The Second World War began in Europe following the German Invasion of Poland on the 1st September
1939.
Inside of Poland, the occupiers would commit horrific war crimes and many executions and
acts of brutality.
The Germans caused chaos across the country, and thousands of polish people were displaced
and made homeless and many were sent to concentration camps.
Warsaw, the Polish capital was believed to haver been by the Germans as the centre of
the Polish resistance against the Nazi laws and rules.
But inside of the ruins of the city, the SS and Wehrmacht conducted huge scores of executions
and in the ruins of the city which had been destroyed by the war, thousands of Polish
hostages were shot dead.
Join us today as we look at the brutal executions in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto.
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Warsaw was the seat of the leading authorities of the Polish underground state, and it was
where there was strong and well organised groups of resistance against the Nazis.
The Governor General Hans Frank wrote, ‘If we had not had Warsaw in the General Government,
we would not have four fifths of the difficulties we had to face.
Warsaw is and will remain a focus of turmoil, the point from which unrest spreads in that
country.’
As soon as the city was occupied, the Germans imposed terror onto the people and they carried
out horrific publish executions of practically innocent people in public to strike fear into
the hearts of the population.
There were many prisons and detention centres filled with arrested people, suspected of
being members of the resistance.
Round ups saw thousands of people deported to concentration camps, and many executions
were carried out in secret places.
This led to huge massacres occurring inside of mountains and forests surrounding the city,
and it was said of the executions in the forests that they were risky and also problematic.
For the executioners, it was hard to discreetly transport prisoners to the site of execution
a distance from the city, as they would attract attention and it would take time.
The Germans were also concerned about the people living nearby being able to find the
mass graves.
The Warsaw ghetto had been established in the city in November 1940 and it was the largest
of the Nazi ghettos during the Second World War.
At one point 460,000 jews were imprisoned in a small area, which led to around 9 people
being forced into a room.
The prisoners had hardly any food, and at least 254,000 residents of the ghetto were
sent to Treblinka extermination camp where they were gassed.
It’s estimated that at least 300,000 people from the ghetto were killed, along with 92,000
victims of starvation and disease relating to the conditions of the ghetto.
It was isolated from the rest of the city, and the bodies of the murdered were left abandoned
with bodies lying in the streets for weeks.
There were Jewish working groups who helped to clean up the bodies, but executions took
place on a larger scale following the displacement of the inhabitants of the ghetto which took
place in summer 1942.
It was easy for the Germans to hide the killings and then get rid of the bodies, and in the
spring of 1943 the Ghetto was finally shut down after an uprising was put down brutally.
With this, it was believed that the ghetto would be a possible place to carry out secret
executions of Polish prisoners on a huge scale.
It was said by one German commander, ‘Lets use Grossaktion to finish Poles as well.
Many Jews died in the ghetto and will continue to do so.
There are corpses everywhere, so if a few thousand more dead poles arrive, nobody will
be able to verify anything anyway.’
Because of this, the Ghetto’s ruins became a place of execution and mass killing.
It was close to the Pawiak Prison, and prisoners were marched from the prison into the ruins
and then shot.
Police regularly hunted Jews who were hiding in the ruins, and then these were murdered
also.
The first executions of Pawiak prison’s prisoners occurred in the ruins on the 7th
May 1943.
94 were executed in the gate of a tenement house, and following this executions took
place in the Jewish residential district on a daily basis.
The Germans gave up with their concealment of executions inside of the forests, and instead
of deporting prisoners to concentration camps they just shot them and murdered them in the
ruins.
Each day executions of Jews who were captured occurred, as well as those who hid them and
tried to help them.
Around many different places in the ghetto, Germans carried out executions.
Often there were specific houses which were the usual firing ranges, and many of the murdered
bodies were burned on the property of the former houses.
Labour units also burned prisoners, and as time went on the killings continued.
On the 29th May 1943, around 530 prisoners from Pawiak were shot and killed, and over
the following weeks hundreds more were being killed in the ruins of the former ghetto.
But as October 1943 came, the terror inside of Warsaw ramped up.
The Germans took further destructive effort to break the Polish resistance, and they actively
sought out more to be killed.
The action intensified when SS Brigadefuhrer Franz Kutschera took command of the SS and
Police command for Warsaw.
He took a hard line approach, and wanted to pacify the city through mass executions, carried
out for every possible act by the resistance.
Executions were then ordered to be carried out in the open on the streets to strike fear
into the hearts of the resistance so that they would not conduct sabotage.
The round ups intesified, and every day shootings were taking place every few hours in the main
areas of the city.
Street executions took place where victims names and their crimes were read out on megaphones
so that everyone could hear what was happening.
The huge killing operation shocked the people living in the city, and ordinary residents
not involved in the resistance were being shot indiscriminately.
Around 5000 people were executed between the 15th October 1943 and 15th May 1944 in the
city and the area nearby.
3800 were shot in the ruins.
They continued at Pawiak prison, when prisoners were dragged into the streets naked before
they were mown down by machine gun fire.
It was said that the mental stress on the soldiers who became the executioners was so
severe that one SS man took his own life.
But the executions kept occurring.
Hundreds of victims a day were dying and mass executions continued to occur.
After the death of Franz Kutschera, the terror did slow down.
The street executions stopped, as did the megaphone announcements but the extermination
process continued in a more secret manner.
Still people were being brought into the ruins each day and were killed.
On the 4th March 1944, around 100 prisoners including 4 Jewish women were killed in the
ruins, and their bodies were thrown into a cellar of a demolished house which was then
set on fire.
On the 21st March, 200 people were killed in the ghetto, and these were people from
the surrounding villages, and then many of their bodies were burned in the crematoria
of the concentration camp nearby with the smell of burning bodies emanating across the
city.
The shootings and executions cotninued, but as the Soviets were approaching, the Germans
began to dismantle Pawiak prison.
They evacuated 1800 prisoners, and then the aim was to erase the evidence of the crimes
committed in the city.
Two weeks after the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto, the last execution occurred in the
ruins of the ghetto, with 100 people being shot dead, including 18 women and two midwifes.
It is impossible to work out the exact death toll of the Warsaw ghetto ruin executions.
It’s believed that up to around 25,000 people were executed in the ruins.
The executions were mostly carried out by Officers of the Warsaw SD and security police,
Pawiak Prison staff members, Warsaw Concentration Camp staff members and SS men from the third
battalion of the 23rd SS regiment and police.
A number of people were executed for their war crimes after the war, just the majority
of perpetrators escaped any form of punishment.
The executions of the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto were a hidden and brutal execution
and suppression of the polish people.
Thousands of people were killed in large scale massacres and executions that in attempts
to cover up burning squads masked what was happening.
Thousands of people went to their deaths at the hands of the SS and the German police,
and it is a forgotten part of the Second World War that shows the brutality and savagery
of the SS.
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