The Jewish ghetto in Warsaw saw its resistance concluded after 28 days of combat.
In an operational report, Brigadier Juergen Stroop, the local SS commander, noted that the uprising commenced on 19 April, as SS, police, and Wehrmacht units, utilizing tanks and other armored vehicles, entered the ghetto to transport Jews to the railway station for their journey to concentration camps.
Jews made a stand against them using homemade explosives, rifles, small arms, and “in one instance, a light machine-gun.”
He reported that his forces engaged in intense confrontations day and night with groups of approximately 20 or 30 Jews, comprising both men and women.
“On April 23, Himmler issued an order to carry out the thorough combing out of the Warsaw ghetto with utmost severity and relentless tenacity. Thus, I resolved to eradicate the entire Jewish residential area by igniting every block.”
The final battle culminated in the destruction of the Great Synagogue.
In 1940, the Nazis established the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, cramming approximately 500,000 individuals into an area no larger than one square mile (2.6 sq km).
The inhabitants faced systematic transport to Treblinka, and those who participated in the legendary Jewish uprising preferred to meet their deaths with dignity rather than being sent to death camps.
About 50 of the 1,000 fighters managed to escape through the sewers, with some participating in the second Warsaw uprising alongside the Polish Home Army in August 1944.
In retaliation for the uprising, around 40,000 Jews were massacred. By the time Soviet forces liberated Warsaw on 17 January 1945, only about 200 Jews remained, and the old city had been nearly annihilated.
Stroop’s copy of the operational report, titled “The Jewish quarter in Warsaw no longer exists,” surfaced during the Nuremberg war crimes trial in 1945.
Stroop received a death sentence from a US military tribunal and was sent to Poland for execution in 1951.
