Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto

© fkoester Children in the Warsaw Ghetto (1943)

© Bundesbildstelle Willy Brandt falls spontaneously to his knees as he lays a wreath at the memorial for the Jews murdered in 1943 by SS units in the Warsaw Ghetto

By early April the German occupation troops in Poland have decided to liquidate the „Warsaw Ghetto“, whose Jewish residents have had to endure inhuman conditions for over three years. Hitler’s henchmen are completely surprised by the armed uprising which breaks out in the ghetto on 19 April 1943. Until mid-May members of the „Jewish Combat Organisation“ are able to hold out against the Wehrmacht and SS units until the resistance collapses. The entire ghetto is levelled, and the surviving resistance fighters are either shot on the spot, deported to the extermination camps of Treblinka and Maidanek or brought to forced-labour camps.