Source B is an extract from Martin Gilbert’s book Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (1986). It tells us that at the conference in Berlin, where the long-term future of the Jews was organized, Heydrich talked, euphemistically, about the fate of the Jews. He talked about the “ultimate aim,” and “planned overall measures” without specifying what exactly was meant. It was all to be “strictly secret”. However for the short term he talked about the “concentration of Jews in the cities”, especially the larger cities, like Warsaw. Ostensibly the Jews were to be forbidden from entering certain districts, but in reality they were confined to one area only- the Ghetto.
In Source A one can see the walls being built around the Warsaw ghetto in 1940. It presents a lot of information about the ghettoes, especially the Warsaw ghetto. It is a video clip from a history documentary called “Hitler the Criminal” shown on the Discovery Channel. It includes original film footage taken inside the Warsaw ghetto in 1941.
It shows walls of about 6 metres or 20 feet, with German guards at one of the gates. Janina David, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, was interviewed about life in the Warsaw ghetto – she described it as “like living in a trap.” Conditions in the ghetto were horrendous. Where 40,000 poor Polish Catholics had lived, 500,000 Jews were moved into. The result was huge overcrowding.
Source A tells us that the Nazis allocated 184 calories per Jew per day. In the original footage we can see an emaciated body lying on the side of the road, skeletal corpses being lifted onto a cart, and starving children standing on a footpath. Janina David talks about the hunger in her interview, “Death from hunger is terrible; it takes a long time. It is a very painful death.
The scenes of death are omnipresent in the ghetto – 100,000 died.
In source A we learned that the Warsaw ghetto was walled in during October 1940 to, ostensibly, stop the spread of disease, however we get the idea that the real reason was to stop the Jews from leaving the ghetto. In source A Hitler declares, “I must get rid of the Jews. They are an element of revolt.” He viewed the Jews as troublemakers – Karl Marx was a Jew. However it is not clear what he planned to do in the long term. In the short term the Nazis used the walled ghettoes to the Jews under their control.
The ghettoes were a way of controlling the Jews. They had to wear a Star of David, a way of demeaning them, of making them out as subhuman and a threat of racial contamination.
The ghettoes were never intended to be the final Solution to the Jewish Problem. Heydrich told the conference held in Berlin that the ghettoes were only a “prerequisite stage” towards the “planned overall measures” – a euphemism for the permanent solution to the “Jewish Problem”. Hitler himself said, “We can only do what is feasible,” meaning that the ghettoes were “a stage” towards something much worse. Hitler did not say what his aim was, and he did not decided on the Final Solution until the second half of 1941.
Ghettoes were established to bring the Jews under the Nazis’ control in the short term. This was only a temporary solution until permanent one was decided in the long term. It was a necessary stage for the “ultimate aim” - to solve the “Jewish Problem” permanently. By having the Jews “concentrated” in a small number of places they would be available for any “solution” the Nazis should decide on. Ghettoes would facilitate the final solution.
