wallstein publishers, Göttingen. 2007, 5 volumes
Mendel Grossman, My Secret Camera: Life in the Lodz Ghetto, edited by Frank Dabba Smith. San Diego: Gulliver Books, 2000
Andrea Löw: Juden im Getto Litzmannstadt. Lebensbedingungen, Selbstwahrnehmung, Verhalten. Wallstein publishers, Göttingen. 2006
Ingo Loose, Berliner Juden im Ghetto Litzmannstadt 1941-1944. Ein Gedenkbuch, Berlin, Foundation on the topography of terror, 2009
Johanna Podolska, The Children of the Łódź Ghetto: Exhibition, August 2004, on the 60th Anniversary of the Liquidation of the Łódź Ghetto. Łódź: Bilbo, 2004
Frank Sparing, Das „Zigeunerwohngebiet“ im Ghetto Lodz 1941/42, in: Im Ghetto 1939-1945, edited by Christoph Dieckmann, Wallstein publishers, Göttingen 2009 (Contributions to the history of National Socialism; 25), pp. 136-170
Michal Unger, editor. The Last Ghetto: Life in the Lodz Ghetto, 1940-1944. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1995
„Unser einziger Weg ist Arbeit“ - Das Getto von Lodz 1940-1944, catalogue on the exhibition, Jewish Museum at Frankfurt/M 1990
Web tips
http://www.zukunft-braucht-erinnerung.de/holocaust/osteuropa/455.html (Detailed contribution on the Lodz ghetto)
http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/music/lodz.asp: (Music from the Lodz ghetto)
http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/lodz/ (Website on children in the Lodz ghetto, USHMM Washington, including links to other museum’s websites on the subject)
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