t Synagogue and burned it down. Himmler visited two days later and gave his approval of the SS actions. The 50,000 ghetto Jews lived in cramped squalor, as was the case in all the ghettos.
Every few weeks, a detachment of several thousand Nazis entered the ghetto to round up thousands of Jews to be sent to their deaths. Rumors could not help but be spread, and by the time rail cars reached their destinations, the passengers were screaming in terror and banging on the walls to try to escape. By August 1943, the Jews of the Anti-Fascist Military Organization had worked up the courage to fight back, though they were only equipped with a single MG 34 machine gun and a single belt of 500 rounds of ammunition, 100 pistols, most of them Walther police pistols, and 25 Mauser rifles. They supplemented this meager arsenal with Molotov cocktails of gasoline, diesel, and kerosene, and about 100 glass bottles of hydrochloric, sulfuric, and nitric acids. They had set up command bunkers in the sewers and Moskowicz and Tenenbaum emptied their pistols at the surrounding SS until they turned their final bullets on themselves.
The remaining 10,000 Jews in the ghetto were immediately shipped to Majdanek, Treblinka, and Auschwitz. Some 1,200 children eventually arrived at Auschwitz for the gas chambers or Josef Mengele’s experiments.
1 The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
This should not be confused with the Warsaw Uprising, which was a city-wide battle between the Nazis and the Polish Home Army. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising took place from April 19 to May 16, 1943, over a year before the Warsaw Uprising. The ghetto was established between October and November 1940, and from then until May 16, 1943, around 300,000 Jews were killed in various deportations, liquidations, and the final destruction.
Life in the ghetto was deplorable. The Nazis allowed the Jews only 184 calories of food each per day, and they had to supplement this by stealing from outside the walls whenever possible. The Nazis entered the ghetto in January of 1943 for a deportation and shot 600 Jews dead more or less at random. Some of the women were dragged into the trucks and raped before being taken to trains that would ship them to their deaths.
The Nazis withdrew with 5,000 fresh prisoners for the death camps and waited under order from Heinrich Himmler until the Passover Week in April before they reentered for another deportation. Himmler appears to have chosen this date purely for the sake of offending their religion. About 4,000 Nazis began house-to-house searches only to walk face-first into multiple ambushes. Firefights erupted all over the city and the Nazis found themselves surrounded on many streets and without initial tank support. They quickly retreated and regrouped with tanks, heavy machine guns, demolition, and flamethrowers, with which they initiated building-by-building assaults, murders, and arson.
The Nazis claimed 17 of their own were killed, while they executed 13,000 Jewish civilians. The fighting only lasted for about 10 days, after which the Nazis, ordered by Hitler himself, utterly obliterated the entire ghetto. Almost every single building was razed to the ground, and 56,000 Jews were shipped to death camps. The few who survived the war claimed that they knew they had no hope of defeating the Nazis, and were simply hoping to die on their own terms.
FlameHorse is a writer for Listverse.