Ghetto
Nazi Ghettos
Between 1939 and 1944, Nazi racial ideology was put into operation in German-occupied Europe. The occupiers separated Jews from other subject peoples and imprisoned them in more than one thousand ghettos, which the Germans did not consistently give that name. The Germans ruled through governing councils that they selected. The occupiers allowed disease to spread widely and imposed both substarvation rations and the death penalty for smuggling food.
Hans Frank, chief of the Generalgouvernement of Poland, summarized the policy in August 1942 when he stated that if the Jews did not die of starvation, other measures would need to be taken. The Germans liquidated all the ghettos, and sent the survivors to extermination camps. Under these conditions, the Jews' attempts to preserve normal communal life and to demonstrate their productivity qualify as resistance, but the desperate armed uprising by the last inhabitants of the ghetto in Warsaw, in April and May 1943, added an unprecedented association to the term ghetto.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clark, Kenneth B. Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power. New York, Evanston, Ill., and London: Harper and Row, 1965.
"Ghettos." In The Holocaust Encyclopedia, edited by Walter Laqueur, 259–265. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2001.
Gutman, Yisrael. The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.
London, Jack. The People of the Abyss. London and Sterling, Va.: Pluto Press, 2001. Originally published in 1903.
Ravid, Benjamin C. I. "From Geographical Realia to Historio-graphical Symbol: The Odyssey of the Word Ghetto." In Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, edited by David B. Ruderman, 373–385. New York: New York University Press, 1992.
Slutsky, Yehuda. "Pale of Settlement." In Encyclopedia Judaica, columns 24–28. Jerusalem: Encyclopedia Judaica, 1971.
Ward, David. Poverty, Ethnicity, and the American City, 1840–1925: Changing Conceptions of the Slum and the Ghetto. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Wirth, Louis. The Ghetto. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1998. Originally published in 1928.
Arthur M. Lesley
Additional topics
Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Gastrula to Glow dischargeGhetto - Jewish Urban Quarters Before The Ghetto, Establishment Of Ghettos, Ghetto As Metaphor For Slum, Black Ghettos